Summary
Contents
Subject index
This major new volume of papers by leading criminologists, sociologists and historians, sets out what is known about the political and penological causes of the phenomenon of mass imprisonment. Mass imprisonment, American-style, involves the penal segregation of large numbers of the poor and minorities. Imprisonment has become a central institution for the social control of the urban poor. Other countries are now looking to the USA to see what should be learned from this massive and controversial social experiment. This book describes mass imprisonment's impact upon crime, upon the minority communities most affected, upon social policy and, more broadly upon national culture. This is a book that all penologists and poli
Fear and Loathing in Late Modernity: Reflections on the Cultural Sources of Mass Imprisonment in the United States
Fear and Loathing in Late Modernity: Reflections on the Cultural Sources of Mass Imprisonment in the United States
In recent work, Theodore Caplow and I (Caplow and Simon, 1999) have argued that there is no singular cause of the unprecedented growth of imprisonment in the United States. We point to three different factors whose interrelationship has driven incarceration rates in ways quite different than might have been expected for each independently. First, we argue that changes in the political culture of the United States have made fear of crime a priority issue for politics. Second, the ‘war on drugs,’ largely a product of this political priority of crime, ...
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