Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (review)

American democracy is at great risk as a result of the "war on crime" – if Jonathan Simon is right. Simon eloquently explores ways in which America is "governed through crime." His account is mostly descriptive. While lacking systematic data collection, it is based on intimate familiarity with the subject matter. Also, while short on systematic development or application of theory, there is much implicit and some explicit exploration of the conditions and consequences of the state of American democracy. The "war on crime," Simon argues, has thoroughly transformed the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government; its racialized focus has contributed to mass imprisonment on a hitherto unknown scale and character, and governing through crime now rules into and through family life, educational systems and workplaces. Sociologists of many specialties should thus take notice, those concerned with politics, family, education, work and, of course, crime and punishment. And so should political scientists, historians and a broader public that cares about American democracy.

An introduction and brief discussion of selected literature are followed by a chapter each on the three branches of government. First, the "war on crime" has turned the American prosecutor into a model for political authority; governors increasingly govern like prosecutors. And prosecutors themselves have gained considerable jurisdiction over communities. Second, "lawmakers have defined the crime victim as the idealized political subject, the model subject, whose circumstances and experiences have come to stand for the general good."(110) Third, legislation has limited discretion of judges and the courts' ability to hear cases. Courts themselves, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, have become cautious in challenging the dominant political will, since they have been increasingly understood as indifferent toward the fate of ordinary Americans. Finally, political institutional changes correspond with the growth of mass imprisonment and with the simultaneous transformation of the prison into a "space of pure custody, a human warehouse or even a kind of social waste management facility."(143) This chapter's conclusions sketch the dysfunctional and conflict-producing consequences of such penal policy, consequences that may, eventually, bring down the system that produced it. Here is a point of hope, but the process of reversal may be costly.

Simon is sufficiently inspired by Foucault to argue that "governing through crime" is not limited to institutions of the political system. Three chapters address the role of families, educational institutions and workplaces. The family, "once a space deemed too private for the intrusion of criminal justice… has become crisscrossed by tension resulting from crime, domestic violence, child abuse, school misconduct, and housing and insurance exclusion… Perhaps no other set of relationships more powerfully anchors the constellation of meanings and practices we call governing through crime."(205) Simultaneously, schools become subject to the crime control imperative, at great cost to their educational mission. Schools share with prisons "the institutional imperative that crime is simultaneously the most important problem they have to deal with and a reality whose 'existence' – as defined by the federally imposed edict of ever-expanding data collection – is precisely what allows these institutions to maintain and expand themselves in perpetuity."(231) Federal legislation and funding programs contribute to this trend. Finally, the crime theme has come to dominate the workplace as well. Companies seek to accept – and govern – their opportunistic agents: "In this perspective, crime is not an aberration at the edges of the employment relationship but an inherent and constitutive struggle."(256)

These are strong arguments, and Simon accumulates substantial plausibility to support them. This reader worries, at times, that Simon, with a penologist's microscopic lens, misses out on broader economic and geopolitical conditions of the political system that other disciplinary "gazes" would consider. Further, much theoretical and empirical work remains to be done. Building on Simon's leads, nation-specific institutions (e.g., particular features of the American prosecutorial system) have causal significance, in line with Weberian insights...