Governing Through Crime
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Simon has put together an unremitting wealth of detail concerning institutional, cultural and private life-world changes. (Rebecca Pates, Akademie Verlag )
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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.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Simon makes us challenge the penalism of late modernity and its relationship to majoritarian politics. Pickup this book and you will, I feel sure, be in a better place to critique the 'law and order' style of neoconservatism. A brilliant read.
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3 reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful
a brilliant analysis
2 Jun 2007
Format:Hardcover
How is it that the American state continues to grow in a politically conservative age? Professor Simon argues that the growth of federal crime control policy is the key to understanding this phenomenon. Beginning in the 1960s, and continuing through to century's end, the willingness of national politicians to assume responsibility for crime fighting and the establishment of social order has allowed the federal government to grow, even after Americans grew to doubt the ability of Washington D.C. to solve social and economic problems in the wake of the Great Society. Conservative Chief Executives promised to use the powers of the federal government to stop crime and social disorder and to secure Americans from all manner of threats to life and property. The fact that crime was in fact rising in the 1960s and 1970s gave the crime issue the needed salience to make crime control a seemingly legitimate policy goal for Washington D.C.
Professor Simon excavates how the image and substance of crime fighting proved to be manna for the continued aggrandizement of executive power in the American federal state. Also, conservative politicians in both parties worked in the legislative branch to delegate powers in crime fighting to the President, as well as governors, mayors and district attorneys at the state and local level. For Simon, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 was the key legislative template for this process; thus, that act ranks right up with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as one of the most important laws of the decade, though most Americans have never heard of it.
Simon covers this process in the first half of the book. That is his explanation for the modern American state. What about modern American society? In the second half of the book Professor Simon shows how the rhetoric and strategies behind federal crime control policy replicate themselves in all manner of lived experiences in America, from residential patterns, to the acceptance of surveillance in the work place, to the disciplining of students in schools through zero tolerance policies for any sort of real or perceived misbehavior.
This is a great book describing how crime and fear of crime governs our sense of proper governance and, indeed, life. I'd have preferred a bit more on how imperatives of foreign policy work to create a crime control state in domestic policy. How, for example, does the need to surveil foreign activity through the CIA and NSA work to grow federal domestic law enforcement through the FBI, DEA and state and local law enforcement?
This is a quibble though. Read this book to understand how America became security obsessed in the last decades of the twentieth century, and how we can approach strategies for a healthier polity and a more beneficial relationship to our fellow citizens and government.
Professor Simon excavates how the image and substance of crime fighting proved to be manna for the continued aggrandizement of executive power in the American federal state. Also, conservative politicians in both parties worked in the legislative branch to delegate powers in crime fighting to the President, as well as governors, mayors and district attorneys at the state and local level. For Simon, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 was the key legislative template for this process; thus, that act ranks right up with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as one of the most important laws of the decade, though most Americans have never heard of it.
Simon covers this process in the first half of the book. That is his explanation for the modern American state. What about modern American society? In the second half of the book Professor Simon shows how the rhetoric and strategies behind federal crime control policy replicate themselves in all manner of lived experiences in America, from residential patterns, to the acceptance of surveillance in the work place, to the disciplining of students in schools through zero tolerance policies for any sort of real or perceived misbehavior.
This is a great book describing how crime and fear of crime governs our sense of proper governance and, indeed, life. I'd have preferred a bit more on how imperatives of foreign policy work to create a crime control state in domestic policy. How, for example, does the need to surveil foreign activity through the CIA and NSA work to grow federal domestic law enforcement through the FBI, DEA and state and local law enforcement?
This is a quibble though. Read this book to understand how America became security obsessed in the last decades of the twentieth century, and how we can approach strategies for a healthier polity and a more beneficial relationship to our fellow citizens and government.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Imaginative interpretation of the most recent phase of US history
7 Oct 2007
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I've read plenty of books that deal with questions of the growth of mass incarceration and surveillance in US society, the 'culture of fear' paranoia that defines much of our popular political culture, etc. and so I thought this book would mainly cover familiar material. But I was wrong. Jonathan Simon offers a fresh interpretation of these developments. Central to the development of 'governing through crime' is the emergence of the crime victim as the central figure around which political debate revolves, and the identification of supporting police/prisons/death penalty with solidarity with that victim. Simon shows how this has raised the profile (and political power) of prosecutors and governors (most of our presidents recently, in part because of their ability to wield the death penalty). On the other hand, this development has thrown the judiciary on the defensive, as it is perceived as an obstacle to victim's righteous vengeance through their representatives, the police. Simon also deals with the way crime has defined the governance of families, schools, and, perhaps most originally, workplaces. In the latter, as unions have collapsed, charges of the crime of discrimination have become one of the few recourses workers have against employer power. At the same time, employers treat workers as potentially dangerous criminals who may be responsible for violence in the workplace. Simon ends by tying the logic and limits of governing through crime to the failings of the US in stopping, and later reacting to, the attacks of 9-11.
Simon does not have much to say about the economic changes that have accompanied and been intertwined with the practice of governing through crime. For that you should read Christian Parenti's Lockdown America or Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag. Nevertheless, this book should also definitely be on your reading list to understand this disturbing trend.
Simon does not have much to say about the economic changes that have accompanied and been intertwined with the practice of governing through crime. For that you should read Christian Parenti's Lockdown America or Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag. Nevertheless, this book should also definitely be on your reading list to understand this disturbing trend.
0 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Boring!
7 Feb 2012
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
We used this in a Criminal class and I just about died at how stinkin boring of a read this is! Phew, glad that one is over.
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