Imprisonment and social classification in five common-law democracies, 1955-1985

Rates of imprisonment have risen in many Western democracies over the past few decades, most dramatically in the United States. The development of a systematic and general explanation of imprisonment trends has been impeded because of the theoretical and methodological limitations of prior quantitative studies. Most use data from a single country or jurisdiction and focus narrowly on the Rusche-Kirchheimer "labor surplus" hypothesis, with little attention to alternative explanations. This study takes a cross-national perspective, using longitudinal data from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States to offer an institutional account of imprisonment rates. The labor surplus effect is treated as a special case of a more general process by which individuals are allocated among alternative life-course paths. This allocation process is likely to be influenced by macrolevel institutional arrangements and contests for political power. Hypotheses are tested using pooled time-series cross-section regression techniques. Results support this broadened perspective: prison growth is driven not only by crime rates and unemployment rates, but also by welfare spending and the power of right parties.