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28 J. Contemp. Crim. Just. 4 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/jccj28 and id is 1 raw text is: Article journal of Contemporary Criminal justice 28(1) 4-6 Editors' Introduction: I2 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: http:\\www. Imagining a Different sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1043986211432191 Future http://ccj.sagepub.com *SAGE Francis T. Cullen', Cheryl Lero jonson2, and Mary K. Stohr3 Beginning in the early 1970s, the United States embarked on what Todd Clear poi- gnantly labeled a penal harm movement. The linchpin of this campaign was the idea that locking up more offenders for more time would not only give suffering victims the justice they were seeking but also enhance public safety. As is well known, the size of state prison populations multiplied more than sevenfold from just less than 200,000 to more than 1.5 million. When all types of confinement were combined (e.g., federal and juvenile facilities), the inmate count came to surpass 2.4 million-meaning that about 1 in 100 adults in American was behind bars on any given day. We, this volume's editors, have spent much of our lives (if not our entire life as is the case for Cheryl Jonson) in a context in which getting tough on crime was virtually hegemonic. To be sure, cracks in the penal harm movement existed-for example, calls for rehabilitating offenders were not extinguished fully-but policy makers on both sides of the political spectrum spouted law and order rhetoric and, in the words of Jonathan Simon, governed through crime. Little concern seemed to exist that inmate populations rose intractably, that institutions became horribly crowded, that many facilities descended into violent warehouses, that the shameful concentration of minori- ties in custody evoked little national guilt, and that vast sums of the public treasury were gobbled up by a seemingly insatiable correctional system. For us-and most readers, we suspect-there seemed to be no escape from this dismal future. Suddenly, however, things changed. In the past year or two, a broad policy consen- sus has been reached that penal harm and mass incarceration have outlived their use- fulness. A complete history of this transformation remains to be written, but we can 'School of Criminal justice, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA 2Department of Political Science and Criminal justice, Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, KY, USA 3Department of Criminology and Criminal justice, Missouri State University, Springfield, MO, USA Corresponding Author: Francis T. Cullen, School of Criminal justice, PO Box 210389, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0389, USA Email: cullenft@ucmail.uc.edu

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