Leaving the Shining City on a Hill: A Plea for Rediscovering Comparative Criminal Justice Policy in the United States

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567720981626
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Author: Alessandro Corda,Rhys Hester
• Date: 01 June 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Leaving the Shining City on a

Hill: A Plea for Rediscovering

Comparative Criminal Justice

Policy in the United States

Alessandro Corda

1

and Rhys Hester

2

Abstract

Over the past several decades, American penal exceptionalism—the tendency for U.S. penal policies

and practices to proudly diverge from those of other Western countries—has severely limited the

development of comparative criminal justice research from a U.S. perspective. However, in recent

years, a growing consensus that America’s criminal justice policies and practices are too expensive,

ineffective, excessively punitive, and often inhumane has laid the ground for a new phase of soul-

searching. This article argues for an explicit rediscovering of comparative criminal justice policy in

America, which would prove extremely helpful in providing bold yet practicable solutions in the

current commendable but unimaginative era of criminal justice reform. We first contend that

American exceptionalism is not as embedded in U.S. penal policy and culture as the past few decades

might seem to suggest. Second, we discuss the main causes of the gradual demise of the comparative

criminal justice enterprise in America. Finally, we discuss two areas of U.S. criminal justice reform

suggesting mechanisms of comparative criminal justice policy that should be nurtured: (1) new

prison reform initiatives pointing to renewed openness to comparative insights and (2) the growing

chorus calling for prosecutorial reform, showing how many of the reform ideas proffered tap into

characteristics found in continental systems.

Keywords

comparative criminal justice, American penal exceptionalism, criminal justice reform, penal policy,

penal change

1

School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, United Kingdom

2

Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice, Clemson University, SC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Alessandro Corda, School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, Main Site Tower, University Square, Belfast BT7 1NN,

United Kingdom.

Email: a.corda@qub.ac.uk

International CriminalJustice Review

2021, Vol. 31(2) 203-223

ª2021 Georgia State University

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DOI: 10.1177/1057567720981626

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Introduction

During the last four decades of the 20th century and into the new century, the idea of “American

exceptionalism” increasingly became a regular talking point among U.S. politicians and commen-

tators, emphasizing that America should do things “its way” and that other countries’ experiences

should not inform U.S. domestic policies. Perhaps the most potent depiction of American excep-

tionalism is the “shining city on a hill,” a biblical image employed by John Winthrop, Puritan lawyer

and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in his 1630 sermon A Model of Christian

Charity (see Rodgers, 2018). This image was popularized by Ronald Reagan throughout his political

career—most notably in two speeches in 1974 and 1989—to describe America as a unique example

of freedom and hope, and Americans as “a special people, in a special land, with a special mission”

(Calabresi, 2006, p. 1371). The notion of American exceptionalism within the domain of criminal

justice and punishment grew out of the general understanding of the term and can be defined as the

tendency for U.S. penal policies and practices to diverge sharply from those of other developed

industrialized Western countries (K. R. Reitz, 2018). American exceptionalism has been often

invoked, particularly in the post-mid-1970s era: Not only did it become a mainstay of death penalty

proponents (see Steiker, 2002), but eventually it also came to characterize all of the major areas of

the U.S. penal state—from policing to prosecution, from sentencing to imprisonment, and from

community supervision to collateral consequences of conviction (Garland, 2020). At least for some,

American exceptionalism embodies not just the idea that America does things differently but that it

does so proudly, even defiantly.

Especially over the past decade, a growing consensus that America’s criminal justice policies and

practices are too expensive, in effective, excessively puni tive, and often inhumane has laid t he

ground for a new phase of soul-searching. The years since the peak of mass incarceration and mass

supervision, in 2009 and 2007, respectively (Cullen, 2018; Pew Charitable Trusts, 2018), have been

variably described as a period of “late mass incarceration” (Beckett et al., 2018; Seeds, 2017) or a

phase of “equilibrium” (Tonry, 2016, pp. 91–93). Prison populations and adults under penal super-

vision have declined by about 10%, and punitive policies and practices have coexisted with reform

initiatives characterized by a more lenient approach, especially for nonviolent offenders. However,

although the wisdom of “mass punishment” (K. R. Reitz, 2018, p. 8) in America is now widely

questioned, incarceration and correctional supervision rates have fallen far less than one might have

guessed a few years ago, given declining crime trends and the seemingly new societal debate and

political discourse around crime and justice issues. Despite a few seeds of change, the current state

of affairs of U.S. criminal justice highlights the need for bolder reform ideas. In this context, an

important contribution may come from thinking outside the box by looking beyond the borders.

The central argument we present in this article is that American exceptionalism in criminal justice

policies and practices is neither hist orically immutable nor politically ine vitable, nor desirable

policy-wise. A renewed openness and attention to foreign ideas and models should not be seen with

suspicion or as an attempt to corrupt or subvert fundamental American values and principles in the

administration of criminal justice. On the contrary, questioning the widespread exceptionalism ethos

and rediscovering comparative criminal justice in the United States could be the key for moderating

today’s overuse of harmful aspects of criminal justice polic y—and this especially in a time of

growing consensus as to the need and increased opportunity for reform, given current low levels

of crime and fear of crime (Zimring, 2007). Furthermore, receptivity to international policies is far

from un-American: In fact, we make the case that the “xenoskeptic” (to say the least) turn of

American exceptionalism is the aberration from a more long-standing willingness to borrow and

adapt policy ideas, including from foreign nations.

We first challenge the often-assumed ontological nature and unavoidability of the American

penal exceptionalism hypothesis from a policy, historical, and cultural perspective. We do so by

204 International Criminal Justice Review 31(2)