Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy (original) (raw)

In analyzing how the United States came to operate the most expansive criminal justice enterprise in the world, I argue in Frontlash that the carceral state’s robust and sudden development owes its beginnings to the conflict over race. Rather than a genuine response to crime, the origins of the punitive turn in crime policy can be traced back to a campaign by defeated policymakers, who turned the crime issue into political currency to make an end-run around civil rights. The graveyard of civil rights legislation was the same place where crime bills were born. First, through a process I term frontlash, elites mobilized around crime and violence after suffering serious defeats in civil rights, arguing that crime legislation would be a panacea to protest and “crime in the streets” and building an indelible connection between black activism and crime. Second, this episode resulted in a set of policy changes that speeded the development of the carceral state. Specifically, passage of the omnibus Safe Streets and Crime Control Act built up tremendous state capacity to punish, engendered a whole network of new institutions dedicated to crime-control and punishment, and fostered powerful interests with a stake in the new punishment bureaucracy. The policy shift expanded police departments, spent billions on new prisons, agencies and technological developments, promoted a burst of state policy change and criminal code reform, and stimulated the formation of a powerful criminal justice lobby. I show that not only did this reform episode double the prison population in the first few years, it made a deep imprint on the later functioning, limits, and possibilities of the carceral state.

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