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Prisons Research at the Beginning of the 21st Century

By Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia

This essay was the introductory chapter of Prisons, edited by Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia,

released in 1999 by the University of Chicago Press. The publication is volume 26 of Crime and

Justice: A Review of Research, an NIJ-sponsored series that for 20 years has presented essays on

topical issues in crime and criminal justice by prominent scholars in criminology and related

fields.
1

The effects of America=s contemporary experiment with mass imprisonment will be clearer 25

years from now. The answers to some important questions, however, including whether vastly

increased use of imprisonment has substantially enhanced public safety, will never be clear. The

problem is that changes in things that appear to be related to each other may not be related at all,

but instead may both be causally related to something else. In some northerly regions, for

example, robins return from their winter vacations in February, their eggs hatch in April, and

apple blossoms appear in May. It happens every year. However, robins= vacation or reproductive

predilections have nothing to do with apple trees. Both respond to changes in ambient

temperature and climatic conditions. Apparent relations between crime and punishment may be

similarly misleading.

Rising crime rates may affect imprisonment rates, or rising imprisonment may affect crime rates,

or both may be caused by something else. If, for example, a broad-based, long-term change in

social norms toward greater personal responsibility and respect for the interests of others were

underway, it would be reasonable to predict that crime rates would fall (fewer people would

choose to behave irresponsibly) and imprisonment rates would rise (many people would be more

intolerant of wrongdoers and thus more inclined to punish them harshly). Observers might well

infer that increased imprisonment reduced crime rates. They might be right, or wrong, or partly

right and partly wrong. The absence of a causal relationship between the activities of robins and

the blossoming of trees is well understood; we understand and know how to measure changes in

temperature and climate. Unfortunately, we don=t understand what makes crime and punishment

patterns change.

The world keeps changing and it is often impossible to know why things happen when they do.

The rapid increase in the 1990s in the numbers of people confined in prisons and jails coincided

with falling crime rates. A cross section of lay people, public officials, and scholars believes that

the deterrent and incapacitative effects of increased imprisonment caused crime rates to fall. Other

cross sections of those groups believe that changes in policing strategies (e.g., community and

problem-solving policing) and tactics (e.g., zero-tolerance and misdemeanor policing) deserve

substantial credit. Still others credit the robust and record-length economic expansion of the

1990s and related low unemployment rates, or deeper, more fundamental, but more elusive socialstructural changes that produced falling crime rates throughout the Western world in the 1990s

irrespective of the content or severity of countries= penal policies (Mayhew and van Dijk 1997).

There are plausible cases, and plausible refutations, to be made for each of these claims. Each, no

doubt, has some merit but we will never know how to apportion credit among them, or which

deserve primary credit.

Likewise, we are unlikely in 2025 to know how the coming quarter-century=s imprisonment

policies, whatever they prove to be, have affected crime rates. Imprisonment rates and numbers

may continue to rise, or stabilize, or decline, or fluctuate. The current economic expansion will

end, as all economic expansions do, and economic cycles will continue, as they always have.

American social welfare policies will continue to be less generous than those of other Western
2

countries, or they will move more toward the mainstream, or they will move in each direction at

different times. Criminal justice policies, practices, and laws will become harsher or less harsh or

will alternate. The movement toward privatization of prisons will continue, or slow, or contract,

and private prison operators and employees will or won=t become effective lobbyists for creation

or maintenance of high-prison-use policies. And if deeper social-structural changes in American

(or Western) society are primary determinants of crime-rate trends in recent years, those changes

may continue or may alter direction. And something will happen to crime rates, and thoughtful

people will disagree deeply about what caused what.

Nor, looking backwards, is the relation between penal policy and crime rates and patterns any

clearer. There is wide agreement among historians, for example, that crime rates, especially

violent crime rates, fell steadily in many Western countries from early in the nineteenth century

until the middle of the twentieth century, after which they began steep rises. Historians refer to

this pattern as a AU-curve@ or, sometimes, a Abackwards J-curve,@ to make the point that twentieth

century violence rates never regained their early nineteenth century heights. There is likewise wide

agreement that crime posed vastly greater dangers to residents of early nineteenth-century cities

than to residents of twentieth-century cities. But there the agreement ends.

There is no agreement on why crime rates fell for more than a century. Some argue that the

increased bureaucratization of modernizing, industrializing, and centralizing countries changed

socialization patterns and in effect trained people to conformity (Lane 1992; Gurr 1989). Some

claim that religious revivalism and a moral reawakening in the nineteenth century affected basic

beliefs and values and with them the socialization people received in families, schools, churches,

and communities (Wilson and Hernstein 1985). Some claim that the decline was the result of a

general, much longer-term, Acivilizing process@ that has affected at least all Western societies, and

in which the increased crime rates of the 1960sB1980s are simply a short-term anomaly (Elias

1978). Most strikingly, virtually no one attributes the long-term decline to changes in sentencing

policies or to criminal justice innovations, even though all the institutions of modern American

criminal justice systems (professional police, imprisonment as the modal punishment, probation,

parole, the reformatory, indeterminate sentencing, the juvenile court) were created between 1830

and 1900 and were ubiquitous by 1930 (Friedman 1993).

All this is a pity, because prison and jail populations of the past quarter-century result from

conscious policy decisions by Federal and State law-makers, premised on propositions about the

crime-preventive effects of harsher and more certain punishments. The validity of those

propositions is the fundamental question to be answered about the wisdom of modern penal

policies.

Even if the answers to first-order questions about aggregate behavioral effects of imprisonment

policies on crime rates are probably unknowable, much more is knowable about second-order

questions concerning effects of imprisonment in general, and of various prison regimes and

programs, on prison staff, prisoners, their families, their communities, and public spending.

Surprisingly little is known, but much is knowable.
3

Imprisonment policies beginning in the 1970s leapt far ahead of knowledge about prisons and

prisoners. Until then, the largest bodies of systematic empirical research concerning prisons

consisted of a sizable but highly variable body of studies on the effectiveness of correctional

treatment programs (Lipton, Martinson, and Wilks 1975), a smaller body of recidivism studies

(e.g., Glaser 1964), and a sociological literature on inmate socialization and subcultures (e.g., 

Sykes 1958). Since then, as a result of the proliferation of criminal justice and criminology

programs in colleges and universities created in the wake of the Law Enforcement Assistance

Administration, the number of researchers interested in prisons increased greatly, but the absence

of sustained commitment of research funding from government agencies and foundations

frustrated efforts to build a vital prisons research community. Foundations for many years

exhibited little interest in research on the adult criminal justice system, including prisons and

prisoners, and until recently federal research-funding agencies focused nearly all their attention on

other subjects.

Important work nonetheless has been done on many prison and prison-related issues. On some

topics, for example, the effectiveness of correctional treatment programs (Canada) and prison

regimes (England), much of the most important recent work has been done outside the United

States. Prudent policy makers and practitioners presumably want to make their decisions on the

basis of evidence, and there are many areas where better evidence could aid in development of

better policies.

* * *

I. Collateral Effects of Imprisonment

People are sent to prison and jail partly because of moral ideas about deserved punishments:

people who do certain things, it is widely believed, deserve to be punished. However, utilitarian

ideas about public safety provide at least as strong reasons for imprisonment: Sending people to

prison enhances public safety, it is widely believed, by incapacitating them, by rehabilitating them,

by deterring them and others, and by reinforcing basic social norms about right and wrong. Put

differently, when Ajust deserts@ ideas are set aside, people sent to prison are being used as means

to achieve public ends. For both moral reasons (can using people in particular ways be morally

justified?) and practical reasons (how much does using people in this way cost, does it do more

good than harm, are there unintended side-effects?) we should want systematically to understand

the effects of imprisonment practices and policies. Earlier we mentioned crime control effects of

imprisonment. Here the subject is the collateral effects.

The literature on collateral effects is fragmentary. At least six kinds of collateral effects can be

identified. First, what are the effects of imprisonment on prisoners= later lives? Sizable economic

and smaller ethnographic literatures (Fagan and Freeman 1999) convincingly show that

imprisonment reduces ex-offenders' subsequent incomes and employment. A policy literature

shows that various State and Federal laws deny ex-offenders the right to vote or hold office in

some places, the opportunity to engage in certain occupations in some places, and the right to

receive various public benefits and services in some places (Fellner and Mauer 1998). Various
4

literatures show that imprisonment often leads to the breakup of families and social relationships

and to less parental involvement with their children (Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999).

Second, what are the effects of imprisonment on prisoners= later physical and mental well-being? 

A psychological literature on coping and adaptation in prison concludes, probably contrary to

many lay people=s intuitions, that even long-term imprisonment appears to have few lasting mental

health effects (e.g., Adams 1992), though some researchers doubt this (Liebling 1999). It would

be surprising if established adverse effects on income, employment, and family functioning were

unrelated to former prisoners= mental and physical health. However, a serious longitudinal study

of ex-offenders= lives is needed to answer such questions, and none has been done.

Third, what are the effects of imprisonment on offenders= spouses or partners, and their children? 

On this subject, the literature is especially thin and fragmented, as Hagan and Dinovitzer (1999)

show, and the most pressing task is to pull together existing knowledge in order to formulate

plausible hypotheses and develop systematic research agendas. Hypotheses would presumably at

least address the effects of imprisonment on the financial and social stability of prisoners= families

while they were in prison and afterwards, on the maintenance of prisoners= relationships with

families, and on the short- and long-term well-being and social functioning of prisoners= children.

These would, of course, not be simple hypotheses. No doubt sometimes families and partners

benefit from the removal of abusive, disordered, or dysfunctional parents and spouses. However,

given the strong negative effects on children=s well-being of being raised in disadvantaged, singleparent households (Loeber and Stouthamer-Loeber 1986), the effects of imprisonment on spouses

and children often are likely to be negative.

Fourth, what are the effects of imprisonment on prisoners= later crime involvement? According to

findings of criminal careers research (Blumstein et al. 1986), the negative effects on ex-prisoners=

incomes, employment prospects, and family involvement predict increased offending probabilities.

In addition, for centuries, at least since the time of John Howard, the great eighteenth century

English prison reformer, the proposition has been put forward that prisons are Aschools for crime,@

that younger and less experienced prisoners are socialized into antisocial and oppositional

attitudes and as a result exit the prison more likely to commit crimes than when they entered. No

informed person doubts that this sometimes happens, and at least partly offsets any crimereductive effects of imprisonment. Many European scholars accept it as proven that prison is

criminogenic and that prison terms should for crime-prevention reasons be avoided whenever

possible (Albrecht 2000). American research on the effects of penalties typically focuses on crimereduction, and only sometimes treats crime-enhancing effects as an offset. If the criminogenic

effects of imprisonment are large, contemporary research may be overlooking an important part

of the crime and punishment puzzle.

Fifth, what are the collateral effects of imprisonment on the larger community? Plausible

hypotheses can be offered about effects of recent prison expansion on the allocation of public

resources (which are transferred from higher education particularly, but also from other public

programs and services, to prisons), on economic development (transferred from inner cities to the

usually rural communities where prisons are built), and on community cohesion (in many

disadvantaged minority communities, large proportions of the young men are or have been in

prison and are thereby disabled from working, parenting, marrying, or otherwise becoming
5

contributing members of the community). Imprisonment may have become so common an

experience in some communities that it may no longer carry a stigma, and thereby may lose

whatever deterrent effects it would otherwise have (Nagin 1998), or may even cause prison styles

and values to be exported to the outside community (Fagan and Wilkinson 1998).

Sixth, what are the immediate effects on prisoners while being confined in prison? This is the one

collateral effect on which there are sizable literatures: on coping and adapting generally, measured

in terms of prisoners= physical and mental health (Adams 1992) and in relation to housing

arrangements (Gaes 1985), and specifically on prison suicide (Liebling 1999).

II. Crime Control Effects of Imprisonment

Research on the collateral effects of imprisonment suggests that policy makers have been flying

blind, making decisions costing billions of dollars and affecting millions of lives without adequate

knowledge of the nature and costs of unintended side effects. A response might be that the

primary goal has been to enhance public safety and, possibly regrettably but understandably, that

single-minded concern has been the reduction of crime through the deterrent, incapacitative, and

rehabilitative effects of increased imprisonment. The relevant literatures, however, are

inconclusive, small, and for the most part old. Four questions appear particularly relevant.

First, has increased use of imprisonment reduced crime rates through deterrence and

incapacitation? Presumably most people would conclude a priori that a quarter-century=s

quintupling of the prison and jail population must have reduced crime rates. There has, however,

been relatively little research in recent years on deterrence and incapacitation, and most

authoritative reviews of both subjects conclude that while such effects exist, they are probably

modest (Nagin 1998). So also concluded the most famous examination of the subject, the 1978

report of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Research on Deterrent and Incapacitative

Effects (Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin 1978). Similar conclusions were reached in successive

decades by National Academy of Sciences Panels on Criminal Careers (Blumstein et al. 1986) and

Understanding and Control of Violence (Reiss and Roth 1993), and by an exhaustive recent

survey of research on deterrence effects commissioned by the Home Office of England and Wales

(von Hirsch et al. 1998).

Second, can prisons deliver treatment programs that will enhance public safety by reducing

prisoners= later recidivism? The pessimism associated with the Anothing works@ findings (wrongly

attributed to Robert Martinson=s famous 1974 article [Martinson 1974]) appears to have

dissipated, and there are grounds for cautious optimism about the positive effects, under some

conditions, of some cognitive-skills, drug-treatment, vocational training, educational, and other

programs in adult prisons (Gaes et al., 1999). The conditions, however, are stringent: most

notably, program eligibility must be carefully matched to prisoners= needs and risks, programs

must be well implemented and adequately funded, and compatible aftercare programs in the

community must sustain treatment. The grounds for optimism concerning programs for young

offenders and in the community are somewhat stronger.
6

Third, in the aggregate (without distinguishing among prison=s deterrent, incapacitative, and

rehabilitative effects), does increased use of imprisonment reduce crime rates in general, and have

the increases of recent years in particular led to crime reduction? The most commonly accepted

answer appears to be yes (Spelman 2000), but the literature, much of it by economists, is highly

technical and inaccessible to nonspecialists, dates largely from the 1970s, and suggests that effects

are much more modest than is widely understood.

Fourth, in cost-benefit terms, is increased imprisonment worth it? This is the smallest and most

primitive of the prison crime-prevention effects literatures, and as yet provides few policy-relevant

findings. Except for a small literature that tries to compare alternative crime-prevention programs

in cost-benefit terms (e.g., Greenwood et al. 1996), the work to date is useful largely for

methodological reasons, by showing how not to pursue such inquiries. For example, the most

widely publicized recent work greatly exaggerates the costs of crime by means of inflated imputed

costs of victim Apain and suffering,@ and takes no account whatever of suffering by offenders or

pains of imprisonment borne by their partners, children, or communities. It may be that gross

cost-benefit assessments of the effects of imprisonment require weighing inherently

incommensurable values, and have reached a dead end. Recent efforts to compare the cost and

benefits of alternative crime prevention policies may offer more promise (Welsh and Farrington

2000).

III. Prisoners and Prison Staff

Thirty years ago, the largest and best-known body of scholarship on prisons was the sociological

literature on prison subcultures and the socialization of inmates into prison life. That is no longer

the case, as much because of the waning of that literature as because of the growth of others.

Prisons have changed a great deal in the past 30 years, inmate and staff subcultures and

interactions between them have changed, and the learning of earlier times may or may not still be

valid but at least needs augmentation. Compared with earlier times, many prisons are much larger,

inmate populations and staffs are more disproportionately black and Hispanic, many more line and

management staff are women, gangs are larger and their influence more pervasive, more prison

staff are unionized, a large and growing fraction of prisons is under private management, and the

possibility of judicial oversight and intrusion is greater. The sentencing policy changes of the past

quarter century and especially the past few years have produced larger fractions of prisoners

serving very long sentences and with them have come increased demands for medical care and

other services for the aging and elderly.

The direct causes of the past quarter century=s increase in imprisonment are becoming clearer.

Changes in sentencing and parole policies and practices, not changes in crime rates and patterns,

are the principal cause of the vastly increased numbers of people in prison and of substantially

increased percentages of members of minority groups among prisoners. Over the past two

decades, drug policies premised on incarceration of drug dealers and increased probabilities of

imprisonment of those charged with crimes have been the major contributors to prison population

growth (Blumstein and Beck 1999) . More recently, increased sentence lengths have become a

major contributor. Changes in parole policies have also increased prison populations through the

abolition of parole in some jurisdictions, tighter release standards that have the effect of
7

lengthening time served, reduced tolerance for parole condition violations, and greatly increased

rates of revocation and readmission to prison (Petersilia 1999).

Behavioral, cultural, and social changes in society at large inevitably impinge on life inside

prisons. AIDS and HIV, for example, are more prevalent inside the prisons than out. The

proportions of mentally ill and defective prisoners, never small, have grown as a result of the

1960s and 1970s movement to deinstitutionalize many mentally ill people. The civil rights and

women=s movements have importantly affected prisons, as has the political conservatism of recent

years. Programs premised on restorative justice ideas are beginning to appear inside prison walls.

The mission for scholars of prison life is to reinvigorate that once robust subject by examining

new subjects, re-examining old ones, and incorporating new ideas and theoretical perspectives.

Recent work in England (Sparks, Bottoms, and Hay 1996), for example, has focused on the

effects of different management regimes from the procedural justice perspective, among others. In

this perspective, people who believe themselves to have been treated fairly and their interests to

have been fairly considered are more likely to perceive the involved institutions and processes as

legitimate, and accordingly to be orderly in prison.

Studies of women prisoners and life inside women=s prisons continue conspicuously absent. There

is a small, quality literature (e.g., Zedner 1995), but the recent paucity of research on life inside

prisons generally has had an even more impoverishing effect on traditionally understudied

subjects. Although the ratio of women to men in State and Federal prisons remains small (men

outnumbered women by 15 to 1 as of June 30, 1998), the number of women prisoners has for

nearly 30 years been growing faster than the number of men, and the absolute number (82,716 as

of June 30, 1998) is considerably larger than the entire prison populations of France, Germany, or

England.

IV. Prison Management

Prison managers, like any other managers, need systematic knowledge if they are effectively,

ethically, and sensitively to do their jobs. In an important sense, the sociological and other

literatures on life inside prisons, and the psychological and other literatures on how people adapt

to the experience of being prisoners, are management literatures. The English work on legitimacy

and order maintenance in prison (Bottoms 1999), which deals with prisoners, prison staff, and

their interactions, all in the interest of understanding how order can be maintained in prisons, for

example, is centrally concerned with management.

In practice, however, writing on management tends to be done by professional managers and

management consultants rather than by social and behavioral science researchers. Chase Riveland

(1999) provides an account of the major challenges that prison managers have dealt with during

the past 25 years and how they have changed over time. Contemporary prison managers have

faced many important challenges in addition to those already mentioned. Examples include the

growing privatization of institutional corrections; the maturing movement for professional

accreditation of prisons and prison systems; oversight of the rapid expansion in the numbers of

prisons, prison staff, and prisoners; and handling of the problems created inside prisons by modern
8

drug use patterns and policies. Douglas McDonald (1999) has examined the nettlesome problem

of health care provision inside prison and illustrates the complex lattice of management, resource,

and political frameworks within which prison managers must operate.

V. The Political Economy of Prisons

No one can know what people 100 years from now will find interesting, important, or cautionary

about prisons and punishment at the 20th century=s end. From our chronocentric perspective, the

most striking and distinctive feature of American punishment polices, both historically and

comparatively, is the past quarter century=s expansion in imprisonment. Older literatures

attempted to explain the functions and purposes of imprisonment (Garland 1990), as have some

works by historians, but only a small contemporary literature tries to explain why contemporary

prisons policies have developed as they have (e.g. Caplow and Simon 1999). 

The political economy of the American prison has changed enormously over the past 25 years. By

and large outside partisan politics before 1960, prisons and punishment policies have been

political staples since the middle 1960s. By and large immune from judicial oversight under the

Ahands-off@ doctrine before 1970, nearly every detail of prison management has come under

intense and often critical scrutiny by Federal judges. Almost entirely under the authority of public

officials and employees (except for minor contracted services) before 1975, prisons are now often

managed by private corporations that operate hundreds of institutions and provide comprehensive

services, such as medical care systems. Although prison administrators needing to build new

facilities were often before 1980 stymied by not-in-my-backyard movements, communities now

compete for new prison construction as a local economic development initiative. Thirty years ago,

there were no labor unions for prison guards; today in at least one State, the prison guards union

is a major contributor to electoral campaigns and an active lobbyist for particular penal policies.

Private-sector analysts commonly speak of the stakeholders in private businessesCmanagers,

employees, customers, sometimes the general public. In the prisons business, where a quarter

century ago the stakeholders were principally public officials and employees, prisoners, and a

nebulous sense of the public interest, the stakeholders today include these but also voters; labor

unions; private for-profit corporations; communities housing prisons; and the politicians,

lobbyists, and political organizations that represent all these interests.

We are too close to our own times to be able to look behind crime rates and punishment policies

to explain why so many people are held in American prisons and why some of them are held for

so long. Whatever the true explanations, they are much more complicated than allusions merely to

rising crime rates, law-and-order politics, or a vengeful public might suggest. 

Researchers from many disciplines using many methods study prisons, and many more of them

should do so in the future. Adding up the numbers of people admitted to or held in prisons and

jails, the people who work in those institutions, the members of both groups= families, and the

residents of communities housing penal institutions, tens of millions of people are directly affected

by prisons. Any social institution affecting so many people should receive much more attention

from scholars than prisons now do. Norval Morris has often said that prisons are a microcosm of
9

society and that if we study them we will learn about ourselves. That is another, perhaps the best,

reason for increased investment in prison research.

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Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, edited by Norval Morris and David J.

Rothman. New York: Oxford University Press. 
12

Michael Tonry is Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, and Sonosky

Professor of Law and Public Policy, University of Minnesota Law School. Joan Petersilia is Professor of

criminology, law, and society, School of Social Ecology, University of California at Irvine.

NCJ 184478