The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarcerations in America

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Air date: 
Mon, 10/06/2014 - 8:00am to 9:00am
The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarcerations in America
Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod speak with Todd Clear, Dean of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University and co-author with Natasha Frost of the new book, "The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarcerations in America."

Over the last 35 years, the US penal system has grown at a rate unprecedented in US history—five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. This growth was part of a sustained and intentional effort to “get tough” on crime, and characterizes a time when no policy options were acceptable save for those that increased penalties. In The Punishment Imperative, eminent criminologists Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost argue that America’s move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the early 2000s was more than just a response to crime or a collection of policies adopted in isolation; it was a grand social experiment. Tracing a wide array of trends related to the criminal justice system, The Punishment Imperative charts the rise of penal severity in America and speculates that a variety of forces—fiscal, political, and evidentiary—have finally come together to bring this great social experiment to an end.

Todd R. Clear is Dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He is the author of Imprisoning Communities and What Is Community Justice? and the founding editor of the journal Criminology & Public Policy.
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