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Two different explanations have been proposed for the oscillatory behavior of imprisonment rates in several western capitalist nations. One of these is based on the Durkheimian model of a collective conscience that responds homeostatically to deviance; the other sees prison populations as changing in response to unemployment. These explanations are tested with data on crime and imprisonment in twentieth-century Poland. Neither explanation is confirmed. The correct explanation appears to lie instead in the political realm.
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David F. Greenberg (1980) studied this question.
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