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Comparative analysis of incarceration rates, an imperfect albeit ready measure of national punitiveness, shows common-law countries at the top of the distribution of wealthy liberal democracies. Within this group, the United States stands apart, incarcerating nearly three times the percentage of its population than does England, the next most punitive common-law nation.1 How the United States arrived at this state is the subject of its own considerable literature.2 Among the leading sociological factors are the unresolved legacies of slavery and racial discrimination, the weakening of the welfare state as a framework for politics and governance, comparatively high rates of violent crime (homicide in particular), and the politicized nature of criminal justice in the highly decentralized U.S. criminal justice system–especially the political influence of home-owning middle-class voters and the power of prosecutors to use their enormous discretion for political advancement. Here I want to focus on how the criminal trial courts, both in their common-law inheritance and in their long-term evolution, have contributed to the rapid emergence of severe U.S. punitiveness.

U.S. criminal courts–the most visible in the world in no small part because of popular crime television .  .  .

Endnotes

• 1Michael Cavadino and James Dignan, “Penal Policy and Political Economy,” Criminology and Public Policy 6 (2006): 435–456.
• 2For a summary, see Mona Lynch, Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010).