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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: sowusu@berkeley.edu
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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

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