Abstract:American criminal laws and criminal justice systems are harsher, more punitive, more afflicted by racial disparities and injustices, more indifferent to suffering, and less respectful of human dignity than those of other Western countries. The explanations usually offered-rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s, public anger and anxiety, crime control politics, neoliberal economic and social policies-are fundamentally incomplete. The deeper explanations are four features of American history that shaped value… Show more
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