For more than two decades, the United States has been at war with street crime, but we have precious little to show for it. Our obsession with punishment at the expense of, indeed to the exclusion of, prevention is not just futile but criminogenic and divisive. This article explains what is problematic about our indiscriminately punitive response to street crime and explores the political forces driving these self-defeating policies. What emerges is an understanding of the politics of street crime that is rooted less in the fear of crime than in a variety of anxieties that transcend street crime but are affectively related to it. Criminals provide a convenient target for the anger that is widely felt, but is not quite appropriate to express, with respect to unwelcome changes in race relations, employment opportunities, homelessness, and the like. To serve their own distinct but convergent purposes, the media, the public, and the politicians all contribute to the perpetuation of our perverse approach to controlling street crime. While there are countervailing forces at work, they seem unlikely to prevail in the foreseeable future.
Just as the formation of nation-states was one of the defining characteristics of an earlier era, their rapid and often radical transformation is one of the defining characteristics of ours. Under pressures variously labeled transnationalism and globalization, state forms throughout the world alter and adapt, adding new functions, shedding old ones, refining institutional processes, developing new alliances within and beyond national borders, sometimes increasing democratic tendencies, sometimes weakening them. In response to those pressures and the alterations and adaptations of states, local and subnational forces assert themselves, sometimes challenging the state, sometimes working with and within it. As a result, increasingly scholars in many different fields are examining complex global-local linkages and are attentive to the manifestations of global phenomena at the local level (see, e.g., Kearney, 1995). All of this is by now something of a familiar story. Yet this is not true for scholars of, or scholarship on, the legal profession. Rarely has research on the legal profession taken the connection of lawyers and the formation and transformation of states as its subject (for an important exception, see Halliday and Karpik, 1997). While state transformation and globalization clearly influence, and are influenced by, law and lawyers, with two notable exceptions (Dezalay and Garth, 1996; Halliday and Karpik, 1997), available research tends to ignore these interdependencies. Instead, as Terrence Halliday (1998a: 3) puts it, most research on lawyers focuses "on the internal organization and behavior of legal professions, overwhelmingly attends to single countries and, within national studies; it is the economic organization and behavior of professions, especially the market for legal services, that has captured most scholarly attention." The Disaggregated State The context for this inquiry into cause lawyering, thus, is defined by two processes, globalization and state transformation/democratization and the way that each in its own way, and in combination with the another, contributes to the redistribution or reconfiguration of state power. In our analysis, we want to honor the analytical distinctions between globalization and state transformation while at the same time
This article focuses on the Community Protection Act (CPA), the State of Washington's legislative effort to control sexual violence, and on the victim advocacy groups that played a prominent role in this effort. It is argued by some, most recently by republican criminologists, that victim advocates serve democratic ideals and introduce into criminal process important values and interests that are neglected by professionals. Others argue that victim advocacy tends to promote punitive policies that empower the state, jeopardize constitutional rights, and divert attention from causes to symptoms. The evidence gathered in this research lends credence to the critics of republican criminology. Victim advocates were not reliable carriers of republican values in their strenuous support of the CPA, the central provisions of which reduce civil liberties and promote exclusion rather than reintegration.
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