Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T15:17:19.608Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

RATS, RANDOM RETRIBUTION, AND REVOLUTION

On the Atrophy of the Criminal Justice System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2010

Shaun Ossei-Owusu
Shaun Ossei-Owusu*
Affiliation:
Department of African American Studies, University of California Berkeley and American Bar Foundation
*
Shaun Ossei-Owusu, Department of African American Studies, University of California Berkeley, 660 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720. E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The abysmal state of the American criminal justice system and its pernicious features has been well documented in much of the relevant literature. Feeley and Simon (1992) propose the notion of a “new penology” that prioritizes efficient, cost-effective (and often actuarial) techniques to manage criminal populations, while Katherine Beckett (1997) argues that the punitive shift in crime control policy was an ideologically motivated response to the Civil Rights Movement, with political rhetoric fomenting fears of crime and public policy reflecting the vogue of law-and-order punishment. David Garland's (2001) comparative study of the United States and Britain suggests that “late modernity,” which encompasses much of the social, economic, cultural, and technological advancements and changes of the second half of the twentieth century (e.g. wage stagnation, regressive tax policies, suburbanization, the rise in the service economy, new penal technologies), along with neoconservative politics in the 1980s played key roles in the reconfiguration of the criminal justice system.

Type
State of the Discourse
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Spring 2010 , pp. 41 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Alexander, Michelle (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Beckett, Katherine (1997). Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Feeley, Malcolm and Simon, Jonathan (1992). The New Penology: Notes on the Emerging Strategy of Corrections and Its Implications. Criminology, 30: 449.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forman, Tyrone (2004). Color-blind Racism and Racial Indifference: The Role of Racial Apathy in Facilitating Enduring Inequalities. In Krysan, Maria and Lewis, Amanda (Eds.), The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity, pp. 43–66. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Frohmann, Lisa (1991). Discrediting Victims' Allegations of Sexual Assault: Prosecutorial Accounts of Case Rejections. Social Problems, 38(2): 213–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garland, David (2001). The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Control in Contemporary Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Harcourt, Bernard (2007). Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lynch, Mona Pauline (2009). Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Ossei-Owusu, Shaun (2010). Gimme Some More: Centering Gender and Inequality in Criminal Justice and Discretion Discourse. American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law, 18(1): 101–117.Google Scholar
Paoli, Letizia (2003). Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Dorothy (1999). Race, Vagueness, and the Social meaning of Order-Maintenance Policing. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 89: 775–836.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, Susan. (1985). Road Not Taken: The Elusive Path to Criminal Prosecution for White-Collar Offenders. Law & Society Review, 19: 179–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simon, Jonathan (2007). Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sklansky, David (2006). Not Your Father's Police Department: Making Sense of the New Demographics of Law Enforcement. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 96(3): 1209–1244.Google Scholar
Smith, Sandra Susan (2007). Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism Among the Black Poor. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc (2002). Slavery to Mass Incarceration. New Left Review, 13(January-February): 41–60.Google Scholar
Wacquant, Loïc (2009). Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Walker, David and Hinks, Peter (Ed.) ([1829]2000). David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Ward, Geoff, Farrell, Amy, and Rousseau, Danielle (2009). Does Racial Balance in Workforce Representation Yield Equal Justice? Race Relations of Sentencing in Federal Court Organizations. Law & Society Review, 43(4): 757–901.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Warden, Rob (2004). The Snitch System: How Snitch Testimony Sent Randy Steidl and Other Innocent Americans to Death Row. Center of Wrongful Convictions, Northwestern University School of Law. Available online at www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions.Google Scholar
Watkins-Hayes, Celeste (2009). The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar