Our favorite books of 2007: by Anne-Marie Cusac.

AuthorCusac, Anne-Marie

Two questions troubled me during my ten years of reporting on American punishment for The Progressive :

1) How did this country turn to retribution and become the largest penal system in the world? And 2) Could these changes be part of a broader cultural shift?

I'm not the only one who wondered. I am pleased to add two books to the lengthening list of careful and intelligent works on punishment by such writers as David Dove, David Garland, and Michael Tonry.

Marie Gottschalk's The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America is eye opening. While many studies of recent U.S. punishment focus on the past three to four decades, Gottschalk's history refuses to accept the assumption that American punitiveness is altogether recent. "Both state capacity to incarcerate and the legitimacy of the federal government to handle more criminal matters were built up slowly but surely well before the incarceration boom that began in the 1970s," she argues. She reveals the historical breadth of the punitive panics that led to the "tough-on-crime" bipartisanship of today.

While Gottschalk's history adds a piece to the puzzle of question #1, Jonathan Simon's Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear provides a partial answer to question #2.

Simon, a specialist in law and social policy, argues that, in recent decades, politicians have crafted a "civil order built around crime." They have done so because "governing through crime" is a tactic that draws votes. For Simon, those phrases have broad legal implications, but also political, social, and cultural ones.

Simon sees a metaphor of crime that permits government intervention in expanding arenas of American life.

Our schools, in their investment in building young lives, once shared the rehabilitative aims of the prison system, Simon argues. The shift in Americans' views of crime and criminals, in turn, reconfigured education. Crime...

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