How rural prison economies impede bipartisan efforts to end mass incarceration

While the US is a currently world leader in incarceration, recent reforms to state and federal sentencing laws provide some hope that this may not always be the case. In new research, Rebecca Thorpe examines one challenge to reducing mass incarceration – the desire of state lawmakers in rural communities to uphold harsh sentencing laws and to block reforms. She argues that these 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.