A Threatening Tone: Homicide, Racial Threat Narratives, and the Historical Growth of Incarceration in the United States, 1926–2016.

This study examines how homicide rates, racial threat narratives in media discourse, and incarceration rates in the United States interacted from 1926 to 2016. Using supervised machine learning to analyze over one million news articles, the research identifies that criminal threat narratives—media portrayals framing racial minorities as criminal threats—increased alongside rising homicide rates and significantly contributed to the long-term growth of incarceration, while economic and political threat narratives showed little effect. The homicide rate influenced incarceration both directly, by increasing long sentences, and indirectly, by amplifying criminal threat narratives that pressured political and criminal justice actors toward punitive policies, particularly affecting Black prison admissions and racial disparities. These findings highlight the temporal dynamics of racial threat perceptions mediated by media discourse and underscore the role of serious offending and media framing in the historical rise of mass incarceration.