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Is the pendulum swinging? Crime, punishment, and the potential for reform in the USA

After a steady and sometimes brisk decades-long march toward increasingly harsher approaches to dealing with crime and criminal offenders, some high ranking policy makers seem to be reconsidering the logic and utility of this approach. Senator Jim Webb’s introduction of the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 in March suggests that at least on the federal level, the costs of the perpetual wars on crimes and drugs are being critically examined. Other state-level reforms have also emerged, some reinstating voting rights for former convicts, others releasing low-level offenders in efforts to lower the costs of incarceration, which suggest that a reform movement might be afoot. Two recent texts, After the war on crime: Race, democracy, and a new reconstruction, edited by Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney Lopez, and Jonathon Simon, and Locked out: Felon disenfranchisement and American democracy by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, offer important insights into a possible reorientation in the notion of justice in the USA. After the war on crime, presents a critical assessment of the nation’s wars on crime and drugs, and offers suggestions for directions to heal the rifts left in their wake. This perfectly timed book contains 13 independent articles authored by many of the authoritative experts on crime policy, punishment, and race across the sociological and criminological spectrum. Divided into three sections, the book first addresses ‘Crime, war, and governance’, which examines the nature of the prison and governing poverty, the war on crime and its impact on Mexico, the USA’s policy shift from social welfare to the war on crime, and an illuminating assessment of the lessons learned from nation’s