Early in the book, we say that the most popular explanations offered by the soi-disant progressive left, the right, and even libertarians don't quite work, even though they are partly right. For instance, the Left likes to say the problems are racism and poverty. But racism and poverty have generally been declining, while the criminal justice system has become progressively more punitive and violent. The trendlines go in opposite directions. While racism can explain why blacks are treated worse than whites, it doesn't explain why white Americans are treated so badly compared to whites in other countries. Conservatives say it has to do with the decline of the family leading to increased crime, and that higher-than-normal US criminality explains higher-than-normal harshness. But, again, the trendlines don't match up. Family instability and crime went up, while punitiveness went up much faster, and then instability and crime went down, but then the US system kept getting more punitive, violent, and harsh. Finally, libertarians like to blame the drug war. They're right that the drug war led to certain perversions, such as civil assert forfeiture and the preponderance of SWAT raids. But, as John Pfaff points out, even if all drug and drug-related convictions disappeared, the US would still have an unusually violent and harsh system.
Instead, Surprenant and I argue that the US are a wide range of unusual rules which create bad incentives, including rules about how prosecutors, DAs, and judges are elected, about how prisons and police are funded, about how taxes are shared, about police unions, and so on, which explain why the US is an outlier. Yes, external shocks such as the war on drugs and rising crime pushed these along (for instance, by inducing misinformed voters to always vote for whoever is toughest on crime), but it's these unique features that best explain what's wrong with the US system.
Here's an excerpt:
There are other perverse incentives. Prisons are usually located in rural towns, where they serve as a source of employment for blighted white communities. These towns and their voters lobby states to build more prisons. The prison system is a workfare program employing poor, unskilled white people to guard poor black people.
The U.S. Census counts incarcerated persons as residents of town where they are imprisoned, not the town they lived in before incarceration. In Connecticut, this is responsible for creating nine (majority white) state representative districts that would not meet minimum population requirements but for their prison populations.
As an aside, you'd think that the progressive left would be more congenial to public choice theory. After all, all public choice--despite dishonest nonsense to the contrary from Nancy MacLean or incompetent nonsense from Henry Farrell--is simply the application of economic tools to collective/group action, including in political and non-profit domains. One of its big insights is that when we create structures of power or organizations charged with the goal of promoting some noble good, we often create perverse or bad incentives which induce normal people to act badly and undermine that good. You would think, given the progressive left's professed values (such as equality), that they would be in love with public choice approaches. After all, it's horrifying if, say, the public school system which is supposed to help promote equal opportunity instead gets hijacked by special interests groups and then perpetuates and enhances inequality. As a progressive, you'd want to carefully measure and eliminate any possible sources of corruption, and you'd want to guard against your threats to your treasured goals. But, no, in general, progressives simply yawn and dismiss the ample empirical evidence that their favored structures aren't working. If I had to speculate, it may be because progressivism is in practice fundamentally an ideology of power--an ideology whose purpose is to justify a technocratic elite reigning over others--and public choice theory speaks truth to power. For instance, as we've seen in Minneapolis and other blue cities and states, the police are largely a client class of Democratic Party, which has enabled and supported their horrible behavior for decades.