2/15/2008
Naomi Murakawa, Political Science, University of Washington, The Origins of the Carceral Crisis: Racial Order as 'Law and Order' in Postwar American Politics
Students of American criminal justice have been puzzled by the seemingly sudden and aggressive federal intervention in crime control in the mid-1960s. To explain this unprecedented intervention, scholars have produced an impressive body of research on the politicization of crime, the dominant thrust of which holds that rising street crime in the late 1960s catapulted crime onto the national agenda. My research questions this now-conventional wisdom by reconsidering the trajectory of the American carceral state. “Street crime,” I argue, did not simply emerge with rising crime rates; rather, national leaders politicized street crime en route to opposing racial integration and civil rights liberalization more than two decades before crime rates escalated. I argue further that the postwar transformation of racial order into “law and order” is more than just a back-story to current scholarship, as it forces reconsideration of the causal triggers of the nationalization of crime policy. Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. faced an actual crime problem in the 1960s that was infused with racial politics. I suggest the opposite. The U.S. did not confront a crime problem that was then racialized; it confronted a race problem that was then criminalized
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