Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics.

• Author: Jardine, Matthew

Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics by Katherine Beckett Oxford University Press. 158 pages. $27.50

The violent crime rate has been falling since 1981, but paradoxically Americans' fear of crime has increased considerably, as has support for law-and-order policies. Many pundits say this is a normal reaction to lawlessness--and to liberal approaches to the crime problem. As conservative political scientist James Q. Wilson puts it, "public opinion was well ahead of political opinion in calling attention to the problem of crime."

But Katherine Beckett demonstrates in Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics that such explanations miss the political scheming that has guided public opinion on this subject.

Making Crime Pay shows how various political actors have exploited the crime issue to further conservative aims. Beckett argues that the law-and-order agenda has been, since the 1960s, an integral part of a rightwing project aimed at redirecting the responsibilities of the state from social welfare to social control.

According to Beckett, concern about crime and illegal drug use has very little to do with the actual extent of these problems. The number of times that political elites highlight crime through the media is by far the more significant factor in generating public concern. While the mid- to late-1970s were times of dramatically increased rates of drug use and crime, "the percentage of poll respondents identifying crime and drugs as the nation's most important problem remained quite low throughout this period," she notes.

Beckett argues that Southern officials started cooking up the law-and-order rhetoric as part of their efforts to discredit the civil-rights movement. Local law-enforcement officials often characterized the movement's civil-disobedience tactics as criminal and the result of a breakdown of law and order. They called for a crackdown on hoodlums, agitators, street mobs, and lawbreakers who challenged the Jim Crow status quo.

Conservatives used similar rhetoric to attack Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Politicians and intellectuals began to point to crime, drug addiction, and delinquency as proof of an ineradicable culture of poverty. Conservatives argued that an expanding welfare state would simply reproduce and perpetuate poverty by encouraging social parasitism--both legal (welfare dependency) and illegal (crime).

The GOP targeted white Southerners. As early as...