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Punishment as Placebo
Abstract
The modern criminal punishment regime has failed to deliver on its promise of public safety. For all of the resources expended and all of the human costs incurred, the ever-growing carceral state does not make us safer. Scholars across the social sciences have studied these shortcomings for decades using various methodologies. The burgeoning prison population has little relation to the crime rate, which advocates have argued supports decarceration efforts to remedy the inefficiency, inequality, and subordinating effects of harsh sentencing policies and institutional design choices that have supported the mass incarceration crisis. What then justifies the continued propagation of this failed regime?