Research on American criminal justice often concludes that the U.S. penal system was largely guided by the “rehabilitative ideal,” the philosophy that punishment should reform inmates and equip them to lead law-abiding lives, through the twentieth century preceding the rise of mass incarceration. This article complicates this narrative by evaluating the intellectual origins of the rehabilitative ideal and demonstrating that it was built on theoretical premises justifying punitive politics from its inception. The ideal has always relied on distinguishing curable offenders from incorrigible ones who cannot be reformed and warrant harsher punishment. This has guided American state development in punitive directions throughout the twentieth century. Progressive era indeterminate sentencing reforms were geared toward both containing and reforming offenders, the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century relied on the idea of criminal incorrigibility to advocate for compulsory sterilization statutes, and anxieties about incorrigibility justified punitive features of the draconian federal sentencing reforms of the 1970s and 1980s. This history indicates that a full revival of the rehabilitative ideal is unlikely to check contemporary punitive political impulses, especially given that two political and ideational currents currently driving American penal policy—neoliberalism and bio-criminology—comport with the punitive facets of rehabilitative penology.
Research on corporate criminal law has grown since the Great Recession, but corporate criminal liability, the principle charging corporations for crimes, remains understudied. Literature points to a 1909 Supreme Court decision as its basis, but historical analysis of the doctrine's deeper political roots reveal that its development was contingent on the convergence of several unique factors driving turn of the century American politics. First, corporate criminal liability would not have emerged had it not been for shifts in jurisprudential theory reconceptualizing the corporate form as an independent entity. Second, middle managers of railroads emerged as powerful political players during this period who capitalized on this discursive shift to advocate for corporate criminal liability as an alternative to individual liability rules directed against them. Third, the Supreme Court upheld corporate criminal lability in 1909 because it was constructed by the era's Republican majority to protect the party's economic preferences, and corporate criminal liability was viewed as consistent with their conservative agenda. These factors were each necessary, but alone insufficient, in paving the way for the Court to validate the principle in 1909. How they fit together sequentially illuminates how the doctrine's construction was contingent on specific political and historical circumstances.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.