-
Title
-
Politics of Criminal Justice
-
Author
-
Barker, Vanessa
-
Research Area
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Social Institutions
-
Topic
-
Institutions of Social Control
-
Abstract
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The apparent disjuncture between the reality of crime and government responses suggests that criminal justice is not simply a technical response to crime. If criminal justice were guided by technical choices, gun death would equal gun control, gun violence would be considered a public health crisis replete with public resources, and the political will to solve it. Instead what we know from the social sciences is that criminal justice tends to be caught up in morality plays about human nature and political competition over the distribution of public goods, including, but perhaps especially, security, where special interests rather than the public interest tend to hold sway. The significance of studying the politics of criminal justice lies in its capacity to account for and explain the disjuncture. Key issues for future research will be scholars' ability to close this gap.
-
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-
Deterrence (Sociology), Robert Apel and Daniel S. Nagin
-
Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V. Horwitz
-
Reconciliation and Peace‐Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
-
Capital Punishment (Sociology), Mona Lynch
-
The Role of School‐Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development (Psychology), Chandra Muller
-
Trends in Street Crime and the Crime Drop (Sociology), Richard Rosenfeld
-
Bringing the Study of Street Gangs Back into the Mainstream (Sociology), James F. Short, Jr. and Lorine A. Hughes
-
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Identifier
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etrds0257
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extracted text
-
Politics of Criminal Justice
VANESSA BARKER
Abstract
The apparent disjuncture between the reality of crime and government responses
suggests that criminal justice is not simply a technical response to crime. If criminal
justice were guided by technical choices, gun death would equal gun control, gun
violence would be considered a public health crisis replete with public resources,
and the political will to solve it. Instead what we know from the social sciences is
that criminal justice tends to be caught up in morality plays about human nature
and political competition over the distribution of public goods, including, but perhaps especially, security, where special interests rather than the public interest tend
to hold sway. The significance of studying the politics of criminal justice lies in its
capacity to account for and explain the disjuncture. Key issues for future research
will be scholars’ ability to close this gap.
INTRODUCTION
Barely a month after the incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the second deadliest mass shooting in the United States, a high school majorette
was fatally shot on Chicago’s South Side, a week after performing President Barack Obama’s Inauguration. These brutal events unfortunately illustrate how much politics shapes the nation’s response to crime and violence.
Violent crime is real in America, but all too often the politics of criminal justice
distorts rational and pragmatic responses. Debates about “gun rights,” for
example, end up protecting people with guns but fail to protect people from
violence. Lisa Miller has identified this dynamic as the American security gap
where the state’s uneven response to violence (over and under-enforcement)
often creates conditions of insecurity, particularly for those most affected by
crime, ethnic and racial minorities in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The apparent disjuncture between the reality of crime and government
responses suggests that criminal justice is not simply a technical response to
crime. If criminal justice were guided by technical choices gun death would
equal gun control, gun violence would be considered a public health crisis
replete with public resources and the political will to solve it. Instead what
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
we know from the social sciences is that criminal justice tends to be caught
up in morality plays about human nature and political competition over
the distribution of public goods, including, but perhaps especially, security,
where special interests rather than the public interest tend to hold sway.
The significance of studying the politics of criminal justice lies in its capacity
to account for and explain the disjuncture between the reality of crime and
public policy. Key issues for future research will be scholars’ ability to close
this gap. Public criminology, a type of civically engaged scholarship, may
provide a way to close the gap.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Émile Durkheim, a pioneer of sociology as a discipline, lay the foundation for
contemporary studies of the politics of criminal justice. To Durkheim, crime
and punishment reflected the very core of society, that is, the deeply held
shared moral beliefs that bind people together. Likewise, the rituals of criminal justice provided effective mechanisms to reaffirm these social bonds,
the backbone of social life. What is crucial here is how Durkheim emphasized the active role of the public in the rituals of criminal justice: It was the
third parties, the onlookers, the public that gave penal sanctioning its force
and social significance. This line of reasoning experienced a renaissance with
the publication of David Garland’s Punishment & Modern Society, a master
work that inspired a new generation of scholars to study criminal justice as
a complex social institution, embedded in broader cultural, economic, and
historical contexts, paying particular attention to public sentiment and the
political configurations of criminal justice.
Pushing this field forward, scholars such as Jonathan Simon, Katherine
Beckett, David Garland, Franklin Zimring, Marie Gottschalk, Loïc Wacquant, and others developed sophisticated accounts of how and why politics
shapes American criminal justice, specifically to account for the rise of
mass imprisonment and subsequent decline of social welfare. By tracing
how the War on Crime displaced and devalued the War on Poverty in the
1960s, Simon (2007) has argued that the very apparatus of government has
been reconfigured to “govern through crime:” the logic of crime control
has colonized nearly all areas of public life, emphasizing risk management,
security, and punishment over the provision of public goods. In her analysis
of politics and media, Beckett (1997) showed how electoral politics hijacked
the substance and trajectory of crime policy, taking it out of the realm of
professional expertise and introducing a more fever-pitched and fear-driven
national discourse on crime that demanded more punishment. Garland
(2001) similarly documents the collapse of a penal welfarist approach
to crime, emphasizing the social causes of crime, as it was replaced by
Politics of Criminal Justice
3
a neo-liberal approach that emphasized individual responsibility and
moral failing where the only solution to crime and social disorder was
increased penal sanctioning. In her historical and political analysis, Marie
Gottschalk (2006, 2012) pinpoints the role of special interests in expanding
the state’s capacity to punish going back to the 1920s with the creation of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. She shows how unlikely alliances between
liberals and conservatives throughout the twentieth century, including law
enforcement, law and order proponents, crime victim’s movements, and the
women’s movement, played a pivotal role in building the carceral state.
But rather than solve the crime problem, the prison boom has had a wide
range of negative effects on the life chances of those groups most affected
by crime and violence, ethnic and racial minorities (Clear, 2008; Petersilia,
2003). Bruce Western (2006) has rigorously documented the extent of these
collateral damages, including such high levels of inequality (i.e., unemployment, family break up, disenfranchisement) for those most affected by mass
imprisonment as to call into question the very meaning of citizenship in the
United States. Similarly, Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen (2006) have
shown how felon disenfranchisement and other civil penalties associated with imprisonment have hollowed out the quality of citizenship for
thousands of former felons and their families.
Despite varying emphasis on state theory, political interests, and citizenship, this body of work has contributed to the widely accepted view that
politics is central to the dynamics of criminal justice in the United States.
Together it provides a benchmark for all further inquiry on the subject.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
There are at least three major streams of research that extend foundational
work in significant and promising ways, including research on: racial politics, democratic politics, and global politics. Each approach asks us to rework
taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature, character, and effects of politics on criminal justice.
RACIAL POLITICS
Michael Tonry (1995) and Loïc Wacquant have advanced our understanding of criminal justice by incorporating racial politics. Wacquant has argued
that the rise of neo-liberalism and its associated penal state cannot be understood without an analysis of its racial dynamics. “Hyper-incarceration,” as
he has redefined “mass incarceration,” specifically and disparately impacts
racial and ethnic minorities at six times the rate of whites and has become
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the functional equivalent of the ghetto, a social institution designed to maintain racial hierarchies and social inequality (Wacquant, 2000, 2009). Likewise,
Michelle Alexander calls the contemporary era of black incarceration: The
new Jim Crow. Similarly, Naomi Murakawa (2008) has argued that law and
order politics must be understood as a backlash against the growing success
of the US Civil Rights Movement (also see Murakawa & Beckett, 2010). The
racial dynamics in criminal justice are indisputable and must be taken into
account if we are to fully grasp its social significance and underlying causal
mechanisms.
DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
The emerging literature on comparative penal sanctioning (Cavadino &
Dignan, 2006; Lacey, 2008; Savelsberg, 1994; Sutton, 2004) and subnational
crime control (Barker, 2009; Campbell, 2012; Greenberg & West, 2001;
Miller, 2008, 2013; Lynch, 2009; Page, 2011; Schoenfeld, 2010) advance our
analytical frameworks for understanding the political process itself. For
example, Nicola Lacey shows how criminal justice policies, specifically
penal practices, are shaped by particular political institutional arrangements
rather than general trends. She also argues that the politicization of crime
itself depends on specific features of the political context with significant
variation across OECD countries (also see Lappi-Seppälä, 2008).
In an innovative analysis of the politics of the prison guards’ union in
California, Joshua Page develops the concept of the “penal field” to show
how the relative position of key actors, including access to resources and
symbolic capital, significantly shapes the trajectory of public policies.
In her multi-level case studies, Lisa Miller found that the character and
demands of the politics of criminal justice changed dramatically by level
of government. On the city or municipal level, she found that African
Americans, often portrayed as passive victims to mass imprisonment, were
actively engaged in crime control politics but tended toward more holistic
approaches, including demands for restrictive gun control and employment
programs. But as crime control traveled to the federal and national level,
special interests and lobbyists dominated the debate, often to the detriment
of cross-cutting approaches favored by local minority residents. This author
found that the type of institutional context had major consequences for
the type of crime control: More open and deliberative forums tended to
support penal moderation (Barker, 2009; also see Green, 2006; Loader and
Sparks, 2012; Rowan, 2011) whereas more closed contexts with lagging
or blocked public participation tended toward more punitive approaches.
Taken together, this new work on politics challenges a conventional view
that public participation necessarily leads to harsh justice. It suggests
Politics of Criminal Justice
5
instead that forums for public participation could be expanded rather than
contracted to support more democratic and more moderate crime control
policies.
GLOBAL POLITICS
With her focus on globalization, Katja Aas has taken the field into
path-breaking directions. This work has opened up criminology’s traditional focus on domestic politics to better account for the effects of
transnational governance and global politics. It has shown how criminal
justice tools such as surveillance, detention, and confinement are implicated
in strategies of global governance to monitor, regulate, and separate elite
global citizens from “crimmigrant” others, those deemed unworthy and
threatening (Aas, 2011; Melossi, 2012). The growing literature on the criminology of mobility has shown how the politics of the affluent Global North
increasingly relies on criminal justice to regulate, block, confine, or expel
migrants from the Global South (Weber & Bowling, 2008; Weber & Pickering,
2011). Mary Bosworth has contributed to the development of this field by
bridging theories of sovereignty and legitimacy with migration control.
As Garland identified the pivotal role domestic penal sanctioning plays in
reaffirming state sovereignty, Bosworth has argued that increased migration
control functions in a similar way (Bosworth, 2008) and has become a major
strategy of governance in the United Kingdom (Bosworth & Guild, 2008).
This work makes a clear and strong case that the politics of criminal justice
should be conceptualized and analyzed in global context, in ways that go
beyond domestic politics and even a comparative perspective, if we are to
fully explain the reach and power of criminal justice.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
AGENDA
Taken together this work has provided theoretical rigor and a wide range
of empirical evidence to show that politics is indeed central to the operation
and meaning of criminal justice. Researchers have spent the past two decades
identifying, documenting, and explaining more precise mechanisms of politics to account for the substance and trajectory of criminal justice policies.
There is still work to be done and a number of outstanding issues for future
research.
Despite the breadth and depth of research activity in this area, more could
be done to systematize our collective knowledge on the topic. It is especially pertinent to close the communication gap between different research
traditions that have at times traveled along parallel tracks. By increasing
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
collaboration and collating findings from both qualitative and quantitative
traditions, researchers would be in a stronger position to advance our conceptual, theoretical, and analytical tools as well as identify dead ends and
weak claims. This process would also improve interpretations of the data
and possibly make the field more relevant to public debate.
Specifically, more could be done in the areas of cutting-edge research on
racial politics, democratic politics, and global politics to refine conceptualizations of key concepts and develop theoretical models that better link key
factors and varying levels of analysis together. When researchers use the concept “politics,” it is not always clear we are talking about the same thing
or measuring the same process. Some may use the term to capture something about the “politicization” of crime while others may use it to describe
institutionalized decision making or governance. We need more precise analytical frameworks that not only identify significant factors in politics but
the relationships between the players, institutions, and outcomes. Field theory, historical institutionalism, and formal modeling may provide fruitful
avenues forward.
It is also fairly clear that most of the academic debate about the politics of
criminal justice is referring to the American or British context. Researchers
in this area could make a more earnest attempt to systematically incorporate
knowledge about political systems outside the United States and Britain, to
incorporate what we know about Japan, China, Brazil, the Nordic countries,
the European Union, Russia, the Middle East, for example, and to recognize what we think we know as general phenomenon is really a cultural
and historical specific product. Global mobility and global politics necessitate that we broaden our view. Comparative criminology offers a bridge into
this domain.
PUBLIC CRIMINOLOGY
As noted, there is a gap between the reality of crime and government
responses. Public criminology seeks to close that gap by participating in
public dialogue about crime and penal sanctioning with informed social
science research. Christopher Uggen and Michelle Inderbitzen (2010) and
Ian Loader and Richard Sparks (2011) have been at the forefront of this
debate, urging researchers to view criminology and related fields of inquiry
as civic enterprises. If we return to the mass shooting noted in the beginning
of this entry, we can immediately see the relevance and urgency of public
criminology. In the aftermath of the shooting, the National Rifle Association,
a powerful special interest group with deep pockets and entrenched allies,
proposed placing armed guards outside children’s schoolhouses as a solution to gun violence. Shortly after, Aaron Kupchik (2010), sociologist and
Politics of Criminal Justice
7
author of Homeroom Security, wrote an op-ed and testified at a House Summit
on Youth Violence, explaining how and why increased police presence in
public schools is a bad idea since it reframes the learning environment
as a place of crime and insecurity and often has negative effect on youth
development. The securitization of schools expands rather than contracts
concerns about crime and violence. This particular example is one of many
in which public criminology can play an important role in communicating
social science research in an informative way to address pressing social
concerns in real time.
REFERENCES
Aas, K. F. (2011). ‘Crimmigrant’ bodies and bona fide travelers: Surveillance, citizenship and global governance. Theoretical Criminology, 15(3), 331–346.
Barker, V. (2009). The politics of imprisonment: How the democratic process shapes the way
American punishes offenders. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Beckett, K. (1997). Making crime pay: Law & order in contemporary America. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Bosworth, M. (2008). Border control and the limits of the sovereign state. Social &
Legal Studies, 17, 199–215.
Bosworth, M., & Guild, M. (2008). Governing through migration control: Security
and citizenship in Britain. British Journal of Criminology, 48, 703–719.
Campbell, M. (2012). Ornery alligators and soap on a rope: Texas prosecutors and
punishment reform in the Lone Star State. Theoretical Criminology, 16, 289–312.
Cavadino, M., & Dignan, J. (2006). Penal systems: A comparative approach. London,
England: Sage.
Clear, T. (2008). Imprisoning communities: How mass incarceration makes disadvantaged
neighborhoods worse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Garland, D. (2001). Culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gottschalk, M. (2006). The prison and the gallows: The politics of mass incarceration in
America. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Gottschalk, M. (2012). The carceral state and the politics of punishment. In J. Simon
& R. Sparks (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of punishment and society (pp. 205–241).
London, England: Sage Publications.
Green, D. (2006). Public opinion versus public judgment about crime: Correction the
‘comedy of errors’. British Journal of Criminology, 46, 131–154.
Greenberg, D., & West, V. (2001). State prison populations and their growth,
1971–1991. Criminology, 39(3), 615–653.
Kupchik, A. (2010). Homeroom security: School discipline in an age of fear. New York,
NY: New York University Press.
Lacey, N. (2008). The prisoner’s dilemma. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Lappi-Seppälä, T. (2008). Trust, welfare and political culture: Explaining differences
in national penal policies. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice 37. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Loader, I., & Sparks, R. (2011). Public criminology? New York, NY: Routledge.
Loader, I., & Sparks, R. (2012). Beyond lamentation: Towards a democratic egalitarian politics of crime and justice. In T. Newburn & J. Peay (Eds.), Policing: Politics,
culture and control (pp. 11–41). Oxford, England: Hart.
Lynch, M. (2009). Sunbelt justice: Arizona and the transformation of American punishment.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Manza, J., & Uggen, C. (2006). Locked out: Felon disenfranchisement and American democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Melossi, D. (2012). Punishment and migration between Europe and the United States:
A transnational “less eligibility”?. In J. Simon & R. Sparks (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of punishment and society (pp. 412–429). London, England: Sage Publications.
Miller, L. (2008). The perils of federalism: Race, poverty and the politics of crime control.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Miller, L. (2013). Power to the people: Violent victimization, inequality and democratic politics. Theoretical Criminology, 17, 283–313.
Murakawa, N., & Beckett, K. (2010). The penology of racial innocence: The erasure
of racism in the study and practice of punishment. Law & Society Review, 44(3/4),
695–730.
Murakawa, N. (2008). The origins of the carceral crisis: Racial order as ‘law and order’
in postwar American politics. In J. Lowndes et al. (Eds.), Race and American political
development. New York, NY: Routledge.
Page, J. (2012). The toughest beat: Politics, punishment and the prison officers union in
California. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Petersilia, J. (2003). When prisoners come home: Parole and prisoner reentry. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Rowan, M. (2011). Democracy and punishment: A radical view. Theoretical Criminology, 16(1), 43–62.
Savelsberg, J. (1994). Knowledge, domination and criminal punishment. American
Journal of Sociology, 99(4), 911–943.
Schoenfeld, H. (2010). Mass incarceration and the paradox of prison conditions litigation. Law & Society Review, 44, 731–768.
Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American
democracy and created a culture of fear. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Sutton, J. (2004). The political economy of imprisonment in affluent Western democracies, 1960–1990. American Sociological Review, 69(2), 170–189.
Tonry, M. (1995). Race, crime and punishment in America. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Uggen, C., & Inderbitzen, M. (2010). Public criminologies. Criminology & Public Policy, 9(4), 725–749.
Wacquant, L. (2000). The new ‘peculiar institution’: On the prison as surrogate ghetto.
Theoretical Criminology, 4(3), 377–89.
Politics of Criminal Justice
9
Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the poor: The neo-liberal government of social insecurity.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Weber, L., & Bowling, B. (2008). Valiant beggars and global vagabonds: Select, eject,
immobilize. Theoretical Criminology, 12, 355–375.
Weber, L., & Pickering, S. (2011). Globalization and borders: Death at the global frontier.
Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Western, B. (2006). Punishment and inequality in America. New York, NY: Russell Sage
Foundation.
VANESSA BARKER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Vanessa Barker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University.
Her research and teaching focus on globalization, border control, comparative penal sanctioning, and ethnicity. She is the author of The politics of imprisonment: How the democratic process shapes the way America punishes offenders
(Oxford University Press, 2009) and has published in Law & Society Review,
Theoretical Criminology, Punishment & Society, Law & Social Inquiry, and Criminology & Public Policy. Before moving to Sweden, she completed her PhD at
New York University, was a Visiting Fellow at the Law and Public Affairs
Program, Princeton University, and worked at Florida State University. She
is currently working on a comparative analysis of global mobility and penal
order.
http://people.su.se/∼vbark/
RELATED ESSAYS
Deterrence (Sociology), Robert Apel and Daniel S. Nagin
Normal Negative Emotions and Mental Disorders (Sociology), Allan V.
Horwitz
Reconciliation and Peace-Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman
Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
Capital Punishment (Sociology), Mona Lynch
The Role of School-Related Peers and Social Networks in Human Development (Psychology), Chandra Muller
Trends in Street Crime and the Crime Drop (Sociology), Richard Rosenfeld
Bringing the Study of Street Gangs Back into the Mainstream (Sociology),
James F. Short, Jr. and Lorine A. Hughes
Bullying, Aggression, and Human Development (Psychology), Samuel E.
Ehrenreich and Marion K. Underwood
Crime and the Life Course (Sociology), Mark Warr and Carmen Gutierrez
Incarceration and Health (Sociology), Christopher Wildeman
-
Politics of Criminal Justice
VANESSA BARKER
Abstract
The apparent disjuncture between the reality of crime and government responses
suggests that criminal justice is not simply a technical response to crime. If criminal
justice were guided by technical choices, gun death would equal gun control, gun
violence would be considered a public health crisis replete with public resources,
and the political will to solve it. Instead what we know from the social sciences is
that criminal justice tends to be caught up in morality plays about human nature
and political competition over the distribution of public goods, including, but perhaps especially, security, where special interests rather than the public interest tend
to hold sway. The significance of studying the politics of criminal justice lies in its
capacity to account for and explain the disjuncture. Key issues for future research
will be scholars’ ability to close this gap.
INTRODUCTION
Barely a month after the incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the second deadliest mass shooting in the United States, a high school majorette
was fatally shot on Chicago’s South Side, a week after performing President Barack Obama’s Inauguration. These brutal events unfortunately illustrate how much politics shapes the nation’s response to crime and violence.
Violent crime is real in America, but all too often the politics of criminal justice
distorts rational and pragmatic responses. Debates about “gun rights,” for
example, end up protecting people with guns but fail to protect people from
violence. Lisa Miller has identified this dynamic as the American security gap
where the state’s uneven response to violence (over and under-enforcement)
often creates conditions of insecurity, particularly for those most affected by
crime, ethnic and racial minorities in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The apparent disjuncture between the reality of crime and government
responses suggests that criminal justice is not simply a technical response to
crime. If criminal justice were guided by technical choices gun death would
equal gun control, gun violence would be considered a public health crisis
replete with public resources and the political will to solve it. Instead what
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
we know from the social sciences is that criminal justice tends to be caught
up in morality plays about human nature and political competition over
the distribution of public goods, including, but perhaps especially, security,
where special interests rather than the public interest tend to hold sway.
The significance of studying the politics of criminal justice lies in its capacity
to account for and explain the disjuncture between the reality of crime and
public policy. Key issues for future research will be scholars’ ability to close
this gap. Public criminology, a type of civically engaged scholarship, may
provide a way to close the gap.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Émile Durkheim, a pioneer of sociology as a discipline, lay the foundation for
contemporary studies of the politics of criminal justice. To Durkheim, crime
and punishment reflected the very core of society, that is, the deeply held
shared moral beliefs that bind people together. Likewise, the rituals of criminal justice provided effective mechanisms to reaffirm these social bonds,
the backbone of social life. What is crucial here is how Durkheim emphasized the active role of the public in the rituals of criminal justice: It was the
third parties, the onlookers, the public that gave penal sanctioning its force
and social significance. This line of reasoning experienced a renaissance with
the publication of David Garland’s Punishment & Modern Society, a master
work that inspired a new generation of scholars to study criminal justice as
a complex social institution, embedded in broader cultural, economic, and
historical contexts, paying particular attention to public sentiment and the
political configurations of criminal justice.
Pushing this field forward, scholars such as Jonathan Simon, Katherine
Beckett, David Garland, Franklin Zimring, Marie Gottschalk, Loïc Wacquant, and others developed sophisticated accounts of how and why politics
shapes American criminal justice, specifically to account for the rise of
mass imprisonment and subsequent decline of social welfare. By tracing
how the War on Crime displaced and devalued the War on Poverty in the
1960s, Simon (2007) has argued that the very apparatus of government has
been reconfigured to “govern through crime:” the logic of crime control
has colonized nearly all areas of public life, emphasizing risk management,
security, and punishment over the provision of public goods. In her analysis
of politics and media, Beckett (1997) showed how electoral politics hijacked
the substance and trajectory of crime policy, taking it out of the realm of
professional expertise and introducing a more fever-pitched and fear-driven
national discourse on crime that demanded more punishment. Garland
(2001) similarly documents the collapse of a penal welfarist approach
to crime, emphasizing the social causes of crime, as it was replaced by
Politics of Criminal Justice
3
a neo-liberal approach that emphasized individual responsibility and
moral failing where the only solution to crime and social disorder was
increased penal sanctioning. In her historical and political analysis, Marie
Gottschalk (2006, 2012) pinpoints the role of special interests in expanding
the state’s capacity to punish going back to the 1920s with the creation of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. She shows how unlikely alliances between
liberals and conservatives throughout the twentieth century, including law
enforcement, law and order proponents, crime victim’s movements, and the
women’s movement, played a pivotal role in building the carceral state.
But rather than solve the crime problem, the prison boom has had a wide
range of negative effects on the life chances of those groups most affected
by crime and violence, ethnic and racial minorities (Clear, 2008; Petersilia,
2003). Bruce Western (2006) has rigorously documented the extent of these
collateral damages, including such high levels of inequality (i.e., unemployment, family break up, disenfranchisement) for those most affected by mass
imprisonment as to call into question the very meaning of citizenship in the
United States. Similarly, Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen (2006) have
shown how felon disenfranchisement and other civil penalties associated with imprisonment have hollowed out the quality of citizenship for
thousands of former felons and their families.
Despite varying emphasis on state theory, political interests, and citizenship, this body of work has contributed to the widely accepted view that
politics is central to the dynamics of criminal justice in the United States.
Together it provides a benchmark for all further inquiry on the subject.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
There are at least three major streams of research that extend foundational
work in significant and promising ways, including research on: racial politics, democratic politics, and global politics. Each approach asks us to rework
taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature, character, and effects of politics on criminal justice.
RACIAL POLITICS
Michael Tonry (1995) and Loïc Wacquant have advanced our understanding of criminal justice by incorporating racial politics. Wacquant has argued
that the rise of neo-liberalism and its associated penal state cannot be understood without an analysis of its racial dynamics. “Hyper-incarceration,” as
he has redefined “mass incarceration,” specifically and disparately impacts
racial and ethnic minorities at six times the rate of whites and has become
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the functional equivalent of the ghetto, a social institution designed to maintain racial hierarchies and social inequality (Wacquant, 2000, 2009). Likewise,
Michelle Alexander calls the contemporary era of black incarceration: The
new Jim Crow. Similarly, Naomi Murakawa (2008) has argued that law and
order politics must be understood as a backlash against the growing success
of the US Civil Rights Movement (also see Murakawa & Beckett, 2010). The
racial dynamics in criminal justice are indisputable and must be taken into
account if we are to fully grasp its social significance and underlying causal
mechanisms.
DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
The emerging literature on comparative penal sanctioning (Cavadino &
Dignan, 2006; Lacey, 2008; Savelsberg, 1994; Sutton, 2004) and subnational
crime control (Barker, 2009; Campbell, 2012; Greenberg & West, 2001;
Miller, 2008, 2013; Lynch, 2009; Page, 2011; Schoenfeld, 2010) advance our
analytical frameworks for understanding the political process itself. For
example, Nicola Lacey shows how criminal justice policies, specifically
penal practices, are shaped by particular political institutional arrangements
rather than general trends. She also argues that the politicization of crime
itself depends on specific features of the political context with significant
variation across OECD countries (also see Lappi-Seppälä, 2008).
In an innovative analysis of the politics of the prison guards’ union in
California, Joshua Page develops the concept of the “penal field” to show
how the relative position of key actors, including access to resources and
symbolic capital, significantly shapes the trajectory of public policies.
In her multi-level case studies, Lisa Miller found that the character and
demands of the politics of criminal justice changed dramatically by level
of government. On the city or municipal level, she found that African
Americans, often portrayed as passive victims to mass imprisonment, were
actively engaged in crime control politics but tended toward more holistic
approaches, including demands for restrictive gun control and employment
programs. But as crime control traveled to the federal and national level,
special interests and lobbyists dominated the debate, often to the detriment
of cross-cutting approaches favored by local minority residents. This author
found that the type of institutional context had major consequences for
the type of crime control: More open and deliberative forums tended to
support penal moderation (Barker, 2009; also see Green, 2006; Loader and
Sparks, 2012; Rowan, 2011) whereas more closed contexts with lagging
or blocked public participation tended toward more punitive approaches.
Taken together, this new work on politics challenges a conventional view
that public participation necessarily leads to harsh justice. It suggests
Politics of Criminal Justice
5
instead that forums for public participation could be expanded rather than
contracted to support more democratic and more moderate crime control
policies.
GLOBAL POLITICS
With her focus on globalization, Katja Aas has taken the field into
path-breaking directions. This work has opened up criminology’s traditional focus on domestic politics to better account for the effects of
transnational governance and global politics. It has shown how criminal
justice tools such as surveillance, detention, and confinement are implicated
in strategies of global governance to monitor, regulate, and separate elite
global citizens from “crimmigrant” others, those deemed unworthy and
threatening (Aas, 2011; Melossi, 2012). The growing literature on the criminology of mobility has shown how the politics of the affluent Global North
increasingly relies on criminal justice to regulate, block, confine, or expel
migrants from the Global South (Weber & Bowling, 2008; Weber & Pickering,
2011). Mary Bosworth has contributed to the development of this field by
bridging theories of sovereignty and legitimacy with migration control.
As Garland identified the pivotal role domestic penal sanctioning plays in
reaffirming state sovereignty, Bosworth has argued that increased migration
control functions in a similar way (Bosworth, 2008) and has become a major
strategy of governance in the United Kingdom (Bosworth & Guild, 2008).
This work makes a clear and strong case that the politics of criminal justice
should be conceptualized and analyzed in global context, in ways that go
beyond domestic politics and even a comparative perspective, if we are to
fully explain the reach and power of criminal justice.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
AGENDA
Taken together this work has provided theoretical rigor and a wide range
of empirical evidence to show that politics is indeed central to the operation
and meaning of criminal justice. Researchers have spent the past two decades
identifying, documenting, and explaining more precise mechanisms of politics to account for the substance and trajectory of criminal justice policies.
There is still work to be done and a number of outstanding issues for future
research.
Despite the breadth and depth of research activity in this area, more could
be done to systematize our collective knowledge on the topic. It is especially pertinent to close the communication gap between different research
traditions that have at times traveled along parallel tracks. By increasing
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
collaboration and collating findings from both qualitative and quantitative
traditions, researchers would be in a stronger position to advance our conceptual, theoretical, and analytical tools as well as identify dead ends and
weak claims. This process would also improve interpretations of the data
and possibly make the field more relevant to public debate.
Specifically, more could be done in the areas of cutting-edge research on
racial politics, democratic politics, and global politics to refine conceptualizations of key concepts and develop theoretical models that better link key
factors and varying levels of analysis together. When researchers use the concept “politics,” it is not always clear we are talking about the same thing
or measuring the same process. Some may use the term to capture something about the “politicization” of crime while others may use it to describe
institutionalized decision making or governance. We need more precise analytical frameworks that not only identify significant factors in politics but
the relationships between the players, institutions, and outcomes. Field theory, historical institutionalism, and formal modeling may provide fruitful
avenues forward.
It is also fairly clear that most of the academic debate about the politics of
criminal justice is referring to the American or British context. Researchers
in this area could make a more earnest attempt to systematically incorporate
knowledge about political systems outside the United States and Britain, to
incorporate what we know about Japan, China, Brazil, the Nordic countries,
the European Union, Russia, the Middle East, for example, and to recognize what we think we know as general phenomenon is really a cultural
and historical specific product. Global mobility and global politics necessitate that we broaden our view. Comparative criminology offers a bridge into
this domain.
PUBLIC CRIMINOLOGY
As noted, there is a gap between the reality of crime and government
responses. Public criminology seeks to close that gap by participating in
public dialogue about crime and penal sanctioning with informed social
science research. Christopher Uggen and Michelle Inderbitzen (2010) and
Ian Loader and Richard Sparks (2011) have been at the forefront of this
debate, urging researchers to view criminology and related fields of inquiry
as civic enterprises. If we return to the mass shooting noted in the beginning
of this entry, we can immediately see the relevance and urgency of public
criminology. In the aftermath of the shooting, the National Rifle Association,
a powerful special interest group with deep pockets and entrenched allies,
proposed placing armed guards outside children’s schoolhouses as a solution to gun violence. Shortly after, Aaron Kupchik (2010), sociologist and
Politics of Criminal Justice
7
author of Homeroom Security, wrote an op-ed and testified at a House Summit
on Youth Violence, explaining how and why increased police presence in
public schools is a bad idea since it reframes the learning environment
as a place of crime and insecurity and often has negative effect on youth
development. The securitization of schools expands rather than contracts
concerns about crime and violence. This particular example is one of many
in which public criminology can play an important role in communicating
social science research in an informative way to address pressing social
concerns in real time.
REFERENCES
Aas, K. F. (2011). ‘Crimmigrant’ bodies and bona fide travelers: Surveillance, citizenship and global governance. Theoretical Criminology, 15(3), 331–346.
Barker, V. (2009). The politics of imprisonment: How the democratic process shapes the way
American punishes offenders. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Beckett, K. (1997). Making crime pay: Law & order in contemporary America. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Bosworth, M. (2008). Border control and the limits of the sovereign state. Social &
Legal Studies, 17, 199–215.
Bosworth, M., & Guild, M. (2008). Governing through migration control: Security
and citizenship in Britain. British Journal of Criminology, 48, 703–719.
Campbell, M. (2012). Ornery alligators and soap on a rope: Texas prosecutors and
punishment reform in the Lone Star State. Theoretical Criminology, 16, 289–312.
Cavadino, M., & Dignan, J. (2006). Penal systems: A comparative approach. London,
England: Sage.
Clear, T. (2008). Imprisoning communities: How mass incarceration makes disadvantaged
neighborhoods worse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Garland, D. (2001). Culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gottschalk, M. (2006). The prison and the gallows: The politics of mass incarceration in
America. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Gottschalk, M. (2012). The carceral state and the politics of punishment. In J. Simon
& R. Sparks (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of punishment and society (pp. 205–241).
London, England: Sage Publications.
Green, D. (2006). Public opinion versus public judgment about crime: Correction the
‘comedy of errors’. British Journal of Criminology, 46, 131–154.
Greenberg, D., & West, V. (2001). State prison populations and their growth,
1971–1991. Criminology, 39(3), 615–653.
Kupchik, A. (2010). Homeroom security: School discipline in an age of fear. New York,
NY: New York University Press.
Lacey, N. (2008). The prisoner’s dilemma. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Lappi-Seppälä, T. (2008). Trust, welfare and political culture: Explaining differences
in national penal policies. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice 37. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Loader, I., & Sparks, R. (2011). Public criminology? New York, NY: Routledge.
Loader, I., & Sparks, R. (2012). Beyond lamentation: Towards a democratic egalitarian politics of crime and justice. In T. Newburn & J. Peay (Eds.), Policing: Politics,
culture and control (pp. 11–41). Oxford, England: Hart.
Lynch, M. (2009). Sunbelt justice: Arizona and the transformation of American punishment.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Manza, J., & Uggen, C. (2006). Locked out: Felon disenfranchisement and American democracy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Melossi, D. (2012). Punishment and migration between Europe and the United States:
A transnational “less eligibility”?. In J. Simon & R. Sparks (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of punishment and society (pp. 412–429). London, England: Sage Publications.
Miller, L. (2008). The perils of federalism: Race, poverty and the politics of crime control.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Miller, L. (2013). Power to the people: Violent victimization, inequality and democratic politics. Theoretical Criminology, 17, 283–313.
Murakawa, N., & Beckett, K. (2010). The penology of racial innocence: The erasure
of racism in the study and practice of punishment. Law & Society Review, 44(3/4),
695–730.
Murakawa, N. (2008). The origins of the carceral crisis: Racial order as ‘law and order’
in postwar American politics. In J. Lowndes et al. (Eds.), Race and American political
development. New York, NY: Routledge.
Page, J. (2012). The toughest beat: Politics, punishment and the prison officers union in
California. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Petersilia, J. (2003). When prisoners come home: Parole and prisoner reentry. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Rowan, M. (2011). Democracy and punishment: A radical view. Theoretical Criminology, 16(1), 43–62.
Savelsberg, J. (1994). Knowledge, domination and criminal punishment. American
Journal of Sociology, 99(4), 911–943.
Schoenfeld, H. (2010). Mass incarceration and the paradox of prison conditions litigation. Law & Society Review, 44, 731–768.
Simon, J. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American
democracy and created a culture of fear. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Sutton, J. (2004). The political economy of imprisonment in affluent Western democracies, 1960–1990. American Sociological Review, 69(2), 170–189.
Tonry, M. (1995). Race, crime and punishment in America. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Uggen, C., & Inderbitzen, M. (2010). Public criminologies. Criminology & Public Policy, 9(4), 725–749.
Wacquant, L. (2000). The new ‘peculiar institution’: On the prison as surrogate ghetto.
Theoretical Criminology, 4(3), 377–89.
Politics of Criminal Justice
9
Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the poor: The neo-liberal government of social insecurity.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Weber, L., & Bowling, B. (2008). Valiant beggars and global vagabonds: Select, eject,
immobilize. Theoretical Criminology, 12, 355–375.
Weber, L., & Pickering, S. (2011). Globalization and borders: Death at the global frontier.
Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Western, B. (2006). Punishment and inequality in America. New York, NY: Russell Sage
Foundation.
VANESSA BARKER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Vanessa Barker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University.
Her research and teaching focus on globalization, border control, comparative penal sanctioning, and ethnicity. She is the author of The politics of imprisonment: How the democratic process shapes the way America punishes offenders
(Oxford University Press, 2009) and has published in Law & Society Review,
Theoretical Criminology, Punishment & Society, Law & Social Inquiry, and Criminology & Public Policy. Before moving to Sweden, she completed her PhD at
New York University, was a Visiting Fellow at the Law and Public Affairs
Program, Princeton University, and worked at Florida State University. She
is currently working on a comparative analysis of global mobility and penal
order.
http://people.su.se/∼vbark/
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Politics of Criminal Justice
VANESSA BARKER
Abstract
The apparent disjuncture between the reality of crime and government responses
suggests that criminal justice is not simply a technical response to crime. If criminal
justice were guided by technical choices, gun death would equal gun control, gun
violence would be considered a public health crisis replete with public resources,
and the political will to solve it. Instead what we know from the social sciences is
that criminal justice tends to be caught up in morality plays about human nature
and political competition over the distribution of public goods, including, but perhaps especially, security, where special interests rather than the public interest tend
to hold sway. The significance of studying the politics of criminal justice lies in its
capacity to account for and explain the disjuncture. Key issues for future research
will be scholars’ ability to close this gap.
INTRODUCTION
Barely a month after the incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the second deadliest mass shooting in the United States, a high school majorette
was fatally shot on Chicago’s South Side, a week after performing President Barack Obama’s Inauguration. These brutal events unfortunately illustrate how much politics shapes the nation’s response to crime and violence.
Violent crime is real in America, but all too often the politics of criminal justice
distorts rational and pragmatic responses. Debates about “gun rights,” for
example, end up protecting people with guns but fail to protect people from
violence. Lisa Miller has identified this dynamic as the American security gap
where the state’s uneven response to violence (over and under-enforcement)
often creates conditions of insecurity, particularly for those most affected by
crime, ethnic and racial minorities in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The apparent disjuncture between the reality of crime and government
responses suggests that criminal justice is not simply a technical response to
crime. If criminal justice were guided by technical choices gun death would
equal gun control, gun violence would be considered a public health crisis
replete with public resources and the political will to solve it. Instead what
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
we know from the social sciences is that criminal justice tends to be caught
up in morality plays about human nature and political competition over
the distribution of public goods, including, but perhaps especially, security,
where special interests rather than the public interest tend to hold sway.
The significance of studying the politics of criminal justice lies in its capacity
to account for and explain the disjuncture between the reality of crime and
public policy. Key issues for future research will be scholars’ ability to close
this gap. Public criminology, a type of civically engaged scholarship, may
provide a way to close the gap.
FOUNDATIONAL RESEARCH
Émile Durkheim, a pioneer of sociology as a discipline, lay the foundation for
contemporary studies of the politics of criminal justice. To Durkheim, crime
and punishment reflected the very core of society, that is, the deeply held
shared moral beliefs that bind people together. Likewise, the rituals of criminal justice provided effective mechanisms to reaffirm these social bonds,
the backbone of social life. What is crucial here is how Durkheim emphasized the active role of the public in the rituals of criminal justice: It was the
third parties, the onlookers, the public that gave penal sanctioning its force
and social significance. This line of reasoning experienced a renaissance with
the publication of David Garland’s Punishment & Modern Society, a master
work that inspired a new generation of scholars to study criminal justice as
a complex social institution, embedded in broader cultural, economic, and
historical contexts, paying particular attention to public sentiment and the
political configurations of criminal justice.
Pushing this field forward, scholars such as Jonathan Simon, Katherine
Beckett, David Garland, Franklin Zimring, Marie Gottschalk, Loïc Wacquant, and others developed sophisticated accounts of how and why politics
shapes American criminal justice, specifically to account for the rise of
mass imprisonment and subsequent decline of social welfare. By tracing
how the War on Crime displaced and devalued the War on Poverty in the
1960s, Simon (2007) has argued that the very apparatus of government has
been reconfigured to “govern through crime:” the logic of crime control
has colonized nearly all areas of public life, emphasizing risk management,
security, and punishment over the provision of public goods. In her analysis
of politics and media, Beckett (1997) showed how electoral politics hijacked
the substance and trajectory of crime policy, taking it out of the realm of
professional expertise and introducing a more fever-pitched and fear-driven
national discourse on crime that demanded more punishment. Garland
(2001) similarly documents the collapse of a penal welfarist approach
to crime, emphasizing the social causes of crime, as it was replaced by
Politics of Criminal Justice
3
a neo-liberal approach that emphasized individual responsibility and
moral failing where the only solution to crime and social disorder was
increased penal sanctioning. In her historical and political analysis, Marie
Gottschalk (2006, 2012) pinpoints the role of special interests in expanding
the state’s capacity to punish going back to the 1920s with the creation of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation. She shows how unlikely alliances between
liberals and conservatives throughout the twentieth century, including law
enforcement, law and order proponents, crime victim’s movements, and the
women’s movement, played a pivotal role in building the carceral state.
But rather than solve the crime problem, the prison boom has had a wide
range of negative effects on the life chances of those groups most affected
by crime and violence, ethnic and racial minorities (Clear, 2008; Petersilia,
2003). Bruce Western (2006) has rigorously documented the extent of these
collateral damages, including such high levels of inequality (i.e., unemployment, family break up, disenfranchisement) for those most affected by mass
imprisonment as to call into question the very meaning of citizenship in the
United States. Similarly, Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen (2006) have
shown how felon disenfranchisement and other civil penalties associated with imprisonment have hollowed out the quality of citizenship for
thousands of former felons and their families.
Despite varying emphasis on state theory, political interests, and citizenship, this body of work has contributed to the widely accepted view that
politics is central to the dynamics of criminal justice in the United States.
Together it provides a benchmark for all further inquiry on the subject.
CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH
There are at least three major streams of research that extend foundational
work in significant and promising ways, including research on: racial politics, democratic politics, and global politics. Each approach asks us to rework
taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature, character, and effects of politics on criminal justice.
RACIAL POLITICS
Michael Tonry (1995) and Loïc Wacquant have advanced our understanding of criminal justice by incorporating racial politics. Wacquant has argued
that the rise of neo-liberalism and its associated penal state cannot be understood without an analysis of its racial dynamics. “Hyper-incarceration,” as
he has redefined “mass incarceration,” specifically and disparately impacts
racial and ethnic minorities at six times the rate of whites and has become
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
the functional equivalent of the ghetto, a social institution designed to maintain racial hierarchies and social inequality (Wacquant, 2000, 2009). Likewise,
Michelle Alexander calls the contemporary era of black incarceration: The
new Jim Crow. Similarly, Naomi Murakawa (2008) has argued that law and
order politics must be understood as a backlash against the growing success
of the US Civil Rights Movement (also see Murakawa & Beckett, 2010). The
racial dynamics in criminal justice are indisputable and must be taken into
account if we are to fully grasp its social significance and underlying causal
mechanisms.
DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
The emerging literature on comparative penal sanctioning (Cavadino &
Dignan, 2006; Lacey, 2008; Savelsberg, 1994; Sutton, 2004) and subnational
crime control (Barker, 2009; Campbell, 2012; Greenberg & West, 2001;
Miller, 2008, 2013; Lynch, 2009; Page, 2011; Schoenfeld, 2010) advance our
analytical frameworks for understanding the political process itself. For
example, Nicola Lacey shows how criminal justice policies, specifically
penal practices, are shaped by particular political institutional arrangements
rather than general trends. She also argues that the politicization of crime
itself depends on specific features of the political context with significant
variation across OECD countries (also see Lappi-Seppälä, 2008).
In an innovative analysis of the politics of the prison guards’ union in
California, Joshua Page develops the concept of the “penal field” to show
how the relative position of key actors, including access to resources and
symbolic capital, significantly shapes the trajectory of public policies.
In her multi-level case studies, Lisa Miller found that the character and
demands of the politics of criminal justice changed dramatically by level
of government. On the city or municipal level, she found that African
Americans, often portrayed as passive victims to mass imprisonment, were
actively engaged in crime control politics but tended toward more holistic
approaches, including demands for restrictive gun control and employment
programs. But as crime control traveled to the federal and national level,
special interests and lobbyists dominated the debate, often to the detriment
of cross-cutting approaches favored by local minority residents. This author
found that the type of institutional context had major consequences for
the type of crime control: More open and deliberative forums tended to
support penal moderation (Barker, 2009; also see Green, 2006; Loader and
Sparks, 2012; Rowan, 2011) whereas more closed contexts with lagging
or blocked public participation tended toward more punitive approaches.
Taken together, this new work on politics challenges a conventional view
that public participation necessarily leads to harsh justice. It suggests
Politics of Criminal Justice
5
instead that forums for public participation could be expanded rather than
contracted to support more democratic and more moderate crime control
policies.
GLOBAL POLITICS
With her focus on globalization, Katja Aas has taken the field into
path-breaking directions. This work has opened up criminology’s traditional focus on domestic politics to better account for the effects of
transnational governance and global politics. It has shown how criminal
justice tools such as surveillance, detention, and confinement are implicated
in strategies of global governance to monitor, regulate, and separate elite
global citizens from “crimmigrant” others, those deemed unworthy and
threatening (Aas, 2011; Melossi, 2012). The growing literature on the criminology of mobility has shown how the politics of the affluent Global North
increasingly relies on criminal justice to regulate, block, confine, or expel
migrants from the Global South (Weber & Bowling, 2008; Weber & Pickering,
2011). Mary Bosworth has contributed to the development of this field by
bridging theories of sovereignty and legitimacy with migration control.
As Garland identified the pivotal role domestic penal sanctioning plays in
reaffirming state sovereignty, Bosworth has argued that increased migration
control functions in a similar way (Bosworth, 2008) and has become a major
strategy of governance in the United Kingdom (Bosworth & Guild, 2008).
This work makes a clear and strong case that the politics of criminal justice
should be conceptualized and analyzed in global context, in ways that go
beyond domestic politics and even a comparative perspective, if we are to
fully explain the reach and power of criminal justice.
KEY ISSUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
AGENDA
Taken together this work has provided theoretical rigor and a wide range
of empirical evidence to show that politics is indeed central to the operation
and meaning of criminal justice. Researchers have spent the past two decades
identifying, documenting, and explaining more precise mechanisms of politics to account for the substance and trajectory of criminal justice policies.
There is still work to be done and a number of outstanding issues for future
research.
Despite the breadth and depth of research activity in this area, more could
be done to systematize our collective knowledge on the topic. It is especially pertinent to close the communication gap between different research
traditions that have at times traveled along parallel tracks. By increasing
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
collaboration and collating findings from both qualitative and quantitative
traditions, researchers would be in a stronger position to advance our conceptual, theoretical, and analytical tools as well as identify dead ends and
weak claims. This process would also improve interpretations of the data
and possibly make the field more relevant to public debate.
Specifically, more could be done in the areas of cutting-edge research on
racial politics, democratic politics, and global politics to refine conceptualizations of key concepts and develop theoretical models that better link key
factors and varying levels of analysis together. When researchers use the concept “politics,” it is not always clear we are talking about the same thing
or measuring the same process. Some may use the term to capture something about the “politicization” of crime while others may use it to describe
institutionalized decision making or governance. We need more precise analytical frameworks that not only identify significant factors in politics but
the relationships between the players, institutions, and outcomes. Field theory, historical institutionalism, and formal modeling may provide fruitful
avenues forward.
It is also fairly clear that most of the academic debate about the politics of
criminal justice is referring to the American or British context. Researchers
in this area could make a more earnest attempt to systematically incorporate
knowledge about political systems outside the United States and Britain, to
incorporate what we know about Japan, China, Brazil, the Nordic countries,
the European Union, Russia, the Middle East, for example, and to recognize what we think we know as general phenomenon is really a cultural
and historical specific product. Global mobility and global politics necessitate that we broaden our view. Comparative criminology offers a bridge into
this domain.
PUBLIC CRIMINOLOGY
As noted, there is a gap between the reality of crime and government
responses. Public criminology seeks to close that gap by participating in
public dialogue about crime and penal sanctioning with informed social
science research. Christopher Uggen and Michelle Inderbitzen (2010) and
Ian Loader and Richard Sparks (2011) have been at the forefront of this
debate, urging researchers to view criminology and related fields of inquiry
as civic enterprises. If we return to the mass shooting noted in the beginning
of this entry, we can immediately see the relevance and urgency of public
criminology. In the aftermath of the shooting, the National Rifle Association,
a powerful special interest group with deep pockets and entrenched allies,
proposed placing armed guards outside children’s schoolhouses as a solution to gun violence. Shortly after, Aaron Kupchik (2010), sociologist and
Politics of Criminal Justice
7
author of Homeroom Security, wrote an op-ed and testified at a House Summit
on Youth Violence, explaining how and why increased police presence in
public schools is a bad idea since it reframes the learning environment
as a place of crime and insecurity and often has negative effect on youth
development. The securitization of schools expands rather than contracts
concerns about crime and violence. This particular example is one of many
in which public criminology can play an important role in communicating
social science research in an informative way to address pressing social
concerns in real time.
REFERENCES
Aas, K. F. (2011). ‘Crimmigrant’ bodies and bona fide travelers: Surveillance, citizenship and global governance. Theoretical Criminology, 15(3), 331–346.
Barker, V. (2009). The politics of imprisonment: How the democratic process shapes the way
American punishes offenders. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Beckett, K. (1997). Making crime pay: Law & order in contemporary America. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Bosworth, M. (2008). Border control and the limits of the sovereign state. Social &
Legal Studies, 17, 199–215.
Bosworth, M., & Guild, M. (2008). Governing through migration control: Security
and citizenship in Britain. British Journal of Criminology, 48, 703–719.
Campbell, M. (2012). Ornery alligators and soap on a rope: Texas prosecutors and
punishment reform in the Lone Star State. Theoretical Criminology, 16, 289–312.
Cavadino, M., & Dignan, J. (2006). Penal systems: A comparative approach. London,
England: Sage.
Clear, T. (2008). Imprisoning communities: How mass incarceration makes disadvantaged
neighborhoods worse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Garland, D. (2001). Culture of control: Crime and social order in contemporary society.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gottschalk, M. (2006). The prison and the gallows: The politics of mass incarceration in
America. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
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VANESSA BARKER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Vanessa Barker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University.
Her research and teaching focus on globalization, border control, comparative penal sanctioning, and ethnicity. She is the author of The politics of imprisonment: How the democratic process shapes the way America punishes offenders
(Oxford University Press, 2009) and has published in Law & Society Review,
Theoretical Criminology, Punishment & Society, Law & Social Inquiry, and Criminology & Public Policy. Before moving to Sweden, she completed her PhD at
New York University, was a Visiting Fellow at the Law and Public Affairs
Program, Princeton University, and worked at Florida State University. She
is currently working on a comparative analysis of global mobility and penal
order.
http://people.su.se/∼vbark/
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