Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T15:49:14.137Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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 

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.)

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.

References

REFERENCES

Barker, Vanessa. The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way American Punishes Offenders. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckett, Katherine. Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Bernard, Thomas J., and Kurlychek, Megan C.. The Cycle of Juvenile Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Brown, Mark. “The Politics of Penal Excess and the Echo of Colonial Penality.” Punishment & Society 4, no. 4 (2002): 403–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Michael C. “Criminal Disenfranchisement Reform in California: A Deviant Case Study.” Punishment & Society 9, no. 2 (2007): 177–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, Michael C., and Schoenfeld, Heather. “The Transformation of America’s Penal Order: A Historicized Political Sociology of Punishment.” American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 5 (2013): 1375–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cheliotis, Leonidas K. “How Iron Is the Iron Cage of New Penology?: The Role of Human Agency in the Implementation of Criminal Justice Policy.” Punishment & Society 8, no. 3 (2006): 313–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garland, David. The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, Philip, Page, Joshua, and Phelps, Michelle. Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutchinson, Steven. “Countering Catastrophic Criminology: Reform, Punishment and the Modern Liberal Compromise.” Punishment & Society 8, no. 4 (2006): 443–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lynch, Mona. “Waste Managers? The New Penology, Crime Fighting, and Parole Agent Identity.” Law & Society Review 32, no. 4 (1998): 839–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lynch, Mona. Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Maurutto, Paula, and Kelly, Hannah-Moffat. “Assembling Risk and the Restructuring of Penal Control.” British Journal of Criminology 46, no. 3 (2006): 438–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLennan, Rebecca. The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Lisa. The Perils of Federalism: Race, Poverty, and the Politics of Crime. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Page, Joshua. The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in California. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perkinson, Robert. Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008.Google Scholar
Phelps, Michelle S. “Rehabilitation in the Punitive Era: The Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality in U.S. Prison Programs.” Law & Society Review 45, no. 1 (2011): 33–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rubin, Ashley T. “Institutionalizing the Pennsylvania System: Organizational Exceptionalism, Administrative Support, and Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829–1875.” PhD thesis, U.C. Berkeley, 2013.Google Scholar
Rubin, Ashley T. “A Neo-institutional Account of Prison Diffusion.” Law & Society Review 49, no. 2 (2015): 365–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, Ashley T. “Penal Change as Penal Layering: A Case Study of Proto-prison Adoption and Capital Punishment Reduction, 1785–1822.” Punishment & Society 18, no. 4 (2016): 420–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, Ashley T. The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America’s Modern Penal System, 1829–1913. Cambridge University Press, 2020, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Rubin, Ashley T. “Punishment’s Legal Templates: A Theory of Formal Penal Change.” Law & Society Review 53, no. 2 (2019): 518–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, Ashley T., and Reiter, K.. “Continuity in the Face of Penal Innovation: Revisiting the History of American Solitary Confinement.” Law & Social Inquiry 43, no. 4 (2018): 1604–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoenfeld, Heather. “Mass Incarceration and the Paradox of Prison Conditions Litigation.” Law & Society Review 44, nos. 3–4 (2010): 731–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schoenfeld, Heather. Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simon, Jonathan. Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Stuntz, William J. The Collapse of American Criminal Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar