Summary
Contents
Subject index
The U.S. crime rate has dropped steadily for more than a decade, yet the rate of incarceration continues to skyrocket. Today, more than 2 million Americans are locked in prisons and jails with devastating consequences for poor families and communities, overcrowded institutions and overburdened taxpayers. How did the U.S. become the world’s leader in incarceration? Why have the numbers of women, juveniles, and people of color increased especially rapidly among the imprisoned? The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America, Second Edition is the first book to make widely accessible the new research on crime as a political and cultural issue. Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson provide readers with a robust analysis of the roles of crime, politics, media imagery and citizen activism in the making of criminal justice policy in the age of mass incarceration.is the first book to make widely accessible the new research on crime as a political and cultural issue. Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson provide readers with a robust analysis of the roles of crime, politics, media imagery and citizen activism in the making of criminal justice policy in the age of mass incarceration.
Murder, American Style
Murder, American Style
The United States does not have an unusually severe crime problem, but it does have an exceptionally high rate of homicide. This fact does not, by itself, directly explain our high rate of incarceration—the main focus of this book. It may, however, help to explain why many Americans worry a great deal about crime, and why so many responded positively to tough-on-crime political rhetoric during the years of the prison boom.
This chapter provides a comprehensive explanation for the United States' high homicide rate. Some might object that by focusing on conventional, interpersonal homicide, we are defining the concept of murder too narrowly. In the United States, thousands of people are killed every year by unsafe products, dangerous working conditions, and ...
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