Law and Order: gênese de um experimento punitivo

Abstract

One of the great embarrassments to the American democracy has been its collective failure to raise any substantial political opposition to the punitive ethos known as law and order that underlies the unprecedented use of imprisonment on its own citizenry. The nation´s prison population grew from less than 200,000 in 1970 to over 2.3 million by 2007. According to the Department of Justice (2007), over 10 million Americans are admitted to jail each year and another 600,000 find their way to prison to spend an average of almost three years largely for property and drug crimes. If children and those over 65 are dropped from the denominator, nearly one in 50 adult Americans is locked up. How dit it all start and what are the reasons for such a phenomenon? This research documents the major shift in the way in which the crime problem was officially perceived and the political positions to which these perceptions gave rise. It aims at analysing how crime-related issues were socially and politically constructed through interpretative, representational, and political processes, in which political elites and the media deployed mediated symbols and mobilized powerful cultural references to call the public opinion´s attention to crime- related problems and defined these problems as the consequence of insufficient punishment and control, and generated popular support for punitive anticrime policies. Despite the complexity of political discourse on crime, it appears that one single view has filled the vacuum created by the demise of the rehabilitative ideal—what David Garland calls “therapeutic nihilism”: get tough on crime. This tough response to the crime problem are predicted upon various and sometimes contradictory explanations of criminal behavior. Despite their differences, these explanations of crime similarly imply that expanding the scope of criminal law and increasing the severity of its penalties are the most appropriate responses to the crime problem. In this get-tough rhetoric, the emphasis has shifted from a concern with rehabilitating and reintegrating offenders to the capacity of the law and the social control system to structure the choices and conduct of individuals. The rhetoric of law and order was first mobilized in the late 1950s, when conservative politicians paid an unprecedented amount of attention to the problem of “street crime”, ridiculed the notion that criminal behavior has socioeconomic causes, and promoted the alternative view that crime is the consequence of insufficient curbs on the appetites and impulses that impel individuals towards criminal activities. This attempt to reconstruct popular perceptions of the crime problem was, in turn, a component of a much larger political contest: the effort to replace social welfare with social control as the principle of state policy. As the civil rights, welfare rights, and the students movements pressured the state to assume greater responsibility for the reduction of social inequalities, conservative politicians attempted to popularize an alternative vision of government, one that diminishes its duty to provide for social welfare but enlarges its capacity and obligation to maintain social control. The central theses of this paper are as follows: 1) The crime issue was a crucial resource for those advocating this reconstruction of social policy. 2) Political initiave and media ressonance, not the official reported incidence of crime, were strongly associated with subsequent public concern about crime. 3) The ascendance of the rhetoric and policies of law and order was not an expression of democracy in action, but rather an ideological framework of the conservative project of state reconstruction.