Submitted by Caterina Rost on December 9, 2015 - 1:44pm
In a blog post for the London School of Economics’ (LSE) U.S. Politics & Policy blog, UW Political Science Professor Rebecca Thorpe examined a central challenge to reducing mass incarceration: “the desire of state lawmakers in rural communities to uphold harsh sentencing laws and to block reforms.” Thorpe notes that legislators “are motivated by a desire to locate and keep prisons as job creators in what are often poor rural areas, and to inflate these areas’ census populations in order to increase political representation and state funding.”
The post entitled “How rural prison economies impede bipartisan efforts to end mass incarceration” was published in the LSE blog on November 19, 2015.