“American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment”
Across the U.S., there was an explosion of severity in nearly every form of governmental response to crime from the 1970s through the 2000s. This book examines the typically ignored forms punishment in America beyond incarceration and capital punishment to include probation and parole supervision rates-and revocation rates, an ever-growing list of economic penalties imposed on offenders, and a web of collateral consequences of conviction unimaginable just decades ago. Across these domains, American punitiveness exceeds that in other developed democracies-where measurable, by factors of five-to-ten. In some respects, such as rates of incarceration and (perhaps) correctional supervision, the U.S. is the world “leader.” Looking to Europe and other English-speaking countries, the book’s contributors shed new light on America’s outlier status, and examine its causes. One causal theory examined in detail is that the U.S. has been exceptional not just in penal severity since the 1970s, but also in its high rates of high rates of homicide and other serious violent crimes.
With leading researchers from many fields and national perspectives, American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment shows that the largest problems of crime and justice cannot be brought into focus from the vantage point of any one jurisdiction. Looking cross-nationally, the book addresses what it would take for America to rejoin the mainstream of the Western world in its uses of criminal penalties.
Kevin kindly sent me a copy of the book’s Table of Contents and his introductory chapter for posting. That chapter can be downloaded below, following these passages from that chapter’s introduction:
One goal of this book is to broaden the scope of American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment (AECP) inquiry to include sanctions beyond incarceration and the death penalty. From what we know, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the United States imposes and administers probation, parole, economic sanctions, and collateral consequences of conviction with a heavier hand than other developed democracies. Although the inquiries in this book are preliminary, they raise the possibility that AECP extends across many landscapes of criminal punishment — and beyond, to the widespread social exclusion and civil disabilities imposed on people with a conviction on their record.
In addition, the book insists that any discussion of AECP should focus on US crime rates along with US penal severity. More often than not, American crime is discounted in the academic literature as having little or no causal influence on American criminal punishment. This is a mistake for many reasons but is especially unfortunate because it truncates causation analyses that should reach back to gun ownership rates, income inequality, conditions in America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, and possibilities of joint or reciprocal causation in the production of US crime rates and punitive severity.
This chapter is divided into three segments. First, it includes a brief tour of the conventional AECP subject areas of incarceration and the death penalty. Second, it will introduce claims that a wider menu of sanction types should be included in AECP analyses. Third, it will speak to the importance of late twentieth-century crime rates to US punitive expansionism.