Possibilities and Contestation in Twenty-First-Century US Criminal Justice Downsizing

Abstract

After four decades of an expanding carceral state, political leaders are increasingly championing proposals framed as smart—rather than simply tough—on crime. Yet as states increasingly adopt progressive reforms like scaling back the drug war, punishment in other respects continues to grow harsher. This article applies the agonistic perspective to explain these contradictory trends. I argue that the struggles of agonists in the penal field, in the context of socio-structural changes, have produced this pattern of reform. In particular, although the conservative Right on Crime movement has claimed much of the credit, recent policy shifts would not have been possible without the long struggle of progressive and moderate actors throughout the past four decades to challenge the punitive status quo. In addition, the emergent alliances between groups with contrasting political ideologies help explain both the possibilities and limitations of reform.

The Politics, Promise, and Peril of Criminal Justice Reform in the Context of Mass Incarceration

“…More-optimistic accounts emphasize the significance of the recent mobilization of conservative reform advocates (Dagan & Teles 2014Green 2015;Travis 2014) and the political opportunities afforded by heightened fiscal concerns in the post-Recession period (Aviram 2015; see also Phelps 2016, Phelps & Pager 2016. By contrast, more-pessimistic accounts foreground the problem of path dependence, especially the power of institutions with a vested interest in mass incarceration (Gottschalk 2015;Page 2011a,b;Thorpe 2015), the ongoing invocation of the need to get even tougher on people convicted of comparatively serious crimes (Beckett et al 2016, Gottschalk 2015, Seeds 2016) and the challenge of harnessing the discretion of the criminal justice actors whose everyday practices notably impact penal outcomes (Cadora 2014).…”

Juvenile Facility Staff Contestations of Change

“…Thus, they had worked in a system that had spanned a number of 'reformers', and thus relied upon what they felt was a strategy of punishment that 'worked' through the reforms, which was largely one that centered behavioral control as punishment. Appeals to this 'common sense' of punishment remain a powerful tool in the arsenal of resistance to penal change (Phelps, 2016). The staff members' responses to the reductions in the use of restraints points to the persistence of ideas about disciplinary control; their sense that they might be losing 'control' over the young people (as opposed to their reflections on the safety of young people)…”

Breaking the Pendulum: Una sugerente lectura agonística sobre la penalidada

“…En realidad, el libro de Goodman, Page y Phelps no es sino la expresión más acabada de un recorrido analítico previo que conforma una tradición de pensamiento emergente. Por una parte, los propios autores ya habían publicado contribuciones en formatos más breves (Goodman, Page y Phelps 2015, Page 2013, Phelps 2016, Rubin y Phelps 2017 pero también de extensión análoga (Page 2011), que sentaban las bases de su método de análisis. De forma más genérica, las tesis de Pierre Bourdieu que se traslucen en el texto 2 ya habían comenzado a inspirar diversos estudios sobre la penalidad (vid., entre muchos otros, Chan 2004, González-Sánchez 2017, Hathazy 2013, Page 2011, Salle 2016vid.…”