Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal?In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime.This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.
The first book to look at the structural, legal, and cultural aspects of J. Edgar Hoover's war on crime in the 1930s, a New Deal campaign which forged new links between citizenship, federal policing, and the ideal of centralized government.
In Addicted to Rehab, Bard College sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two such rehab programs for women, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare ...
This is a glaring omission given the risk of mass imprisonment, the increasing presence of police in inner-city communities, and the emergence of new policy initiatives aimed at improving the quality and effectiveness of the administration ...
Although the attention of interactionist theories to issues of meaning and definition is central to the sociological study of crime and disrepute, work in this tradition did not develop a longitudinal understanding that fully exploits ...
This new edition includes entirely new chapters as well as revisions to all others, with an eye to accessibility and coherence for upper division undergraduate and beginning graduate students in the field.
Recognizance bonds remain familiar to us through their role in the bail process . In the sixteenth century a suspect eligible for bail might obtain release by submitting to a written examination by two justices of the peace .
This book aims to address a way forward for the governance capacity of international criminal justice, arguing that international criminal justice provides a central tool for global governance.
Reveals how liberal democracy and free-market economics reproduce the inequalities of apartheid in Cape Town, South Africa.
Why has crime dropped while imprisonment grows? This well-edited volume of ground-breaking articles explores criminal justice policy in light of recent research on changing patterns of crime and criminal careers.
Those debates have taken place among and between lawyers, anthropologists, political theorists, sociologists, ... by David Von Drehle Lives of Lawyers Revisited: Transformation and Resilience in the Organizations of Practice, ...