Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Introduction Crime and American Governance -- 1 Power, Authority, and Criminal Law -- 2 "Prosecutor-in-Chief" Executive Authority and the War on Crime -- 3 We the Victims Fearing Crime and Making Law -- 4 Judgment and Distrust The Jurisprudence of Crime and the Decline of Judicial Governance -- 5 Project Exile Race, the War on Crime, and Mass Imprisonment -- 6 Crime Families Governing Domestic Relations Through Crime -- 7 Safe Schools Reforming Education Through Crime -- 8 Penalty Box Crime, Victimization, and Punishment in the Deregulated Workplace -- 9 Wars of Governance From Cancer to Crime to Terror -- Notes -- References -- Index.

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendantfocus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world becomedominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal?In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered aready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilledover into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime.This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules oureveryday life.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.