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.
Chapter 4: The Politics of Crime
The Politics of Crime
Over the past several decades, the U.S. government has enthusiastically declared and waged wars against crime and drugs. It is often assumed that these wars were a response to rising levels of crime and drug use. Like many popular theories, this assumption rests on a few kernels of truth: Crime—especially lethal violence—is a significant problem in the United States, the drug trade did expand in the 1970s and 1980s, and this trade frequently generates a good deal of violence. However, as we saw in Chapter 2, the best available evidence suggests that levels of crime did not increase significantly over the past 30 years and have actually dropped a good deal in the past decade—even as rates of ...
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