NCJ Number
227681
Journal
Punishment and Society Volume: 11 Issue: 3 Dated: July 2009 Pages: 377-394
Date Published
July 2009
Length
18 pages
Annotation
This article attempts to explain the harshness of American penal policies from the 1970s to 2000.
Abstract
The story of American penal policy since 1973 is about cynical politicians taking advantage of recurring features of American political culture in order to win elections and wield power. The simplest explanation for why American penal policies are so harsh is that American voters elected candidates who said they would make them that harsh, and did. However, this cannot explain why Americans believed that serious problems of crime and disorder were amenable to easy repressive solutions. The explanation which focuses on social and economic changes of the 20th century is also inadequate, in that every developed country experienced similar devastating changes, but only a few made their penal policies more severe. The next explanation focuses on basic characteristics of national culture and political values; however, globalization and neo-liberalism did not provide bases for explaining differences in national penal policies but constitutional structural and cultural values did. The four factors described in this article: the paranoid strain, Protestant fundamentalism, governmental structure, and patterns of racial hierarchy, go a long way to explaining why penal policies evolved as they did in the 20th century. However, they point to another level of explanation in need of consideration and answering about the Puritanism and intolerance of the first settlers, ideals of individualism, and libertarianism associated with the frontier and the early slavery-based Southern economy. None of the conventional explanations of why American penal policies became so severe are persuasive. Notes and references