Amount Awarded: $25,000
This project seeks to compare and contrast the carceral systems (jails, prisons and detention centers for juveniles and irregular migrants, as well as probation, parole, and community supervision) of the United States (and inside the US, California) and Norway over the past half-century. While both societies are wealthy and postindustrial, Norway and the US are worlds apart in terms of the scale and scope of punishment in each country and their respective tendency to use custodial sanctions. The US is the world's leading incarcerator: it locks up some 2.3 million for a confinement rate exceeding 720 inmates per 100,000 persons, with California alone confining nearly 200,000 persons in 2008. This project adopts a broad historical view by producing trend data on punishment from 1960-2010, interrogating the trajectories of change and continuity in the two penal regimes. It will spotlight the changing mix of custodial and noncustodial sentences over one-half century in the two societies as well as track the social, political and cultural factors that foster penal restraint or punitiveness in each; identify how and why the comparatively moderate and humane Nordic regime of confinement has become subtly more punitive in recent years and whether, conversely, the US could plausibly adapt aspects of the Nordic model of punishment as it considers rolling back incarceration.