Thesis Thoughts

I still have a couple of hours of editing and pagination to finish, but my thesis is essentially done.

I came back to Ithaca on the Wednesday of Spring Break, drove directly to Mann Library, and stayed there until it closed that evening. This first day of my thesis home stretch set the tone for what the last few weeks have been like. I've been ID'd more often at Uris Library (they check after 2am) than at bars in Collegetown. I averaged around 8-10 hours at the library every day. I started to scare myself when I would hear the bell to signal that parts of Uris were closing and realize that I hadn't moved from my chair between 8:30pm and 1:30am. My thesis ballooned from 45 pages as of April 1 to 131 pages as of tonight. You can do the math to figure out how many pages I averaged per day.

Of course, I brought a lot of this upon myself. Knowing that I would be a part-time student this semester, I left all of the heavy lifting until after Winter Break. A longer-than-expected stay in Florida stymied some of my plans for making progress in January, and then I didn't exactly hit the ground running this semester. Between traveling to hockey games, taking care of things for TFA and the fraternity, and spending a lot of time being a second-semester senior (read: going to bars), I didn't leave much room for thesis work. I took my time compiling data and figuring out exactly what I was going to write. It wasn't until late March when I realized that I needed to get my ass moving, and that began my period of library shut-in.

That said, writing a thesis has been an incredibly rewarding experience. For the first time in my academic career, I believe that I am a legitimate expert in an area. I had the very cool experience of working closely with faculty members on an academic project. I took workshops to learn to use Stata, taught myself ArcGIS, and wrote the longest paper I'll probably ever produce. (My AP Government final paper was 67 pages; my friend Liz wrote 90-some pages. Coincidentally, we both wrote Honors Government theses at Cornell this year.)

I missed some of the camaraderie of partying and relaxing with senior friends these last few weeks, but with every hour I spent in the library, I grew closer to the other Gov thesis survivors. Maybe I missed out on some memories, but I created something tangible of which I believe I can be proud.

Oh, and if you're interested in these types of things, I've pasted a summary of my findings below.

If you've drifted away from this blog over the last couple of weeks of inactivity, come back. I'll be posting every day for the next few weeks, at least.

My thesis makes five significant contributions to the existing scholarship on the growth of incarceration in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s. First, it disproves the idea of partisan convergence after the 1988 election on a common set of tough-on-crime ideas; in fact, a Republican governor effect emerges in the 1990s. Second, my results indicate that a more liberal and Democratic citizenry is correlated to higher rates of spending on corrections; this is surprising, since conservatives and Republicans have acquired a reputation for being willing to increase spending to maintain a large prison population. Third, my thesis counters the claim that the political exceptionalism of the Southern states is to blame for the national corrections boom; removing the Southern states from the picture has only a negligible effect on regression models. Fourth, I show that the scale of incarceration increases by a smaller amount after a close gubernatorial election; I hypothesize that these governors lack a mandate to push for significant changes. Finally, I created unique data sets with information on state spending on corrections which may prove useful to future scholars.

[...]

My hypothesis is this: By the 1980s, a combination of the forces described in Chapter One conspired to turn the national sentiment in favor of a stronger government response to rising crime rates. This sentiment was particularly acute in states with large urban populations, which explains the positive correlation of population density, Democratic vote share, and citizen ideology with changes in corrections outcome metrics. By the 1990s, perhaps due to a leveling off of crime rates, these states had walked back slightly from their anti-crime stances of the previous decade, and this shift explains the changes in direction for these variables. Meanwhile, Republican governors like Tommy Thompson and Kirk Fordice seized upon the Dukakis defeat of 1988 as evidence that their party had the upper hand on fighting crime, and they bolted to the right on this issue during the 1990s. Some Democratic governors, such as Zell Miller, also moved right in an attempt to negate the Republican advantage on crime, but the gap between the two parties widened and gubernatorial partisanship became significantly correlated to corrections outcome metrics.