Coffee and registration

9:15 a.m.

Opening Remarks

9:30 a.m.

The Numbers: Their Causes and Meanings

The numbers are now starkly and frighteningly clear. The prison/jail population of the US now approaches two million, with the rate of increase itself dramatically increasing in recent years. African-Americans, representing about 13 percent of the American population, make up about 44 percent of the incarcerated population. These devastating numbers obviously call on us to consider the most foundational questions about American society.  But to reframe the issues a bit more concretely, what are the specific institutional inputs or most immediate social inputs into these numbers? And what metrics do the social sciences—and the humanities—offer us to grasp the significance of these numbers in American history and in comparison to the other nations?

Panelists:
Marc Mauer, Executive Director of The Sentencing Project
Steven Raphael, Professor of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley
Geoff Ward, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University

11:00 a.m.

Break

11:15 a.m.

Prisoner Status and Racial Stereotypes: Political and Cultural Causes and Cures

Major research has improved our understanding of the nature, degree of entrenchment, and political salience of attitudes on crime and race.  Although this field of inquiry illuminates the effect of race on the entire criminal justice system, it has special relevance to the phenomenon of mass incarceration, because disproportionate incarceration is both the effect of and reinforcing cause of stereotyping.  Within this context, the panel will consider the following questions: How much do attitudes toward crime as a threat and toward the fairness of the criminal justice system depend on racial identity and to attitudes toward racial issues?  How malleable are these attitudes?  How sensitive are any of these phenomena to changes in crime rates?  How does purported fear of crime influence voting behavior?

Panelists:
Lawrence Bobo, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University
Jonathan Hurwitz, Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh
Mark Peffley, Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky

12:45 p.m.

Lunch and Keynote Address:

Theodore M. Shaw
Director-Counsel and President,
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

2:00 p.m.

The Social Sciences Meet Legal Institutions

The criminal justice system is a set of very different but complexly overlapping institutions.  In addressing mass disproportionate incarceration, social science often urges changes in the practices of such institutions as prosecutor’s offices, police departments, juries, or parole boards, But at the same time, social science must attend to the “specific gravity” of these institutions.  That is, each of these institutions evinces distinct powers and constraints inherent in its placement within our constitutional system.  How can social science help us to work within these constraints, or to imagine new ways to alter these constraints?

Panelists:
Katherine Beckett, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington
Jennifer Eberhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University
Tracey Meares, Professor of Law at Yale Law School
Robert Weisberg, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School

3:30 p.m.

Break

3:45 p.m.

The Ecology Of Incarceration

Criminologists and other social scientists obviously devote much of their efforts to the social and economic determinants of crime.  In addition to traditional econometric studies of such factors as employment and drug abuse, modern social science has achieved a more anthropologically rich account of criminogenesis through the study, for example, of the efficacy of social structures within neighborhoods.  To a lesser extent, they consider the social and economic costs of crime.  But what is the current state of our scholarship in establishing metrics to study the costs of incarceration?  What is the state of the art in terms of economic projections related to employment opportunities? Less quantifiable measures in terms of loss of parenting? Civic rights in terms of disenfranchisement?  What are the virtues of blending with social science more humanities-rooted approaches to dealing with the creation or alterations of self and identity in prison? Has the universe of American foundations that concentrate on welfare and family and health issues failed to appreciate the need to come at these concerns through reconsideration of criminal justice policy?

Panelists:
Becky Pettit, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington
Chris Uggen, Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota
Bruce Western, Professor of Sociology at Princeton University

5:15 p.m.

Closing remarks and close of conference