How did you decide on state failures of violence and incarceration as the topic of your dissertation?
Jones: As an undergrad, I did research into the policy of prison cohabitation for incarcerated people and their children. This policy was seen as a progressive move at the time, but my job as an undergrad was to talk to people who had experienced that policy in action. What I heard time and time again in testimonials was folks saying how horrific the policy was in practice. It was primarily because of how prisons in Argentina are funded. Argentina’s economy has been so volatile over the past 30 years or so that publicly funded prisons are ill-equipped to facilitate this kind of cohabitation. There are some interesting studies that have come out showing the terrible long-term developmental effects for cohabitating children in the prisons.
As an undergrad, I wasn’t sure how this could fit into a broader research agenda. But as a graduate student, I started thinking about the connection between the failed aspirations of governments trying to enact progressive social policy and the structural limitations resulting from economic volatility. It was a long road through various subfields of American politics and comparative politics, but I eventually landed on this question for my dissertation: Why do we see so many inefficient or suboptimal outcomes in the legal system of the United States? Despite our high levels of incarceration, there is a very high level of civilian violence relative to other places. I’m trying to understand how we reached this paradoxical state of high incarceration and high violence in the U.S.
What conclusions have you drawn from your research?
Jones: Much of the work in political science that speaks to the carceral state has focused on the role of explicit racial politics or the interaction with electoral politics in a two-party system. There are accounts that focus on the interaction with broader dynamics and conversations about race in the national dialogue, and how they lead to the insistence of a tough-on-crime policy that ultimately results in this high-level effect. I think there’s a lot of truth to those accounts. But what I wanted to do was think about American institutional distinctiveness — specifically, our practice of fiscal federalism coupled with strong policy decentralization.
America sits at this unique intersection of fiscal decentralization with political policy decentralization, where local governments experience an extreme form — at least compared to other sort of federalist countries — of place-based distribution. This means that local governments in the United States are effectively presiding over many core state-building functions, including public safety. Looking at this political policy decentralization reveals the core weaknesses of the U.S. government: to effectively monopolize violence.
My dissertation also speaks to the perverse policy incentives that result from this failure. For example, why does incarceration become the default policy response? How might they be the result of financial precarity in local governments, which limits the ability to allocate resources to public safety?
How do you think about the field of political economy? What contributions can it make to our understanding of contemporary politics? How has it shaped your work?
Jones: I was very influenced by Paul Pierson’s thinking about how markets and governments interact to shape dynamics in a market system. More specific to my project, I think about how the interaction of political and economic institutions shapes dynamics around local public services, especially public safety.
For me, political economy has provided the tools for thinking in a more mechanistic way about the dynamics or the incentive structures of governments and the policies that they pursue. For example, in the United States, the largest plurality of incarcerated folks are incarcerated in state prisons. States, largely, just pay for that incarceration. So even though local governments preside over nearly every decision that leads to incarceration — policing, court systems, district attorneys, etc. — for the most part, local governments don’t have to internalize the cost of the choice to incarcerate. That dynamic may offer insight into why we get this intensity of incarceration in the United States.
Starting with the general intuition that local governments are facing economic constraints and that they have a financial incentive to offload the financial burden of violence and incarceration to states, and then being able to describe the mechanism at work has been so helpful for thinking about paths to reform. This kind of political economic thinking really opened up my eyes.
What persuaded you to join the Designated Emphasis in Political Economy? How has the program contributed to your work?
Jones: It must have been an email from Steve Vogel that got me interested in joining. I was already leaning into the American political economy space that Paul and others have been facilitating, so it felt like a natural expansion.
One year, I was part of a group led by Martha Wilfahrt that assembled like-minded folks who wanted to do rigorous, empirical research that could have tangible implications on social welfare programs. I found that group incredibly helpful. It was so nice to be in a space with people with a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and my work really benefited.
Another important influence was Neil Fligstein, who I got to know not only through his DE workshops, but in his course on economy and society. His feedback was super helpful in the sort of early stages of a draft chapter for my dissertation, which I actually wrote for his class. His insights on the intersection economics and sociology class helped me think about state capacity, which ended up playing an important role in my dissertation.
How have research grants from BESI contributed to your scholarship?
Jones: I received a grant from BESI in 2025 for my work on the local politics of incarceration. I wanted to explain local variation in rates of incarceration and better understand the American prison boom at the macro-unit. I ended up examining local penal policy choices across over 3,000 jurisdictions from 1986 to 2016, which helped me understand the role of elite electoral competition, crime rates, local economic constraints, as well as demographic and ideological changes amongst constituents in shaping local sentencing practices. The grant from BESI allowed me to access that data, which was effectively paywalled.
One of the things that’s really cool about folks in the political economy space is that they’re thinking about geographic variation as a driver of patterns of political participation. The data sources that we have now are super granular and allow for hyper-localized measures of spatial variation. But I couldn’t really perform my analysis without getting access to this data. So, I’m grateful for that critical funding.
