Wisconsin Prisoners, c. 1960
As part of my ongoing research into the origins of mass incarceration, I’ve been spending some quality time recently with a voluminous, fifty-year-old government report by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Characteristics of State Prisoners, 1960. This was a once-a-decade production by the BOP in those days, and it contains a wealth of information.
I find it fascinating to have this window into 1960, for at that time — unbeknownst to the report’s authors, of course — everything in American criminal justice was just about to change forever. In fact, crime was already on the rise in the Northeast United States, foreshadowing a nationwide swell of violence that would continue to gather force until well into the 1970′s. Even today, we have yet to return to the historically low levels of criminal violence of the mid-twentieth century. And then, on the heels of the crime wave, came the great imprisonment boom — a period of unprecedented growth in American incarceration that began in about 1975 and continued uninterrupted for more than three decades.
Yes, it is easy to imagine 1960 as a more innocent time!
Using the state breakdowns from the 1960 report, I’ve drawn some comparisons between the Wisconsin of then and now: