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We are grateful for the many helpful comments we received on early drafts of this article from Christopher Achen, Alec Ewald, Christopher Howard, Paul Pierson, Meredith Sadin, John Sides, Christopher Wildeman, members of the University of Virginia Politics Department workshop, and the American Political Science Review anonymous reviewers.
As Americans altered history in 2008 by sending the first black man to the White House, another less celebrated record was charted: 1 in every forty-one adults, including fully 13% of black men, could not cast a vote in his election because they were disenfranchised due to a past criminal record (Sentencing Project 2010 ). Indeed, the scale of citizen contact with the American criminal justice system is now unmatched in modern history. For the first time, one in 100 Americans is incarcerated, topping all other countries in the world (Pew Center on the States 2008). If current trends persist, 11% of American men--and 1 in 3 black men--will at some point in their lives serve time in prison (Bonczar 2003 ).
Over the past half century, the American criminal justice system has undergone tremendous expansion. In 1965, there were 780,000 adults under correctional authority of any type (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice 1967 ); that population steadily expanded to seven million by 2008, whereas the number of living people who have ever been imprisoned grew by 3.8 million between 1974 and 2001 (Bonczar 2003 ). On any given day, about 1 in every 31 adults is currently in custody, on parole, or on probation.
In addition to the runaway expansion of prisoners, citizens have become much more likely to experience other state interventions that are disciplinary in nature. Although systematic national data on police contact are rarer than imprisonment data, several recent studies suggest that involuntary interactions with law enforcement are increasingly commonplace in some communities (Goffman 2009 ; Gelman, Fagan, and Kiss 2007 ). For instance, in Chicago, 20% of all sampled residents and 70% of young black men recalled being stopped in the past year (Skogan 2006 ).
Carceral contact is not randomly distributed, but is both spatially and racially concentrated. On any given day, 11% of black men aged 25 to 29 years...