University of Amsterdam
American Studies
How Small Counties Drive American Incarceration
Author Supervisor
S.V.Wolfert Prof. dr. M.S. (Manon) Parry
TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction to Mass Incarceration
1.1 Introduction ... 3
1.2 Historiography of the National Debate on Mass Incarceration ... 6
1.3 County incarceration: the County Jail as a Warehouse ... 11
1.4 Sources and Methods ... 13
2. Local Legislation and Politics 2.1 County Legislature ... 19
2.2 Oklahoma and Love County Legislation and Politics ... 22
2.3 Louisiana and Concordia Parish Legislation and Politics ... 25
2.4 Utah and Daggett County Legislation and Politics ... 30
2.5 Conclusion ... 33
3. The Primary Actors 3.1 The Role of Money ... 35
3.2 The Sheriff, the Prosecutor, the Judge, and the Public Defender ... 36
3.3 Love County ... 42 3.4 Concordia Parish ... 47 3.5 Daggett County ... 55 3.6 Conclusion ... 62 4. Conclusion 4.1 Key Findings ... 64
4.2 Limitations and Future Research ... 67
Chapter 1
Introduction to Mass Incarceration
§1.1 Introduction
The transformation of prison policy at the turn of the twenty-first century can be best portrayed as the mass incarceration of poor people in small and mid-sized U.S. Counties. The United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population but contains 25 percent of its prisoners. Incarceration rose from 200.000 prisoners in 1972 to over 2.2 million in 2014.1
Today, there are 7.2 million people on parole, probation or in a deportation center and an estimated 65 million Americans have a criminal record.2 The majority of the prison population is poor, black or Latino and face disproportional charges compared to white felons. The carceral apparatus employs millions of people who depend on the continuance of the system; according to the historians Hernández, Muhammad, and Thompson "[c]riminal justice is now the largest employment sector in the United States," and the implications of this are being felt in every aspect of the society, economy, and politics.3
Mass incarceration has had a major impact on everything from how urban and suburban spaces have evolved to how electoral maps are drawn to how national borders are defined and maintained to how state and federal resources are distributed to how social movements are made and unmade to how gender roles are bolstered and undermined to how cultural norms and identities are forged and reinforced to how sexuality is profiled and policed.4
The essence of American democracy has been dramatically altered since the rise of the prison population, because almost all states disenfranchise felons. Moreover, because mass incarceration mostly affects African Americans, these political ramifications greatly burden them.5
The U.S. Census counts prisoners to the state they are incarcerated in and not to the place inmates originally came from. Through the process of gerrymandering, counties have used prisoners as pawns in political power games because they are not allowed to vote. For
1 Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn. (2014). The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. The National Research Council. Washington, D.C.: The National
Academies Press.
2 Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Heather Ann Thompson. (2015). "Introduction:
Constructing the Carceral State." Journal of American History 102(1), p. 18.
3 ibid., p.20 4 ibid., p. 19.
5 Among the most well known scholars to address this problem is legal scholar Michelle Alexander. See
Michelle Alexander. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press. Hereafter referred to as Alexander (2010).
example "[e]ight house districts in the state of Pennsylvania simply would not exist if disfranchised prisoners were not included in the population numbers."6 Because a big part of the African American community is not allowed to vote, they cannot change what almost solely affects them. So, whereas the election of Obama in 2008 was seen as racial equality coming to a climax, the incarceration numbers, in truth, presented a never-ending nightmare. Change of the criminal justice system has seemed to come to a halt with the inauguration of Donald Trump, as he promised to restore "law and order" on various occasions.7
Historians, sociologists, criminologists and economists disagree over what precisely was the origin for the tremendous surge in imprisonment, but scholars agree that various causes have led to an unprecedented incarceration rate. Recent studies of mass incarceration are more inclusive, as these address the more distinctive features such as the costs and benefits, rather than solely focusing on the historical questions about racial disparity.8 The new research agenda shows all sides of the problem, and also questions if incarceration is the real answer to crime, and how the American nation can justify the morality of the system that incarcerates so many of its own citizens.
Mass incarceration anno 2018 is a problem of the backyard. The geography of mass incarceration has dramatically shifted. The Vera Institute of Justice, one of the first non-profit criminal justice organizations to address the issue of local incarceration, argues that "[t]he highest incarceration rates are no longer in the nation’s big cities, but rather in the thousands of often-overlooked smaller cities, towns, and rural areas that comprise nearly half of the U.S. population."9 Therefore, mass incarceration has become a local, rural issue. While
incarceration rates in bigger cities have leveled off or decreased in the last two decades, the opposite is happening elsewhere. The rural, often southern states and counties contain half of the American prison population. According to Hérnandez, Muhammed, and Thompson the underlying cause is that "generally, though, white, rural, and small-town Americans benefit economically more than others from correction dollars."10
Between 2005 and 2014, more than half of the large and mid-sized U.S. counties saw
6 Hernández, Muhammad, and Thompson (2015), p.20.
7 See for example Sabrina Siddiqui. (2017). "Eric Holder calls Trump administration's crime policies dangerous
and dispiriting." The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/18/eric-holder-trump-administration-crime-dangerous-policies [Accessed 5 June 2018].
8 Dorothy Roberts. (2004). "The Social and Moral Cost of Mass Incarceration in African American
Communities." Stanford Law Review 56(1271), p. 1273.
9 Vera Institute of Justice. (2018). "In Our Backyards." Available at:
https://www.vera.org/in-our-backyards#introduction [Accessed 27 Jan. 2018].
their incarceration rates decline, in contrast to small counties, where the numbers only went up. For a graphic that shows the decline and increase in incarceration see figure 1.11
Possible causes for decline seem to be federal consent decrees, class-action suits about jail and prison overcrowding, and new reform policies and practices to reduce the prison and jail population.12 Crime rates do not drive the division between large, mid-sized and small
counties. Instead, according to The New York Times journalists Keller and Pearce, the division "reflects growing disagreement about how harshly crime should be punished, especially drivers of the criminal justice system like theft, drugs, weapons and drunken driving."13 Cities and large urban areas have adopted a more lenient approach towards nonviolent crimes such as drug abuse, whereby low-level offenders end up in treatment
11 Figure 1 retrieved from Josh Keller and Adam Pearce. (2016). "This small Indiana county sends more people
to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why?" The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/upshot/new-geography-of-prisons.html [Accessed April 21 2018]. Hereafter referred to as Josh Keller and Adam Pearce (2016).
12 Subramanian, Christian Henrichson, Jacob Kang-Brown. (2015). "In Our Own Backyard: Confronting
Growth and Disparities in American Jails," p.5.
programs or probation rather than in the county jail. It is important to acknowledge that "[j]ust a decade ago, people in rural, suburban and urban areas were all about equally likely to go to prison." Nowadays, "people in small counties are about 50 percent more likely to go to prison than people in populous counties."14 The process of mass incarceration started through stricter federal and state laws in the 1970s, but the increase could not have been truly established without local criminal justice reforms and actors. As the trend on the national level is shifting, it seems as if federal and state efforts to reduce incarceration and the improvement of the criminal justice system have not yet reached the remote, often conservative counties, where the local actors such as the prosecutor and the judge still retain all power. As Keller and Pearce stated, "Dearborn County [The New York Times case study] represents the new boom in American incarceration: mostly white, rural and politically conservative."15
What caused the rise in incarceration rates in small counties? Are these the same causes as at the national level? What kind of jail system do counties have and what are the problematic aspects of this system? This thesis provides an answer to these questions, which until now have been raised by only a handful of independent institutes and journalists. This thesis seeks to examine the questions through three case studies of counties, to explain how, and why incarceration rates are still growing in rural counties.
§ 1.2 Historiography of the National Debate on Mass Incarceration
The indication that mass incarceration is becoming a more and more local and rural problem has led to an entirely new debate. The research, scholarly articles, and books have not provided a clear answer to how this came into place and what caused the disproportionate differences in incarceration in small counties. Neither has there been an analysis of mass incarceration in jails that included the different levels of policy-making, laws and specifically the role of the prosecutor, sheriff, judge, and the public defender in the process of local incarceration. Therefore, the specific analysis of the county level hopefully will provide a new contribution to the debate. The difference between jails and prisons is also often overlooked in the general literature and will put the outcome and consequences of policies into practice.
Many scholars and journalists have written about mass incarceration at the national
14 ibid. 15 ibid.
and states level, to explain the roots and causes of the phenomena. Among these, racial oppression is indicated as one of the leading causes. Mass incarceration means the entire web of laws, rules, policies and customs that make up the criminal justice system and which serve as the gateway to permanent marginalization and stigmatization of the undercaste.16 Since the founding of the American nation, incarceration, freedom and the right to citizenship have always been intertwined; "[p]rison and slavery defined the boundaries of citizenship and, in this sense, were two sides of the same coin."17 But as there came an end to slavery a solution
had to be found to maintain the boundaries between citizenship and race. The Thirteenth Amendment provided this loophole, leading to prisons becoming blacker and browner. However, historians have not focused on mass incarceration until Heather Ann Thompson wrote an article in 2010 in which she argued that it was time for "historians to think critically about mass incarceration and begin to consider the reverberations of this never-before-seen phenomenon."18
Mass incarceration truly became a topic of national debate due to the best-selling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), wherein legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that the "War on Drugs" is one of the main causes of incarceration.19 Through this book it became clear that any discussion on the problem of mass incarceration is not possible without addressing racism as the foundation for this new system. The New Jim Crow tilts the current criminal justice system as the successor of slavery and segregation and the Jim Crow legislation. Many scholars of various fields responded to the book, mostly acknowledging that this system deserved larger notice, but some scholars criticized the book, due to the comparison with the Jim Crow era, because this overlooked many aspects of the Old Jim Crow. The comparison does both injustice to the Jim Crow and its legacy and to the current (class) trends in mass incarceration. Jeffrey Adler, for example, argues that the shift in the 1970s is built on the social, legal, and political changes of the period between the world wars in which less crime led to more punishment. Prosecutors during that time gained more freedom to prosecute, and mainly charged African Americans.20
Professor of Law John Pfaff who wrote Locked In: The True Causes of Mass
16 Alexander (2010).
17 Hernández, Muhammad, and Thompson (2015), p. 21.
18 Heather Ann Thompson. (2010). "Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and
Transformation in Postwar American History." The Journal of American History 97(3), p. 705.
19 Alexander (2010).
20 Jeffrey Adler. (2015). "Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early
Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform (2017), constructs a new narrative in the
story of incarceration, namely, that of the role of the prosecutor.21 Pfaff denounces the most commonly accepted explanations for mass incarceration, such as the War on Drugs, harsher sentencing and the private prison industry. According to him, we should look at another aspect: the major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s. Prosecutors started to bring charges twice as often as before. Pfaff constructs a new narrative, filling in the gaps of other authors, by focusing on the four dimensions often overlooked: local criminal justice systems, the role of prosecutors, the failed politics of punitive punishment and violent offenders. Whereas Michelle Alexander argues that the "War on Drugs" is one of the main causes, Pfaff disputes this claim by arguing that people who are convicted for non-violent, drug offenses are only a small part of the prison population. Other scholars have also acknowledged the War on Drugs is highly problematic and targeting blacks and other non-whites primarily, but that the war does not explain the current situation.22 Historian Matthew Lassiter argued the War on Drugs cannot be explained by simply saying it is the new Jim Crow. Rather, we must see it in the light of the position that the white middle-class youth had through state institutions and American political culture, namely that of innocent victims. Therefore, we must acknowledge that "[t]he criminalization of blackness and decriminalization of whiteness remains deeply entrenched in American political culture."23
Professor of Law James Forman Jr. wrote the book Locking up our Own: Crime and
Punishment in Black America (2017) wherein he argues that black elites have actively
participated in the rise of mass incarceration. The book offers an insightful history of black American leaders and their struggles to keep their communities and neighborhoods safe, from both police and black criminals.24 Pfaff argues that black leaders have had a significant role in the increasing of incarceration. Criminologist Vanessa Barker who wrote the book The
Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders (2009) is in line with the argumentation of Forman that many blacks fought for
harsher sentencing. 25 Other scholars have also provided comprehensive historical
21 John Pfaff. (2017). Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform.
New York: Basic Books.
22 Others scholars who specifically addressed this are for example: James Forman Jr. (2017). Locking up our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Matthew Lassiter.
(2015). "Impossible Criminals: the Suburban Imperatives of America's War on Drugs." The Journal of
American History 102(1), pp. 126-140. 23 Matthew Lassiter. (2015), p. 140. 24 James Forman Jr. (2017).
25 Vanessa Barker. (2009). The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders. New York: Oxford University Press.
documentation of the black political level of involvement in the build-up of the drug war. Forman and with him many others, however, do agree with Alexander that mass incarceration resulted in African American felons becoming part of an "undercaste", and that this resulted in poor black men being seen as potential threats and social outcasts whose rights could be violated with impunity.
However, we must not forget that the carceral state faced a lot of political opposition, especially during and after the Civil Rights Movement. Historian Robert Chase argues that many social scientists have looked through "a top-down national lens" that did not show protests, even though when we look at the regional and local scale there were various prisoners’ rights movements.26 Political scientist Vesla Weaver undermines these movements by arguing that the end of the Civil Rights Movement marked a shift in America. Through the efforts and tapping into voter's fear, a white, conservative political elite regained the power.27 James Fortner also criticizes this kind of argument because it does not recognize the role of the "black silent majority." He criticizes scholars such as Alexander and Thompson for being too functionalist, creating an obscure, racial image of mass incarceration of white power and black powerlessness, thereby ignoring the black victims and their agency. Joseph Osel, a scholar of psychology and politics, also claimed that Alexander’s analysis was ahistorical, elided the voices of black revolutionaries and activists, and had a "liberal-humanist, bourgeois framework," which he found problematic and limiting.28 Nowadays, the racial disparities within the incarceration system are a result of the American class system. This is in contrast with the Jim Crow era when these disparities were a "black condition" separated from class notions. Fortner emphasizes this, namely rather than creating law and order, politicians used incarceration as a rhetorical device to speak to the multiple and diverse concerns of working and middle-class Americans, both black and white. Alexander neglects
26 Robert Chase. (2015). "We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the
Prisoners' Rights Movement." Journal of American History 102(1), pp. 86.
27 Vesla Weaver. (2007). "Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy." Studies in American Political Development 21(2), pp. 230-265. This conceptual framework is supported by Kohler-Hausmann, who
argued that the politics of poverty, the war on crime and drugs were overlapping and the result of the
intertwining welfare-and carceral state. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann. (2015). "Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States." Journal of American History 102(1), pp. 87–99. Elizabeth Hinton also supports this and claims that Johnson's Great Society programs, which were the combination of antipoverty and anticrime programs, laid the groundwork for mass incarceration. Elizabeth Hinton. (2015). "A War within Our Own Boundaries’: Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State." Journal of American History 102(1), pp. 110-112.
28 Joseph Osel. (2010). "Black Out: Michelle Alexander's Operational Whitewash. The New Jim Crow
Reviewed." Radicalcritique.org. Available at: http://www.radicalcritique.org/2012/03/black-out-michelle-alexanders.html [Accessed 21 Dec. 2017].
to emphasize that mass incarceration is limited to "the poorest, least educated segments" of black communities.29
In the end, there is a broad consensus shared by scholars that agree with the central arguments of Alexander or that support her findings. Many scholars criticize the counter-voices of Forman and others, because the compassionate explanation for the black elites participation neglects to elaborate on aspects such as the extremely harsh residential segregation. Sociologists Doug Massey and Nancy Denton called this the American Apartheid, which was a leading cause for the support for aggressive policing and tough-on-crime sentencing.30 Elaine Brown, in The Condemnation of Little B (2002) goes even further by arguing that black leaders functioned as what Brown called "Black Slave Overseers."31 Khalil Muhammad also said in The Condemnation of Blackness (2013) that the American people have invented a new category, that of black criminality, which has led to the segregated urban development and social policies.32
Black crime was seen as something different from that of white crime or crimes committed by immigrants. Black criminality became a tool to measure black fitness for citizenship to shield white Americans from the charge of racism, helping to determine the degree to what extent whites had any responsibility to help black people. The only solution for black crime was harsher sentencing, not considering a more humane non-law-enforcement option. Forman, Pfaff, and other authors could have reflected more on this colorblind post-Civil Rights era and explain the struggle for black equality and social justice in a broader way than they did. Scholars also have to acknowledge the agency of minority communities and not use a "top-down" analysis with such a complicated issue.
Two other aspects of the mass incarceration analysis have to be pointed out,
namely non-violent versus violent crime and the role of the government. Alexander and other scholars have pleaded for the importance of non-violent crime, arguing that this form of crime is the primary cause of mass incarceration. Pfaff, however, has argued that most people are incarcerated for violent crimes, which cannot be left unpunished. The role of the federal government in mass incarceration is another thorny issue because that role is much smaller than we think. States and municipalities often ignore the federal policies so they can adapt
29 James Forman Jr. (2012). "Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow." New York University Law Review 87(22), pp. 101-146.
30 Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton. (2003). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
31 Elaine Brown. (2002). The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America. Boston: Beacon Press. 32 Khalil Muhammad. (2011). The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
their own laws and approaches. Besides, the federal prisons only house 200.000 prisoners out of the 2.2 million. Eventually different phenomena have led to the drastic increase in incarceration. Many of the scholars who are involved in the debate are now moving away from the causes of racial disparity to examining its consequences. However, in this thesis, we turn to the locale to look at the causes of mass incarceration.
§ 1.3 County incarceration: the County Jail as a Warehouse
America's prison system is very complex, consisting of federal prisons, state
prisons, private prisons and county jails, whereby the latter will be the focus of this thesis. In one county there can be one of each, but that does not mean that the county is responsible for it. Jails are often confused for prisons and the other way around, but jails are locally run facilities, mostly holding people who are arrested but not convicted. The U.S. is home to over 3000 jails, holding around 730.000 people on any given day, whereby jails have nearly nineteen times the annual admissions of that of state and federal prisons.33 Jails range in size from ten people to 20.000 inmates, and the county or local municipality partially pays for their costs.34 Jails house several types of inmates, which make them very heterogeneous and hard to manage. People incarcerated in jails are pretrial detainees, locally sentenced inmates (usually imprisoned for a year or less), state inmates awaiting transfer to prison or serving time in jail because of overcrowding, probation violators, parole violators, pretrial federal detainees pending federal charges, inmates from other counties, and lastly immigrants awaiting trial or deportation. County jails fall under the jurisdiction of the county or local municipalities, and although almost every county has one, jails are rarely on the radar of most Americans.
Originally, jails were meant to imprison only those who posed a threat to society or a flight risk before trial, however according to editorial director of the Vera Institute Ram Subramanian, nowadays jails have "become massive warehouses primarily for those too poor to post even low bail or too sick for existing community resources to manage."35 It is not the
case that jail inmates are presumed to be found guilty, the majority of them are assumed to be innocent. Although jails do hold people accused of serious, violent crimes, nearly 75 percent
33 Ram Subramanian et al. (2015). "Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jail in America." Vera Institute of Justice. Available at:
http://www.safetyandjusticechallenge.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/incarcerations-front-door-report.pdf [Accessed 8 May 2018], p.4. Hereafter referred to as Incarceration's Front Door. All the subsequent references come from the same source unless otherwise stated.
34 Six states in the U.S. do not have locally-run jails: Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and
Vermont. Prisons and jails fall under same jurisdiction of the state.
of the population of the sentenced inmates and those awaiting trial are in there for nonviolent offenses. Most of the time these offenses involve traffic, property, drug or public misdemeanors; however, a few days behind bars for a minor offense can have a major impact on the future. Due to regulations such as the ballot box, voting rights, right of housing and food stamps, poor minorities are mostly influenced by their time in jail. The report from the Vera Institute states,
For the disproportionately high number of those who enter jails from minority communities, or who suffer from mental illness, addiction, and homelessness, time spent in jail exacerbates already difficult conditions and puts many on a cycle of incarceration from which it is extremely difficult to break free.36
Incarceration rates at the local level have increased drastically since the 70s and 80s. Annual admissions have doubled from around six million in 1983 to twelve million in 2013, whereby many inmates are part of the "revolving door", re-entering jail time and again. The rate of confinement also increased to (a peak of) 259 per 100,000 in 2007. Various things cause the increase in jail incarceration, for example; drug arrests that grew with 160 percent and the length of stay that doubled from 14 to 23 days. These statistics are not in line with crime rates, because overall crime rates peaked in the 1990s and have been drastically declining ever since.
The jail incarceration rates are a result of rulings by a primarily autonomous system of actors. These actors include the police, the sheriff, who decide on arrests and releases, prosecutors who determine the charges, pretrial services program, judges, bail commissioners, public defenders, and other court actors. The Vera Institute identifies six key decision points that determine incarceration: arrest, charge, pretrial release/bail, case processing, disposition and sentencing, and supervision and reentry. Local actors seem to be largely independent from federal laws, as well as state regulation and laws, even though state law has to be upheld when required actors determine what is a criminal offense based on local political pressure, policy decisions and priorities.
The stakes of maintaining a jail are higher than ever because more money is involved than ever before. The costs of jails have increased with 235 percent from 1982 to 2011, resulting in the $22.2 billion spent by local jurisdictions each year.37 These numbers do not even truly capture the amount that is spent on jails, because things like healthcare are often
36 ibid., p.5.
37 Tracey Kyckelhahn. (2013). "Local Government Corrections Expenditures, FY 2005–2011." Washington,
paid for by non-correctional agencies. The expenditures on criminal justice are over $270 billion and have grown by over 70 percent in the last two decades.38 Estimated jail and prison costs are now coming close to a staggering 80 billion on an annual basis.39 As counties contribute to these costs, the money is drawn from the same place as the "tax revenue that supports schools, transportation, and an array of other public services."40 In addition, jails charge their inmates for the services they provide, whereby telephone and video costs are higher than the county community pays. Even though debtors' prisons were abolished 200 years ago, jail inmates often have to spend thousands of dollars on fees, and these do not end when inmates are released. When people are sentenced to probation or treatment programs, these persons end up paying those bills as well.
A few days in jail can result in significant debts because people who are incarcerated often work low-wage jobs, which salaries do not cover the costs. Many inmates lose their jobs because they cannot work, or they are fired later on because they have to show up for supervision and programs during their scheduled hours. Another problematic aspect is that those incarcerated in local jails often end up there because they are too poor to post bail or fail to comply with the conditions of their pretrial release. Local jails are getting overcrowded, not because crime rates are increasing, but because of local policies and political pressure under the guise of America getting "tough on crime." The people who end up in jail are often African Americans and Hispanics, poor, immigrants, drug addicts or mentally ill - almost 70 percent of jail inmates have a history of drug or alcohol abuse or both. 41
§ 1.4 Sources and Methods
Even though jails incarcerate more than 12 million people each year there is almost no research and data available on the subject. Scholars have only recently started to focus on county jails after several reports appeared by criminal justice institutes that addressed the
38 Executive Office of the President of the United States. (2016). "Economic Perspectives on Incarceration and
the Criminal Justice System. Available at:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20160423_cea_incarceration_criminal_justic e.pdf [Accessed 17 October 2018].
39 Peter Wagner and Bernadette Rabuy. (2017). "Following the Money of Mass Incarceration." The Prison Policy Initiative. Available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html [Accessed 22 May 2018]. For
more data on money spent on jails see Christian Henrichson, Joshua Rinaldi, Ruth Delaney. (2015). "The Price of Jails: Measuring the Taxpayer Cost of Local Incarceration." The Vera Institute of Justice. Available at: https://storage.googleapis.com/vera-web-assets/downloads/Publications/the-price-of-jails-measuring-the-taxpayer-cost-of-local-incarceration/legacy_downloads/price-of-jails.pdf [Accessed 10 April 2018].
40 Incarceration's Front Door, p.13.
41 African Americans account for 36 percent of jail population, but locally these disparities in racial background
rising incarceration rates in counties.42 The Vera Justice Institute has published various
reports and a new data tool that analyzes publically available data on jail incarceration.43 However, the research that exists on prison and jail incarceration is often merged into one another or jails are eliminated. Counties also contribute to this problem because they barely publish any data about their jail. Although federal data is available, the way data is collected and stored makes it difficult to answer even simple questions about jail use in a given county or discern similarities or differences across the approximately 3,000 counties in the United States.44
Scholars have looked at specific aspects of jails, such as judges, prosecutors, health care, gender, plea-bargaining, making bail, and disparities in ethnicity. However, far too little attention has been paid to the combination of multiple aspects. This thesis seeks to address the various causes of growth, of which the most important are policy decisions, local legislation, and the roles of local government elected officials. In this thesis, I will examine if the causes of mass incarceration as identified in the secondary literature apply to the comparative case studies of small counties.
I will focus on three counties as case studies of local incarceration. I chose the
counties through the Vera Institute of Justice incarceration data tool. The tool addresses the relative number of people incarcerated in a county -the number of inmates in the county jail in relation to the population-. The Vera data tool shows that 130 small counties (under 250.000 county residents) have jail incarceration rates that exceed 1000 per 100.000. Formerly there was no metric to rank jails by incarceration rate; therefore many of these counties escaped the public scrutiny that would come with the incarceration of such a high percentage of their residents. My hypothesis states that the smallest counties have the relatively highest incarceration numbers, caused by the local prosecutor, judges and
42 Another leading institute is the Prison Policy Initiative, see for example: Joshua Aiken. (2017). "Era of Mass
Expansion: Why State Officials Should Fight Jail Growth." Prison Policy Initiative. Available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/jailsovertime.html [Accessed 22 May 2018].
There are also more locally oriented state institutes such as the Oregon Justice Resource Center. See, Kate Gonsalves. (2017). "Disrupting Mass Incarceration at the Local Level: A Guide to Mapping Reform." Oregon
Justice Resource Center. Available at:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/524b5617e4b0b106ced5f067/t/594dbdd5b3db2b9cbb1e1f75/1498267106 315/Disrupting+Mass+Incarceration+at+the+Local+Level+FINAL.pdf [Accessed 19 May 2018].
43 See for example, Don Stemen. (2007). "Reconsidering Incarceration: New Directions for Reducing Crime."
Vera Institute of Justice. Available at:
https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.nl/&httpsredir=1&article=1018&con text=criminaljustice_facpubs [Accessed 10 May 2018].
44 The federal data is made available through the Bureau of Justice Statistics and Census of Jails. See for
example Todd D. Minton and Zhen Zeng. (2015). "Jail Inmates at Midyear 2014 Statistical Tables." Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.
legislation. Therefore, I have first looked at incarceration numbers and then selected them through their population. There are seventeen counties that have an incarceration rate of more than 4000 persons per 100.000 inhabitants. Out of these seventeen counties, selected by population number of a maximum of 20.000 persons, there came forward six counties: Love County, Oklahoma, Catahoula Parish, Louisiana, Jackson Parish, Louisiana, Concordia Parish, Louisiana, Beaver County, Utah and Daggett County, Utah. Based on a common denominator, namely their population, we can now for the first time, compare them and speak in a common language. Because of the scope of this analysis and the fact that some of the counties are situated in the same state, I chose one county for each state.
Love, Daggett, and Concordia have the highest incarceration rates of all the U.S. counties; therefore, these counties are the case studies of this thesis. In Love County the incarceration rate increased from 341,2 per 100.000 in 2005 to 15768,1 in 2013 see figure 2.45
The incarceration rate of Concordia Parish grew from 453,5 in 1993 to 9808,3 in 2015, see figure 3.46 Daggett County incarceration rate grew from 3846,2 in 1998 to 11666,7 in 2014, see figure 4.47
45 Figure 2 Love County is retrieved from the Vera Institute of Justice. "Incarceration trends: data tool."
Available at: http://trends.vera.org/incarceration-rates?data=pretrial [Accessed 3 May 2018]. The bottom lines in the figure are the national and state level. The left numbers from 0 to 20.000 are the number of people incarcerated. The right line from 1980 to 2000 are the years.
Figure 3 Figure 4
As said before, these rates are based on 100.000 inhabitants, a population number that all these counties do not reach because they have no more than 20.000 residents. Therefore, a county like Daggett does not incarcerate 11666.7 persons, since that is tenfold the population of 1110 persons. There is more important data not included here (jail admission rates, length of stay, racial background, costs of detention, and onwards), but this will be addressed in the specific case studies. The counties provide fascinating research material for case studies as their rates have sometimes increased by twenty-six-fold. Each of these counties has a local prosecutor, and since the literature brought forward that prosecutors are one of the leading causes of incarceration, it will be interesting to focus on their role in the local community and courthouses.
The methodology of researching incarceration rates is complicated because it is a very new subject. I will use the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which is the primary source for criminal justice statistics, and thus of crucial importance when one wants to examine incarceration rates. The BJS is a federal government agency that has collected and published data and reports on the national, state and local level. The main problem with the data is that the BJS gathers data about the criminal justice system on an institution-by-institution basis (police, courts, corrections), using different units of analysis (crimes, individuals, cases), and 46 Figure 3 Concordia Parish ibid.
sometimes-varying time periods and samples. This data offers a cross-sectional assessment of the system, but fails to display the flow of individuals and how and why people exit the criminal justice system.48 People exit the system at many different stages in ways that are poorly understood, even though this is consequential for the effectiveness and fairness of criminal justice system processes. Therefore, we miss crucial data that shows people who are arrested but not prosecuted, or people who pay bail or fail to make bail.49
In addition to this, agencies and departments within the justice system function separately and do not exchange data between them, even though combined records would lead to a better understanding of the interaction between the systems. I found the reasons for incarceration (such as drug-related crime, property crime, etcetera), but I did not find what cases were solved with bail or plea deals. It is impossible to detract the people that agreed to a plea deal or ended up in jail because of failing to make bail. There is a number for pretrial jail population or in the BJS data "the unconvicted", but this data is from June 30th, 2015, and incarceration counts tend to fluctuate per single day. Data on bail, plea-deals, and pretrials is also not available in the data tool of the Vera Institute, because Vera is dependent on the data from the BJS. For some counties the data could only be traced back to the 2000s; however, the trends show that incarceration rates of small counties only started to increase exponentially from the 2000s and onwards. Therefore, the lack of data of the 20th Century is not very problematic for answering my research question, as I will focus on the 21st century primarily.
I will use the data tool, but also look at the data from the institutions separately because sometimes an interpretation of data differs from what the data reveals. The data from the tool is obtained through the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), Annual Survey of Jails (ASJ), and Census of Jails (COJ). The ASJ has been undertaken 25 times between 1985 and 2014 and captures data for a sample of a few hundred jails. In 2014, the sample was approximately 800 counties, which included the 250 largest jails. The COJ has been fielded ten times since 1970—in 1970, 1972, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1999, 2005, 2006, and 2013— but captures data for all counties.50 Data for years that counties do not supply data (through the ASJ or COJ) are interpolated, assuming a constant rate of change between the years when data are provided. Data for resident population is from the U.S. Census Bureau decennial
48 National Research Council. (2009). "Ensuring the Quality, Credibility, and Relevance of U.S. Justice
Statistics." Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, p. 134.
49 ibid., 325.
50 Vera Institute of Justice. (2018). "Incarceration Trends: Data Sources." Available http://trends.vera.org/about
census and American Community Survey (ACS). Data for county arrests is the 2012 Uniform Crime Report. General data on counties will be retrieved from the local county website, County and City Data Book, and other websites such as USA County Records. Lastly, I will focus on local newspapers, interviews and other locally produced data to analyze the counties.
The analysis of three counties will be useful, but not necessarily applicable to
all counties, because as research director of the Vera Institute, Christian Henrichson explained, "[e]veryone's jail problem is a little different."51 Cross-state comparisons of jail incarceration data should be made with caution because each state's jail use and policies are different. According to the Vera Institute, pretrial and jail admission data are separable and are not affected by sentencing practices, but even there can be differences because one jail may house other inmates from another county, or from the state prison. Besides, there are also success stories and counties that have implemented reform policies and had lower incarceration numbers. For these reasons, the three counties and their causes will not be representable for every U.S. County that has a population between 1000 and 20.0000 persons. This thesis will still be valuable because it is a comparative case study analysis of incarceration rates of individual counties, a form of research that has not been done very often on the local level.
The causes of mass incarceration that are identified as crucial to this thesis lead to the thematically organization of each chapter. I will test if the causes as identified in the general academic literature about incarceration, apply to individual counties. The following themes will be the subject of this study: local politics and legislation, the role of money, and the primary local government officials. In chapter 2, I will examine the effect of local politics and legislation on incarceration, to answer the question: Are the small counties white and conservative? In this chapter, I will also examine whom the legislators and politicians are, and look at their individual backgrounds. Are politics and legislation responsible for the increase in jail population? In chapter 3, I examine the role of money to find out who benefits from incarceration and if this system is indeed the largest employment sector. I turn to the local prosecutor, the sheriff, the judge, and the public defender and examine their roles within the counties. In all of these chapters Love County, Concordia Parish, and Daggett County will be discussed, as they provide case studies to test the causes of incarceration.
51 Henrichson cited in Jake Pearson. (2015). "America's booming prisoner population is coming from small
county jails." Business Insider. Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-study-smaller-counties-driving-us-jail-population-growth-2015-12?international=true&r=US&IR=T [Accessed 24 May 2018].
Chapter 2
Local Legislation and Local Politics
§ 2.1 County Legislature
Is it true that white, rural, and politically conservative small counties drive
incarceration when we look at the practice of legislation and politics, and to what extent do law and order politics shape actual sentencing? Is mass incarceration a result of America's unique justice and governing system that assigns power to local criminal justice actors? A county is a smaller administrative region that in the state of Louisiana are called parishes. The county has varying degrees of political and legal significance. The U.S. has a complex law system, whereby states remain very sovereign from federal laws, and in turn some counties also enjoy sovereignty from the state they are situated in. Each state has its own constitution, statutes and regulations in which various articles determine the amount of power and individuality a county has. The constitutions are also subject to judicial interpretation per legal district, similar to their federal counterparts. American citizens often live under various layers of special districts. Therefore, a citizen is subjected to multiple agencies simultaneously at the federal, state, and local level. Sometimes, the boundaries of a local government can overlap with another local government or district. Local governments are creatures and interpreters of state law and can create local laws if state legislation grants them those powers.
The nature of county government varies significantly between states and counties, but in general, the government officials are elected and the government agencies employ many persons. Local citizens are the ones who choose the framework of their government from a selection determined by the constitution of the state. Most counties have a governing council or board of commissions whom are elected locally.52 Besides the local government, there are several other positions for which regular elections are held in the county, such as local judges, sheriffs, prosecutors and various other offices. The latest data on state and local law enforcement agencies showed that local governments employed over 1.1 million persons on a full-time basis and 100.000 part-time employees.53 During the past decades, the legislative body has grown tremendously. Whereas during the crime peak in the 1970s, crime rates increased and the number of government officals remained the same, the trend reversed from
52 Local governments have five common forms: mayor–council, council–manager, commission, town meeting,
and representative town meeting.
53 Findings from 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies
the 1990s and onwards. From 2004 to 2008, for example, local police grew with 14.000 officers and sheriffs' offices grew with 8.000 persons.54
Changes in legislation that have impacted mass incarceration have often emerged from the locale and the state, whereby the local, social and political culture influenced the characteristics of the legislation. The legislation, arrests, prosecution, filing charges, plea-bargaining, and sentencing are all the responsibilities of the local government agencies. The distinctness of states and local counties is a product of divergence in statutes, laws and overall legislation. As criminologists Vanessa Barker and Mona Lynch and political scientist Marie Gottschalk have explained, laws are created in local jurisdictions in ways that are both profoundly distinctive regarding politics, styles, structures of governance, and individual personalities of political actors.55 An example of how the local level shapes state level punishment is the death penalty, whereby 14% of the counties have been responsible for all executions since the 1970s.56 Only fourteen counties concentrated in four states have produced 30% of all executions. Therefore, we see that the micro-local matters. However, local, criminal laws are often not original or a new initiative, because a significant amount of formal and informal legislation is a result of the inter-jurisdictional transfer of knowledge and trends.57 Counties are generally a part of a larger jurisdictional region that has the same (symbolic) politics and legislation.
Regionalism is of great importance concerning mass incarceration, because most of the incarceration innovations were primarily initiated from the Sunbelt South and the West, where states installed reforms to increase the lengths of sentences.58 Mona Lynch explains
the importance of regionalism,
Region—irrespective of literal jurisdictional lines—also provides locale-based clues into American mass incarceration. Laws, policies, practices, and norms get shared,
54 Brian Reaves. (2011). "Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2008." Bureau of Justice
Statistics. Bulletin NCJ 233982.
55 Vanessa Barker. (2009). Marie Gottschalk. (2006). The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Mona Lynch. (2009). Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
56 Frank Baumgartner. (2010). "The geography of the death penalty." Available at:
https://www.unc.edu/~fbaum/Innocence/NC/Baumgartner-geography-of-capital-punishment-oct-17-2010.pdf [Accessed 27 May 2018].
57 Sean Nicholson-Crotty. (2009). "The politics of diffusion: Public policy in the American states." Journal of Politics 71, pp. 192–205.
58 Mona Lynch. (2009). Lichtenstein also supports this framework and argues that the increase in prisoners
needs to be understood as congruent with the new dominance of the Sunbelt in the country’s politics, social mores, and economic capacities. Alex Lichtenstein. (2015). "Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass
Incarceration: Toward a New Political Economy of the Postwar Carceral State." Journal of American History 201(1): pp. 113-125.
adopted, and remade as local across jurisdictional lines, and these boundary crossings often follow regionally based movement in adoption patterns.59
As annual reports from the Bureau of Justice Statistics have shown, the clustering of incarceration rates by region (counties and, or states) has been a trend for decades now, whereby the South has the highest numbers and the West the second highest. The clustering existed before the incarceration explosion and has persisted throughout the expansion.
Sentencing legislation schemes differ tremendously per state, which makes it hard to predict the sentence outcome lengths for the entire U.S. Various scholars have studied this subject, but due to the tremendous differences, have not come up with a unilateral answer.60 The state of Louisiana, for example, has adopted a guideline system for sentencing and as a result, the state has been the number one incarcerator since the entry of this system. As the Times-Picayune study showed "[o]ne in 86 adult Louisianans is doing time, nearly double the national average."61 Vanessa Barker identified a cause for the punitive legislation of such
states, namely, low and cynical level of civic engagement in politics, commonly a result of an unstable population with a substantial in- and outflow of citizens.62 Gottschalk's argumentation is in line with Barker's, as she suggests that criminal justice reform is fundamentally a political problem, not a crime and punishment one. Gottschalk argues that "[t]he real challenge is how to create the political will and political pressure at all levels of government—local, state, and federal—to pursue new sentencing policies and to create alternatives to incarceration."63
The state creates local governments that are often entirely dependent on the delegated power and have no sovereignty of their own. However, some U.S. states have given the rights of self-government to counties and other municipalities. The most important legislation that provides sovereignty is Home rule, a concept that according to legal scholar Sandra Stevenson refers to,
... the right of a local government to determine for itself matters related to its local concerns or sometimes more specifically delineated as its local affairs, property and
59 Mona Lynch. (2011). "Mass Incarceration, legal change, and locale. Understanding and remediating
American penal overindulgence." Criminology and Public Policy 10(3), p.682.
60 See for example: David Greenberg and Valerie West. (2001). "State prison populations and their growth,
1971–1991." Criminology 39, pp. 615–654.
61 Cindy Chang. (2012). "Louisiana Incarcerated." The Times-Picayune. Available at:
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/page/louisiana_prison_capital.html [Accessed April 24 2018].
62 Vanessa Barker. (2006). "The politics of punishing: Building a state governance theory of American
imprisonment variation." Punishment and Society 8, pp. 5–33.
63 Marie Gottschalk. (2009). "Money and mass incarceration: The bad, the mad, and penal reform." Criminology & Public Policy 8, pp. 107-108.
government... it is authority of local government to act on its own behalf and a corresponding limitation on the state from interfering with solely local concerns.64
Home rule comes in two different forms; the first is imperium in imperio, which gives local government authority over local affairs. The second form is the legislative Home rule, which provides all powers of self-governance. The sovereignty of counties is often enacted through state constitutions and knows two limitations, namely that the exercise of power must solely address local concerns and that counties must not conflict with state legislation. The fact that counties only have those powers that have been delegated to them by states is known as Dillon's Rule. Through this rule states can place any restriction and limitation on their municipalities.65 The authority of rights and to exercise those rights are granted through a charter by the state. The county can also adopt or amend charters themselves, which is an efficient tool for shaping local governance over time. Both Home rule and Dillon's Rule are crucial concepts to understand local legislation and policy-making concerning incarceration. Most states do not provide Home rule or Dillon's Rule, whether or not these rules are included is defined through the state's constitution.
Constitutions are the cornerstone of the law, as they ensure the rights of individuals, describe the separation and distribution of power of the state and local government, establish the state and city civil service system, and describe the manner of revising the law. In general, the county commissions hold the executive power over the constitutions, develop policies, and supervise all elected county officers and employees to ensure compliance with general county administrative ordinances, rules, and policies. However, the county officers often remain mostly independent of the governing authority. Because states and counties differ tremendously, we must first turn to the politics and legislation of the states of Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Utah.
§2.2 Oklahoma and Love County Legislation and Politics
The Republican Party in general, holds all the state’s federal representation and statewide offices in Oklahoma. The state is bicameral and consists of the House of Representatives with 101 members, 73 Republicans, and 28 Democrats. The State Senate has 48 members, 39 Republicans, eight Democrats, and one vacant. Both the lower and upper
64 Sandra Stevenson. (2009). Understanding Local Government. LexisNexis Kindle edition, citation is from
Chapter 2: Local Authority.
65 Judge John Forrest Dillon established the legal doctrine in 1872 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hunter v. Pittsburgh, 207 U.S. 161 (1907). Available at:
house are chosen through district elections. The two U.S. Senators from Oklahoma are Jim Inhofe and James Lankford, both Republicans who have been serving since 1995. The Oklahoma Constitution dates back to 1907, and is extremely detailed.66 The state does not provide Home rule, however Oklahoma does have Dillon's Rule within the constitution. Since this year, Oklahoma has the highest incarceration rate in the United States, unseating Louisiana from its long-held position as "the world’s prison capital."67
The power of a county is relatively limited in Oklahoma, because counties officially can only raise taxes, give fines, incarcerate people, and hold elections on local matters. Counties are organized as political and corporate bodies and have various offices. Among those offices are Judges of County Courts, County Attorney, Clerk of District Court, County Clerk, Sheriff, County Treasurer, and three County Commissioners. The powers of the legislature are limited to those specified in the Oklahoma Constitution. All other powers are reserved to the people, namely initiatives, referendum, and voting. However, incapacitated persons may not register to vote, and convicted felons can only register to vote after they waited for a period equal to the time of the original sentence. The Oklahoma Constitution does not allow the passing of any local or special laws regulating affairs of counties, changing the laws, regulating the practice of evidence in judicial proceedings of courts, sheriffs, commissioners and others, and limiting civil or criminal actions. Even though powers are limited the county officials are thus solely the ones responsible for incarceration.
Love County is a relatively small county, the 60th most populated of Oklahoma State and was created in 1907. The county borders Carter County, Jefferson County, Marshall County in Oklahoma, and Cooke County, Grayson County and Montague County in Texas.68 All but Jefferson County have an incarceration rate that is below the national average of 698 per 100.000.69 Jefferson and Love are not part of the same region or judicial district. Love County is part of the Texoma region that contains eight counties, has a popilayopm of 9,997, and consists of three towns: Marietta (county seat), Leon and Thackerville.70 The majority of the county is white, namely 78.8%. Black, American Indian, and Hispanic people make up
66 The Oklahoma Constitution. (1907). Available at:
https://libraries.ok.gov/wp-content/uploads/oklahoma-constitution.pdf [Accessed 1 June 2018].
67 Peter Wagner and Wendy Sawyer. (2018). "States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2018." The Prison Policy Initiative. Available at: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2018.html [Accessed 11 June 2018]. 68 All county data is found through the Vera Institute of Justice. (2018). "Incarceration Trends: Data Tool."
Available at: http://trends.vera.org/about [Accessed 23 May 2018].
69 Peter Wagner and Wendy Sawyer. (2018).
70 The region Texoma is an area on either side of the border between Oklahoma and Texas, along the Red River
the rest of the population, of which the city of Marietta especially has rich Hispanic heritage.71
The key state government representatives of Love County and the ballot measures show a Republican and conservative county. During the presidential elections the substantial majority of its residents voted for Donald Trump, and during the Senate election the same occurred for Republican Lankford.72 In the House Representative election, 69.9% voted for Cole, a Republican as well. Fellow Republican Frank Simpson represents Senate District 14, where Love County is incorporated in, as he succeeded a Democrat in 2010. For the House District the county elected Republican Tommy Hardin in 2010, to replace a Democrat as representative of Love. The county's residents have also voted in favor of a ballot measure that allows the Oklahoma Constitution to grant the state power to impose capital punishment and set methods of execution, such as the death penalty. Republicans have thus replaced Democrats during the last state elections. However, as of 15 January 2018, there are more residents registered as Democrats than as Republicans in Love County, namely 54.4%.73
The primary governing agency of Love County is the Board of County
Commissioners. The board manages policy, infrastructure, maintenance, county budget, and other regulations. The board consists of three commissioners who are all (white) Democrats: Jerry McGill, Linda Hyman, and Herchel Peery. The county -unlike Concordia Parish and Daggett County- does not have its own Code of Ordinances, thus there exists no local legislation whatsoever. The city Marietta, which describes itself as a friendly and progressive city on the city website, has a mayor and eight council members. The towns within Love County also have a separate governing council and actors such as a clerk and treasurer, and a Code of Ordinances that specifies the fines for offenses.74 There are thus several, overlapping
71 United States Census Bureau. (2010). "Profile of General Population and Housing Characteristics: 2010."
Available at:
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/lovecountyoklahoma,daggettcountyutah,concordiaparishlouisiana/ PST045216 [Accessed 6 June 2018].
72 Politico. (2016). "Election results 2016: Love County." Available at
https://www.politico.com/mapdata-2016/2016-election/results/map/president/ [Accessed 4 June 2018]. All the subsequent references about election results of the counties come from the same source unless otherwise stated.
73 MESA. (2018). "Current Registration Statistics by County." Available at:
https://www.ok.gov/elections/documents/20180115%20-%20Registration%20By%20County%20%28vr2420%29.pdf [Accessed 3 June 2018].
74 Section 1.16 of Thackerville Code defines that, "any provision of this Code or of any ordinance, upon
conviction, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding $500.00." Thackerville Code of Ordinances. (2000). Available at:
https://library.municode.com/ok/thackerville/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=CD_ORD_TOWN_THACKE RVILLE_OKLAHOMA [Accessed 8 June 2018].
government levels within the county itself, and the local government officials are mostly Democrat.
Love County has several individual actors that are responsible for policy and
legislation, of which most are female Democrats, but the most vital actors (the judge and the sheriff) are Republican and male. The county has one courthouse with elected District Court judge Todd Hicks and a Court Clerk Kim Jackson. Love also has a County Assessor, who appraises and assesses the property for ad valorem taxation and works with the County Treasurer, who serves as the financial officer and collects and apportions all ad valorem taxes for the county and its subdivisions. Love County has a County Clerk that serves as a secretary to various boards, and registries deeds, records, warrants, and fees. Love is part of judicial district 20 that also contains Carter, Johnston, Marshall, and Murray counties. There is one head district attorney, Craig Ladd, who switched parties last year and became a Republican. The clerks, treasurer, and assessor are all female, and their deputies are female as well. Love County has a sheriff William Grisham, three local police departments and one jail, and the county is building a new one. State and local law officials were all in favor of the new jail and residents of the county also overwhelmingly voted yes to the construction.
One cannot draw a conclusion on the growth of incarceration numbers based on the politics and legislators of Love County alone. Love County is a complicated county, with various paradoxes concerning elections, legislation, and government officers. The county has mostly voted for Republicans during state and federal elections, but more than half of the county's residents are registered as Democrats. Many of the local legislators are female and Democrats, and although mainly white, some have different ethnic backgrounds. However, the most vital actors are white Republicans, namely the judge, prosecutor, and sheriff. Most essential here is that the county is not responsible for the legislation concerning incarceration, because local and special laws are not allowed within the Oklahoma Constitution. The citizens of Love County do, however, vote for every local change, policy, legislator, and politician. Therefore, local citizens do have a significant impact on policy in the county and also in the state, as elected officials want to please their voters and citizens are responsible for the persons in charge of incarceration. The building of a new jail also indicates that incarceration reform is not on the radar.
§ 2.3 Louisiana and Concordia Parish Legislation and Politics
politics shifted and the state turned Republican red ever since. Louisiana has had the highest incarceration rate in the world for decades, however since this year Oklahoma dethrones the state. Louisiana still has the second highest incarceration rate, with an average of 1052 incarcerated per 100.000.75 The state's legislature has a bicameral body, consisting of the House of Representatives with 105 members, 60 Republicans, 41 Democrats, and three Independents. The other part of the legislative body is the Senate that has 39 senators, of which 25 are Republican, and 14 are Democrat. The state's U.S. Senators are Republicans John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy, serving since 2017 and 2015. During the last presidential election Trump won with 58.1%.76
The Constitution of Louisiana provides a high amount of sovereignty to the parishes and local governments.77 Home rule is embedded in the constitution, but for checks and balances Louisiana’s Constitution also provides Dillon’s Rule. However, the latter only applies to charter municipalities established before 1974. The Louisiana Constitution consists of many articles of which article VI defines the composition of parishes and municipalities, plus Home rule and its limitations. Parishes in Louisiana are primarily sovereign political and legislative bodies of local government, but the constitution does not allow for any passing of local or special laws.
Parishes differ significantly from one another, because they are responsible for their own legislature, make regulations for their government, levy taxes to defray the expenses of their respective parishes, appoint all officers necessary for parish regulations, and many more proceedings. Parishes can have various forms of government, whereby each division has different sub-types and rules for petition, establishment, and governance.78 The statutes of Louisiana establish the right and the process for all parishes and municipalities to request and adopt a Home rule Charter. The parishes can also hold elections, initiatives, and referendums on any subject. However, the right to vote will be suspended once people are incarcerated for a felony, during parole, and during probation. There are currently 70.000 residents on
75 Peter Wagner and Wendy Sawyer. (2018).
76 Politico. (2016). Elections results 2016: Louisiana and Concordia Parish. Available at
https://www.politico.com/mapdata-2016/2016-election/results/map/president/ [Accessed 4 June 2018]. All the subsequent references about election results of the counties come from the same source unless otherwise stated.
77 The Louisiana Constitution. (1974). Available at:
http://senate.legis.state.la.us/documents/constitution/constitution.pdf [Accessed 5 June 2018].
