Michael C Campbell

I earned my Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine in Criminology, Law & Society where I examined why lawmakers in US states chose to expand prisons. My early work focused on Texas and California, two states with different political cultures that ended up taking similar pathways that led to the creation of the nation's largest prison systems. This work highlighted the central role that prosecutors and their associations played in rewriting criminal codes and advocating for prison expansion (Theoretical Criminology, Law and Society Review), and how governors were central players in driving prison expansion (Law & Society Review).

After graduate school I worked at universities in Illinois and Missouri where my research focused on explaining how America's complex federalist structure helped make the focus on prison expansion a national phenomenon. By exploring how state and national political and legal institutions interacted over time, this work illuminated how states were innovators in creating punitive policies that the federal government then disseminated and incentivized nationwide, helping create what many now call "mass incarceration." My co-authors and I published a series of articles that identified the key mechanisms contributing to mass incarceration's rise (American Journal of Sociology), tested the relative importance of factors like crime, partisan power, and race (Criminology), identified the nuanced ways that demographic changes across regions was related to prison expansion (Punishment & Society), and explained links between state funding mechanisms and incarceration levels (Journal of Quantitative Criminology),

My research then shifted focus to examining reforms that gained momentum in the 21st century and led to the first declines in state incarceration rates in three decades. With funding support from the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and Koch Foundation, my collaborator (Heather Schoenfeld) and I have published articles showing how state legislators gradually changed how they talked and thought about penal reform (Punishment & Society), and how correctional administrators worked with lawmakers to reform policies that provided states with more flexibility in responding to prison overcrowding and rising correctional costs (Punishment & Society). From 2025-6 I was a residential fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City where I continued work examining why some states were able to reduce their prison populations (and reduce crime) while others did not.