Hey folks, I’m back with another post about all the stuff I’ve been reading. Pretty much all of this is political sociology, most is focused on criminalization, but a few are bigger-picture.
Stanley Cohen - Folk Devils and Moral Panics
This book coined the term “moral panic,” which I think makes it worth reading. It’s about the mods and rockers, two British youth subcultures which were a lot closer to aesthetic kin groups than street gangs. Through media amplification of a moral panic which tied these subcultures to a broader sense of social breakdown and unease in Britain, these youths were disproportionately criminalized and used as the basis for social control expansion. Notably, Stuart Hall and colleagues expanded the use of “moral panic” for Policing the Crisis, looking at muggings rather than kids hanging around on beaches. Garland has a good article on moral panics and their uses over time.
David Garland - Culture of Control
Published a few months before 9/11, this book attempts to provide a “history of the present” in order to account for the emergence of mass incarceration and the law-and-order consensus. Garland’s main argument is that prior to the 1970s, the public believed that criminalization was harsher than it actually was due to their deference to experts (criminal justice bureaucrats). He calls this regime “penal-welfarism,” which idealized individual rehabilitation, even if it did not live up to this ideal. After conservatives launched an assault on welfare and progressives attacked penal-welfarism more specifically, liberals were completely outflanked. This led to the development of “two penologies”: neoliberals emphasized efficient cost-cutting measures, and neoconservatives emphasized expressive retribution at any cost. This dovetails with an article by Feeley and Simon in Criminology.
Katherine Beckett - Making Crime Pay
This book answers a similar question, and is specifically intended to rebut what Beckett calls the “democracy at work” thesis (crime went up, the public became more punitive, and politicians cracked down). Instead, Beckett argues that politicians and other powerful actors led the public on punitiveness. In particular, she looks at crime news, showing that when journalists quoted state officials as sources, the resulting content was more likely to adopt punitive frames. She also did some pioneering public opinion analysis, finding that the rate of public opinion change about crime and drug use was quite different from the rate of change for actual crime and drug use. I think it’s a great book.
Peter Enns - Incarceration Nation
Enns takes the public opinion analysis to the next level, developing a comprehensive index measuring American punitiveness and its rate of change over time. Worth pausing the discussion here to show this figure:
A lot of the book reads like a rebuttal to Beckett, whose argument he names the “political leadership hypothesis.” Instead, Enns argues that changes in public punitiveness preceded politicians’ discourse and policymaking. He finds that changes in punitiveness were highly correlated with increases in news coverage of crime. I don’t think this ends up being a super strong rebuttal of Beckett overall - she’s already shown that politicians influenced the framing of news coverage - but Enns’ public opinion analysis is a lot more compelling. He also complements the public opinion work with archival analysis, finding that e.g. Nixon’s 1968 campaign ratcheted up its punitiveness after looking at opinion data.
Jonathan Simon - Governing Through Crime
This is kind of a legal theory text. The main argument is that the crime victim has become the “idealized subject” of American law, replacing e.g. the industrial worker and the yeoman farmer. Accordingly, victimization discourse infects all regions of American politics. Probably the most disturbing point he raises is that basically all civil rights and workplace justice claims work in the victimization framework now (i.e. discrimination lawsuits). There’s some unfortunate Marx-bashing towards the end, but mostly a good read. You could probably get away with just reading chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6.
Fred Block - Revising State Theory
I think this book is a really good starting point if you’re looking for a structural theory of capitalists’ political dominance that moves beyond the “committee of the bourgeoisie” truism from Engels. In particular, Block explains how capitalists hold political sway while not demonstrating any kind of cohesive class consciousness, i.e., they tend to be more interested in “narrow economic rationality” ($$$) compared to political hegemony. He also develops the concept of “business confidence”: basically, if a country’s policy becomes too pro-labor, capitalists will move their investments elsewhere. This is a major pressure on state officials which limits their autonomy. Compared to a lot of work on this topic, it’s a straightforward read and very concise.
Piven and Cloward - Poor People’s Movements
This book is pretty famous, and I think it deserves the hype. Their overarching argument is that in a context where wealth production and the monopoly on violence centralize power in the hands of a few, the many can gain power through disruption during limited windows. They analyze three movements: the unemployed, the labor movement, and the Civil Rights movement. The analyses aren’t perfect (I had some quibbles with the Civil Rights chapter), but I found their overall argument pretty illuminating, if a bit pessimistic. One of their broader-reaching claims is that greater institutional power allows greater disruption (i.e. workers compared to the unemployed).