The ‘Great Decarceration’: Historical Trends and Future Possibilities

Abstract

During the 19th Century, hundreds of thousands of people were caught up in what Foucault famously referred to as the ‘great confinement’, or ‘great incarceration’, spanning reformatories, prisons, asylums, and more. Levels of institutional incarceration increased dramatically across many parts of Europe and the wider world through the expansion of provision for those defined as socially marginal, deviant, or destitute. While this trend has been the focus of many historical studies, much less attention has been paid to the dynamics of ‘the great decarceration’ that followed for much of the early‐ to mid‐20th Century. This article opens with an overview of these early decarceration trends in the English adult and youth justice systems and suggests why these came to an end from the 1940s onwards. It then explores parallels with marked decarceration trends today, notably in youth justice, and suggests how these might be expedited, extended, and protected.

Digital Crime Histories and Developing a Public Pedagogy of Criminal Justice

“…Coupled with the white Western bias in the digitisation of records, this has the potential to distort views of the structural barriers that individuals, especially minorities, today face in their encounters with the criminal justice system (Roscoe 2022). This is particularly concerning for the UK, which has Western Europe's highest rates of imprisonment, where Black and minority ethnic prisoners make up 23 per cent of prisoners compared to 16 per cent of the general population (Rees 2019, quoted in Cox and Godfrey 2020;Yasin and Sturge 2020). Further, in Australia, Indigenous people are currently 11.3 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-Indigenous people, with a far smaller drop witnessed in Indigenous prisoner numbers than other groups during the fall in incarceration rates as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2021).…”

Youth carceral deinstitutionalisation and transinstitutionalisation in Ontario: Recent developments and questions

“…Decarceration literature speaks to the efforts of countries across the globe to decrease youth imprisonment rates (e.g., Ulybina (2022) on eastern Europe), attention to diverting youth to community alternatives (Hawks et al, 2022), and awareness that decarceration has occurred unevenly across countries and groups within countries (Goldson et al (2021) on Australia, England and Wales). Over the last 50 years, starting with American and British scholars such as Scull (1977), Matthews (1987), Cohen (1979Cohen ( , 1985 and Hudson (1987), academic work has taken an interest in decarceration and possible adverse impacts (Cox & Godfrey, 2020). Such attention persists amid mass incarceration and the Covid-19 pandemic (Gordon, Klose & Storrod, 2021;Martin, 2016).…”

“…A second key theme is international literature which speaks to the legacies of youth legislative reform. This includes the decarceration of status offences (e.g., truancy) in American states (Bronstein, 2022), changes in the minimum and maximum ages of youth offenders and overall shifts in penological philosophy (Cox & Godfrey, 2020). The literature speaks to specific reforms, and includes Canadian literature evaluating the outcomes, benefits and challenges of the YCJA.…”

“…Since the early 2000s rates of youth decarceration have accelerated globally (Cox & Godfrey, 2020). This trend has been most recently evidenced in legislative and institutional transformations in Ontario, Canada.…”

A Quasi-Experimental Study on the Effects of Community versus Custodial Sanctions in Youth Justice

“…Since the 1970s, most western youth justice systems have increasingly applied punishment alternatives to imprisonment (Cox & Godfrey, 2020; Winterdyk, 2015). Youth court statistics from the United States (U.S.) and Canada indicate that in 2018, approximately 72% (Hockenberry & Puzzanchera, 2020) and 88% (Statistics Canada, 2020) of youth offenders received an alternative sanction that did not involve custody.…”