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"The Political Economies of Criminal Justice"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this interesting looking article on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:Long understood as a specialized branch of law applicable to unambiguously harmful transgressions, criminal law has become instead a mechanism for routine social regulation.  As Jonathan Simon puts it in a recent book on the subject, politicians increasingly govern through crime, by framing social policy choices as criminal justice problems.  Such choices, in turn, engender expansive criminal jurisdiction, powerful enforcement bureaucracies, and ever more capacious concerns about crime-control. This essay makes three arguments in response to the idea that society is governed through crime. First, it explains why Simon's description of the crime-governance nexus yields important contributions to our understanding of law in its social context...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on March 14, 2008 (boomark / email).