The books involved are "The Powers That Punish: Prison and Politics in the Era of the 'Big House' 1920-1955," by Charles Bright (1994); "The Rise and Fall of California's Radical Prison Movement," by Eric Cummins (1994); "Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future," by Peter Schrag (1998); and "Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster," by Mike Davis (1998). Recent research that used multiple regression techniques to examine State and prison populations suggests that in otherwise similar States, the views of the governor on prison has a large influence on relative imprisonment rates. Recent research also suggests that the war on drugs and its promises of lengthy prison sentences for thousands of small-time drug criminals was mobilized primarily by politicians who led rather than followed public opinion on this issue. Bright's framework for thinking about State government and penal policy offers a way of seeing the relationship between the two accounts. Bright's analysis suggests that penal narratives are not simply the ideological superstructure of some more basic structure of State government or politics, but rather an important site for the co-production of successful strategies for governing States in the 20th century. Some States have remained remarkably free of massive investment in prison populations, institutions, and cultures. In most States, minority communities, which are typically the hardest hit by the social costs of the "initiative State's" penal strategies, have the capacity to bring concentrated political pressure to bear on government in a way nearly impossible at the level of national politics. The works canvassed here suggest that we also need to conduct careful analysis of individual States, not just for the ideology of their governors but for the organization of political power in the State. 20 notes and 41 references