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Interrogating the Penal Pendulum: An Introduction to the Review Symposium on Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2019

Ashley T. Rubin
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Abstract

This Essay introduces a Review Symposium for Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps’s Breaking the Pendulum, a book that challenges the centrality of the pendulum metaphor that scholars, journalists, and politicians have used to describe significant shifts in the overall orientation of punishment nationwide. Drawing on recent research, Goodman, Page, and Phelps lay out the case for abandoning this metaphor as well as its associated theory of penal change, offering in its place an “agonistic perspective.” Using this agonistic perspective as well as research on the topic, I suggest some reasons why the pendulum metaphor may still be a fruitful site of interrogation. Specifically, I argue that, while recognizing the caveats illustrated by Goodman, Page, and Phelps, we should take seriously the pendular pattern of US penal history told at the national level and we should not dismiss the mechanical causes of penal change in our efforts to populate theories and accounts of penal change with individual and group actors.

Type
Review Symposium: Rethinking the Pendulum Model of Criminal Justice History
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 791 - 798
Copyright
© 2019 American Bar Foundation 

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Footnotes

She thanks Michael Campbell, Johann Koehler, and Michelle Phelps for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece. Disclosure: Rubin is departmental colleagues with one of the book’s authors, Philip Goodman, and has coauthored with another, Michelle Phelps.

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