Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment
ISBN: 9780520960329
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Corrections -- Economic aspects -- United States; Prisons -- Economic aspects -- United States;

After forty years of increasing prison construction and incarceration rates, winds of change are blowing through the American correctional system. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the unsustainability of the incarceration project, thereby empowering policy makers to reform punishment through fiscal prudence and austerity. In Cheap on Crime, Hadar Aviram draws on years of archival and journalistic research and builds on social history and economics literature to show the powerful impact of recession-era discourse on the death penalty, the war on drugs, incarceration practices, prison health care, and other aspects of the American correctional landscape.

Hadar Aviram is Professor of Law at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she codirects the Hastings Institute for Criminal Justice and publishes the California Correctional Crisis blog.