Penal Transformation

From the 1970s to the early 2000s, the U.S. experienced a profound transformation of penal practices, with an explosion in incarceration rates as the most visible indicator. This prompted a large literature on the “punitive turn” and post-modern punishment, which argued that that the penal pendulum had swung away from rehabilitation and toward a mass warehousing of bodies in prisons across the nation. Much of my research provides a revisionist critique of this account to clarify and extend our understanding of penal change.

BOOK

Goodman, Page, & Phelps (2017). Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press.

*Book Reviews: Aviram (Law & Society Review); Piché (Social Justice); Jermstad (Federal Probation); Jiang (Social & Legal Studies); Buchan (Criminology & Criminal Justice); Appleby (Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books); Law & Social Inquiry Review Symposium (Rubin, Koehler, Ward, McNeill); Response by authors.

ARTICLES

Rubin & Phelps (2017). Fracturing the Penal State: State Actors and the Role of Conflict in Penal Change. Theoretical Criminology 21(4): 422-440.

Phelps (2016). Possibilities and Contestation in Twenty-First-Century US Criminal Justice Downsizing. The Annual Review of Law & Social Science 12: 153-170.

Phelps & Pager (2016). Inequality and Punishment: A Turning Point for Mass Incarceration? The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 663(1): 185-203.

Goodman, Page, & Phelps (2015). The Long Struggle: An Agonistic Perspective on Penal Development. Theoretical Criminology 19(3): 315-335.

Phelps (2012). The Place of Punishment: Variation in the Provision of Inmate Services Staff Across the Punitive Turn. Journal of Criminal Justice 40(5): 348-357.

Phelps (2011). Rehabilitation in the Punitive Era: The Gap between Rhetoric and Reality in U.S. Prison Programs. Law & Society Review 45(1): 33-68.