Are All Politics Local? A Case Study of Local Conditions in a Period of “Law and Order” Politics

• Author: Michael C. Campbell
• Published date: 01 March 2016
• Date: 01 March 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0002716215602702
• Subject Matter: I. Origins of the Crisis

602702ANN
The Annals of the American AcademyAre all Politics Local?
research-article2015
This article explores how voters in Contra Costa
County, California, came to support aggressive criminal
justice policies that helped to drive prison growth. As
this case study shows, the antitax movement’s successes
in the latter 1970s had important implications for local
and state politics and government that ultimately
shaped support for the law and order movement.
Institutional structures, especially the state’s easily
accessible proposition process and the considerable
Are All Politics political power of homeowners, facilitated the antitax
movement’s successes. This reflected and reinforced
Local? A Case deep tensions between state and local government and
created new problems and dilemmas for state and local
lawmakers. Politically, the antitax movement’s suc-
Study of Local cesses helped to mobilize a powerful constituency of
affluent property owners receptive to tough anticrime
Conditions in a measures and provided a blueprint for the law and
order movement’s political success. While state and
local lawmakers struggled to manage new challenges,
Period of “Law increasingly active and well-organized law and order
campaigns thrived in state and local environments.
and Order” Keywords: punishment; incarceration; corrections;
Politics
prisons; sociology of punishment; crime
and politics; federalism; California
In 2011, one of the most conservative
Supreme Courts in American history handed
down a rather sweeping and surprising deci-
By
sion, Brown v. Plata (2011), ruling that the
MIChAeL C. CAMPbeLL
conditions of confinement in California’s pris-
ons violated eighth Amendment protections
against cruel and unusual punishment. The
Court ordered California to reduce prison
overcrowding to 137.5 percent of capacity, and
state lawmakers responded by passing Assembly
bill 109 (or, Public Safety Realignment), which
Michael C. Campbell is an assistant professor in the
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the
University of Missouri-St. Louis. His research uses his-
torical methods to examine how politics and institutions
shape legal change. His work has been published in the
American Journal of Sociology, Law and Society Review,
and Criminology.
Correspondence: campbellmi@umsl.edu
DOI: 10.1177/0002716215602702
ANNALS, AAPSS, 664, March 2016 43

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The ANNALS OF The AMeRICAN ACADeMY
shifts part of the burden for managing certain inmates from state to local govern-
ment. The Plata ruling and subsequent Realignment legislation mark a major
shift in the decades-long growth in the state’s prison population and signifies one
of the most serious attempts to address the state’s dysfunctional correctional sys-
tem. These developments reflect broader changes in the political winds that
seem to suggest a rethinking of the nation’s decades-long increases in imprison-
ment.
A number of studies have traced the macro-level changes in Americans’ sup-
port for aggressive and punitive criminal justice policies and have pointed to the
rise of violent crime in the latter twentieth century, ongoing racial tensions, fear
mongering and partisan politics, and interest group activism (Alexander 2010;
beckett 1997; Garland 2001; Gottschalk 2006; Simon 2007). Taken together,
these forces helped to create an electorate that embraced policies resulting in
significant prison expansion and ultimately mass incarceration. More recently,
scholars have argued that to explain how these changes came about it is necessary
to look at the politics of crime at the state level during the 1970s and 1980s when
crime became a central political issue in state politics (barker 2009; Campbell
and Schoenfeld 2013; Lynch 2009). This period was critical, it is argued, because
it captures a political backlash after a decade of progressive reforms and civil
unrest linked to the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and progressive
reforms (Weaver 2007). Crime and criminal justice policy, these accounts sug-
gest, were central factors in a broader conservative backlash that helped to
restructure the American political landscape.
To explore the proposition that “all politics is local,” this article follows political
events in Contra Costa County, California, across two key electoral cycles—1978
and 1982—when the county’s and the state’s voting trends shifted behind increas-
ingly radical law and order candidates and propositions. Across many measures,
Contra Costa was a rather average suburban county with many towns that were
bedroom communities of San Francisco and Oakland. Like most of California, its
economy expanded, and its population grew rapidly and became less white. Its
crime rates were relatively low compared to other similar California counties, and
its voting patterns were historically moderate. Nonetheless, in the space of a
decade, the political winds of Contra Costa, as measured by newspaper coverage
and voting patterns, evolved into an electorate that was “tough on crime,” includ-
ing support for candidates and propositions that drastically ramped up California’s
war on crime. Through a close reading of changes in the political winds of this
one “average” California county, this article sheds important light on how politics
in the Golden State created California’s correctional Frankenstein.
This article argues that to understand the speed and magnitude of the law and
order movement’s success we must understand how it was shaped by the circuitry
that connects local and state governing and political institutions. Specifically,
local governing institutions, including Contra Costa County and its many city
councils, suddenly faced a profound realignment in their relationship with state
government in the wake of California’s Proposition 13, a statewide proposition
that drastically reduced local government’s ability to raise revenue. While on its
surface Proposition 13 might not seem especially relevant to understanding

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ARe ALL POLITICS LOCAL?
45
California’s punitive turn, its passage and implications restructured the governing
realities and political playing field in ways that benefited law and order advocates.
both the political activism that produced it, and its broader consequences for
political and governing institutions, helped tilt Contra Costa County toward sup-
port for increasingly radical positions on criminal justice policy.
To situate Contra Costa County’s swing from middle of the road to conserva-
tive and its attendant impact on criminal justice policy, this article is divided into
three sections. The first part explains why our efforts to understand penal change
must do more to explain local political and institutional processes and the ways
they interact with state government and politics. The second part presents the
steps taken to collect and analyze the data that describe Contra Costa County’s
political landscape during the 1970s and 1980s. The third part reports the unfold-
ing of Contra Costa County’s evolution from a fairly middle of the road electorate
and local political landscape to one that firmly supported tough-on-crime policies
during the critical period when California’s prison boom began. The conclusion
considers how the findings relate to current explanations of penal change and
explores how the findings might inform future research.
Theoretical Framework
Institutions and penal change
The United States is unique in the degree to which governing and political
power over criminal justice is distributed across various levels of government
(Lacey and Soskice 2015). National-level political and governing processes play an
important role in conditioning state contexts (Campbell and Schoenfeld 2013), but
state and local governments wield considerable power in establishing and espe-
cially implementing law and policy (Zimring and hawkins 1991; Lynch 2011).
Local governments—the city, county, and municipal entities primarily responsible
for establishing and managing criminal justice systems—are connected to state
government through dynamic and interwoven institutional networks. These con-
nections include the political entities and processes that determine state and local
lawmakers and the government agencies that integrate state and local government.
Local problems and dilemmas filter through these institutions into state govern-
ment and politics. In a dynamic and recursive process, state-level lawmaking then
filters back through this circuitry, creating new parameters for action, and reshap-
ing the landscapes across which various actors and organizations, inside govern-
ment and out, struggle to advance their interests. To understand how California
turned so forcefully to a “law and order” brand of penal policy, it is essential to
know more about how these institutional interactions shaped law and policy.
Most research on penal change has understandably focused on developments
at the state level because the consequences of state political currents and the laws
they generate are broad. For some, more punitive policies are rooted in
California’s decentralized state structure, best reflected by its easy proposition
process and the populist politics it breeds. Vanessa barker (2009) argues that

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The ANNALS OF The AMeRICAN ACADeMY
California’s decentralized state structure fails to effectively generate a sufficiently
engaged...