Overview

In this book, Katherine Beckett explains how and why mass incarceration persists despite growing recognition of its many failures, plummeting crime rates, and widespread efforts by state legislators and others to reduce prison populations. Beckett identifies three primary forces sustaining incarceration rates in this country: political dynamics around violence, resistance to criminal legal system reform in suburban and rural counties, and the failure of popular drug policy reforms to reduce the reach of the criminal legal system. Beckett then turns to the question of how we can meaningfully decrease the size of the criminal justice system when so many reforms have failed. Drawing on extensive research, she argues for political and policy shifts that would significantly reduce the scale of punishment while also addressing the underlying social problems to which those extreme penalties are a misguided response. We need to reimagine our view of public safety and understand that locking up millions of our citizens does not make us safer. Rather than focusing on one key change as a cure for our criminal justice system, Ending Mass Incarceration provides a cogent analysis of the dynamics working to sustain mass incarceration, the reforms that have been attempted to date, and the reforms we need to bring about truly transformative change.

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Katherine Beckett is chair and professor in the department of Law, Societies, and Justice and S. Frank Miyamoto Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. She is also a faculty associate and steering committee member of the University of Washington's Center for Human Rights. Her research analyzes the causes and consequences of changes in criminal law and punishment in the United States, with a particular focus on the role of race. She is the author of Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics and co-author of Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America and The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America. In 2019 she received the Dorsen Presidential Prize for lifetime contributions to research on civil liberties and civil rights from the American Civil Liberties Union. Wendy Tremont King, a classically trained actor and accomplished puppeteer, got her start in audiobook narration as a volunteer for The Lighthouse for the Blind and has narrated over 100 audiobooks in a variety of genres. She has performed in live and recorded multi-cast audio theater productions with Pocket Universe, The One Act Players, Misfits Audio, and Shoestring Radio. Her resonant voice, wit, and generous sense of humor is described as having an authentic emotional quality. Wendy lives in Buffalo, New York, and can be found throwing stones at the Buffalo Curling Club.

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