American criminal punishment policies are often cited as some of the harshest in the world. This is true when incarceration rates per capita are compared among different nations, but America’s punitiveness may not be as uniformly harsh as this rough comparison suggests.

Besiki Kutateladze, an associate research director of Vera’s Prosecution and Racial Justice Program, recently published his first book, Is America Really So Punitive? Exploring a Continuum of U.S. State Criminal Justice Policies, in which he developed and tested a multidimensional measurement of state punitiveness to explore how harsh some state penal policies are compared to others. Punitiveness was measured with 44 variables, including average prison sentences, life imprisonment, whether a state used the death penalty, prison conditions, juvenile justice policies, etc. Measuring punitiveness with this scale, rather than simply looking at imprisonment rates or numbers of executions, produces a much deeper understanding of punishment policies. Data were compiled from publicly available datasets on criminal justice operations. Kutateladze’s examination of these variables revealed that Florida was the most punitive, and Maine was the least punitive. The data also suggest that the American South is highly punitive, the West and the Midwest moderately punitive, and the Northeast the least punitive of all the regions.

For more information, contact Besiki Kutateladze.

Length: 9:17 minutes

Besiki Kutateladze, Is America Really so Punitive? Exploring a Continuum of the U.S. Criminal Justice Policies. (El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2009).