The death penalty has cast a long, often dark shadow over the U.S. penal system and the politics of punishment. The contentious politics surrounding efforts to abolish and reinstate the death penalty in the United States in the twentieth century helped transform the broader politics associated with criminal justice and law enforcement. In an exceptional outcome, the political and judicial debate over capital punishment facilitated the construction of a vast penal system in the United States.

Over the past four decades, the United States has embarked on a prison-building boom without precedent here or elsewhere. The number of inmates increased dramatically, rising more than sixfold since the early 1970s. Today a higher proportion of the adult population is behind bars than anywhere else in the world. The U.S. incarceration rate of 754 per 100,000 is 5 to 12 times the rate of the Western European countries and Japan. About one of every one hundred adults in the United States is behind bars today, and one in thirty-one is under some form of state supervision, including jail, prison, parole, probation, and other sanctions.

The exceptional political and institutional trajectory of capital punishment is not the sole or even the primary explanation for the turn toward more punitive policies and mass incarceration in the United States. Rather, it is an important contributing factor alongside the social, political, racial, institutional, and economic factors identified by Garland, Beckett, Alexander, Wacquant, Simon, Tonry, and others.

Toward the end of my two-year stint teaching in Xian, China, in the 1980s, I thought I was inured to shocking scenes. And then I was shopping at the local outdoor produce market on a glorious sunny day in late spring when I heard a racket of loudspeakers. I looked up to see an aging flatbedded truck slowly winding its way through the crowded streets. In the back were about a half-dozen men with shaved, bowed heads, nondescript baggy uniforms, and blank faces. Watched over by crisply dressed police officers, each man slowly shuffled forward as his name was called. The blaring loudspeakers recited his alleged crimes and pronounced his sentence: death.

Over the previous months, my students had told me stories about witnessing executions at crowded outdoor stadiums. And Xian had been peppered with posters with big red X's scrawled across the mug shots of people rounded up in the “strike hard” campaign against crime, some for violations as egregious as petty larceny. Yet witnessing the punitive, unforgiving, and seemingly invincible arm of the state directly in action in the everyday setting of a bustling market deeply unsettled me.

After working for more than six years on this book about mass imprisonment in the United States, I remain similarly shocked and unsettled. The United States today has an incarcerated population that dwarfs that of China, a country that is several times larger and has at best only democratic aspirations and pretensions.

The emergence and consolidation of the U.S. carceral state was a major milestone in American political development that arguably rivals in significance the expansion and contraction of the welfare state in the postwar period. What we have witnessed is a “durable shift in governing authority,” to use Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek's elegant definition of what constitutes political development. The state began to exercise vast new controls over millions of people, resulting in a remarkable change in the distribution of authority in favor of law enforcement and corrections at the local, state, and particularly the federal level.

This book takes the carceral state as a central object of historical study whose construction was an important chapter in American state-building and not just the manifestation of a successful political whim by strategic conservative politicians. This political development had multiple and “dispersed causes” that pre-date the 1960s. The central focus has been on the political development of penal policy. But my account touches on some other important and recurrent themes and debates in American political development. First, it challenges the common understanding of the U.S. state as weak.

The explosion of prison unrest in many Western countries from the 1960s to the 1980s belies just how distinctive the U.S. prisoners' rights movement was. The movement's roots, leadership, relationship with state institutions, and the broader political environment it operated in distinguished it from prison activism in other countries. Most importantly, race was the crucible for the contemporary prisoners' rights movement in the United States but not elsewhere. The most significant race-related factors that shaped the U.S. movement of course included the deep and long-standing racial cleavages in the United States. Beyond this social characteristic of the United States were specific race-related political and institutional factors: the origins and development of the black nationalist, civil rights, and black power movements; and the central role of the courts and a discourse on rights in American political development. These factors help explain an ironic outcome. The United States gave birth to a prisoners' rights movement that was initially more powerful and significant than prison reform movements that emerged elsewhere at roughly the same time. But the U.S. movement developed in ways that helped create conditions conducive to launching the “race to incarcerate.

Criminal justice politics and policies have been a major, not a minor, theme in American political development. It is striking how often public officials throughout U.S. history have latched on to the crime and punishment issue to further their own political agendas and fortunes. Numerous national figures and presidential aspirants, from Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt to Joseph McCarthy, played the crime card long before Barry Goldwater highlighted the issue in the 1964 presidential campaign. Furthermore, while direct federal involvement in crafting penal policy was minor and intermittent for much of U.S. history, the federal government did step in at key junctures (often by orchestrating or responding to national campaigns organized around crime-related concerns) that had important long-term consequences for the development of the carceral state.

These periodic campaigns, undertaken when criminal justice and law enforcement institutions were undeveloped, habituated Americans to indulge rhetorically in a politics of moralism that was not that costly for a long time. Americans could use penal politics to indulge their moralism and express their fears and anxieties because, while their law-and-order campaigns had enormous symbolic significance, the skeletal law enforcement apparatus checked their actual consequences. This is not to minimize the enormous consequences these campaigns had for some individuals, be they the 20 people hanged in the Salem witch trials in 1692 or the 30,000 women rounded up during World War I on suspicion of prostitution.

The problem of the prison was central to major political theorists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The role that punishment and imprisonment served in maintaining social order, legitimizing the state, and reforming the soul were key concerns of thinkers like Mill, Bentham, Kant, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Francis Lieber, the first named professor of political science in the United States. Years ago prisons also transfixed the public. American penitentiaries were a prime sightseeing destination for foreign and domestic tourists. Prison officials charged entrance fees and put prisoners on view as if they were in a zoo, sometimes hosting thousands of tourists in a single day. Charles Dickens reportedly told the warden of Cherry Hill prison after a visit: “The Falls of Niagara and your Penitentiary are two objects I might almost say I most wish to see in America.” By contrast, the contemporary carceral state has been largely invisible. What caused the country's incarceration boom and the political, social, and economic consequences of this unprecedented experiment in public policy have not been a major focus of social science research or public concern.

This chapter critically analyzes half a dozen of the contending theories of the origins of the carceral state. It takes as its starting point that the penal system in any society cannot be understood as “an isolated phenomenon subject only to its own laws.” Rather, it is deeply embedded in a particular social, political, historical, and institutional context.