Charles Houston Decker

Decker researches mass incarceration and criminal justice supervision as a public policy problem. The tremendous rise in incarceration, probation and other forms of state supervision of offenders is not simply a product of crime rates or “root causes” of criminality. He examines the paths chosen by policymakers that led to our current carceral state. He also studies business power in American politics and seeks to understand the sources and results of employers’ influence in the policy process, and how this influence changes over time. His dissertation will examine this question by tracing the development of Right to Work policy in the United States. Decker is currently Director of the Policy Fellows program at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale.