American Exceptionalism in Inequality and Poverty: A (Tentative) Historical Explanation

Abstract

The United States is a fascinating case study in the complex links between crime, punishment and inequality, standing out as it does in terms of inequality as measured by a number of economic standards; levels of serious violent crime; and rates of imprisonment, penal surveillance and post-conviction disqualifications. This chapter builds on the authors’ previous work arguing that the exceptional rise in violent crime and punishment in the US from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s can be explained by the interaction of four political and economic variables: ‘technological regime change’; ‘varieties of capitalism’ and ‘varieties of welfare state’; types of ‘political system’; and – critically and specifically – the US as a radical outlier in the degree of local democracy. Three further questions implied by the authors’ previous work are asked. First, why did such distinctive patterns of local democracy arise in America? And how is this political structure tied up with the history and politics of race? Second, what did the distinctive historical development of the US political economy in the 19th century imply for the structure of its criminal justice institutions? And third, why did the burden of crime and punishment come to fall so disproportionately on African Americans?

Support seeking, system avoidance, and citizenship: Social safety net usage after incarceration

“…Scholars who consider the relationship between the punitive state and the welfare state have conceived of a penal‐welfare policy regime that reproduces and deepens inequality (Lacey & Soskice, 2019; Soss et al., 2011b; Wacquant, 2009). This literature has focused on how penal and social policies are designed with the prevailing hypothesis that punitive penal policy is associated with stingy and surveilling social policy (Beckett & Western, 2001; Cavadino & Dignan, 2006; Garland, 2020; Kohler‐Hausmann, 2017).…”

Depression and repression: Global capitalism, economic crisis and penal politics in interwar Greece

“…Further progress in this area, however, requires avoiding analytic tendencies that have to date been restrictive. Six such tendencies, interrelated with one another, stand out: first, what could be referred to as penological reductionism , in the sense that state punishment has been customarily conceptualised and operationalised solely in the form of conventional imprisonment (Cheliotis and Xenakis, 2016, 2020; Hamilton, 2014; Newburn, 2020; Tonry, 2007); second, what may be termed normalcy bias , inasmuch as disproportionate attention has typically been paid to periods of relative economic or political stability (Cheliotis and Sozzo, 2016; Cheliotis and Xenakis, 2016, 2020); third, ahistoricism , to the extent that limited to no concern has usually been shown with the long-term historical trajectories of the variables at issue, be they the economy, politics or state punishment in itself (Gottschalk, 2006; Lacey and Soskice, 2021; Melossi and Pavarini, 2018; Reiner, 2021; Rock, 2005); fourth, occidentalism , in that the focus has been almost fixed on the Western world and, even more so, on Anglophone cases within it (Karstedt, 2013; Lappi-Seppälä and Tonry, 2011; Nelken, 2009); fifth, statism , insofar as analysis has mostly been restricted to the nation-state at the risk of leaving any local-level variations obscure (Barker, 2009; Lynch, 2010; Phelps, 2017); and sixth, methodological nationalism , given that developments inside nation-states have commonly been investigated without consideration of the international, transnational or global networks of which the states in question are part (Anderson, 2018; Jones and Newburn, 2007; Wacquant, 2009b; Xenakis and Ivanov, 2017).…”