The provision of public order and the defense of citizens against criminal predation may well be the most important undertaking that any government must accomplish. This claim follows from the most widely accepted definition of the state. Weber tells us that any regime that finds it can no longer win violent contests with domestic rivals can no longer claim to be a government. Hobbes reinforces this point when he tells us that in the absence of a state's ability to perform such tasks, life for citizens in such a society will be “nasty, brutish, and short.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Some of these citizens, of course, quite reasonably may harbor intense anxieties criminal predation and vote for Republican candidates on the basis of this interest. But this claim is not supported by findings that women — who not surprisingly express substantially greater anxieties about criminal victimization than men — are far less likely than males to support harsh criminal punishments (Warr 1995) or vote for Republican law and order candidates.
- 2.
Many sociologists think order rests on consent. Polls in fact show that majorities view social arrangements as just. If such attitudes lead the less affluent who benefit least from existing arrangements to remain passive, the stability of unequal societies is less puzzling. But attitudes at best are weak causes of behavior (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2001; Bishop 2005; Pager and Quillian 2005). And this causal order may be backwards. If the necessity to conform leads those who have least to avoid the disturbing realization that the existing order is unjust, such a consensus account would be based on post hoc rationalizations. Successful efforts by the least prosperous to alter the existing order are costly, perhaps dangerous, and therefore extremely unlikely (Olson 1965). Passivity and attitudes that justify passivity clearly may be the best choice for those least favored by existing arrangements. As long as attitudes are not strong causes of behavior or as long as consensus views largely are rationalizations for obedience based on the futility of rebellion, analyses that take a conflict approach and view order in unequal societies as problematic may provide new insights about the politics of social stability. In any case, this logic does not require that conflict theorists must claim that force is the only or even the most important determinant.
- 3.
Non conflict theories of crime and social order in fact have a different focus — that crime stems from defective socialization and strains in the “social system.” This perspective, however focuses attention away from the politics of crime control and order keeping.
- 4.
Careful reviews of the multiple empirical studies on this issue conducted by legal scholars (Zimring and Hawkins 1986), criminologists (Paternoster 1991; Hood 1998), sociologists (Bailey and Peterson 1999), and economists (Donohue and Wolfers 2006; Levitt 2002) conclude that the death penalty has no discernable general deterrent effects beyond those conferred by long prison terms. This list of skeptics includes a scholar (Levitt) who has repeatedly published findings showing that imprisonment and other policies designed to control crime are effective deterrents.
- 5.
Prisoners on death row escape execution mostly because they win a legal appeal. While local trial courts sentence, state and federal appellate courts handle appeals. The first of three possible capital appeals is mandatory and the initial two typically are decided by state appellate courts. After exhausting their state appeals, offenders can and (almost always do) seek relief in the federal courts. From 1970 to 1995 roughly 41% of all state death sentences were reversed on first appeal and about 9.5% were reversed in the second state appeal. Roughly 40% of the remainder who sought federal relief were successful (Liebman et al. 2000). Most of the rest were executed. Of the few of this remainder who were not, a small number received executive clemency, a larger proportion died before execution, and a few were removed from death row for other miscellaneous reasons. The great majority who obtained appellate relief were re-sentenced to prison after their release from death row.
References
Aarons, Dwight. 1998. “Getting Out of this Mess: Steps Toward Addressing and Avoiding In ordinate Delay in Capital Cases.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 89: 1–58.
Allen, Michael P., and John L. Campbell. 1994. “State Revenue Extraction from Different Income Groups.” American Sociological Review 59: 169–186.
Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Streets. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Aspin, Larry T., and William K. Hall. 1994. “Retention Elections and Judicial Behavior.” Judicature 77: 306–315.
Balbus, Isaac. 1973. The Dialectics of Legal Repression: Black Rebels before the American Criminal Courts. New York: Russell Sage.
Baldous, David C., and George Woodworth. 2003. “Race Discrimination in the Administration of the Death Penalty: An Overview of the Empirical Evidence with Special Emphasis on the Post-1990 Research.” Criminal Law Bulletin 39: 194–226.
Bailey, William C., and Ruth Peterson. 1999. “Capital Punishment, Homicide, and Deterrence.” Pp. 257–277 in Homicide: A Sourcebook. Ed. by M. Duayne Smith and Margaret A. Zahn. 1000 Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bandes, Susan. 2004. “Fear Factor: The Role of Media in Covering and Shaping the Death Penalty.” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 1: 585–597.
Banton, Michael. 1964. The Policeman in the Community. New York: Basic Books.
Barkan, Steven E., and Steven F. Cohn. 1994. “Racial Prejudice and Support for the Death Penalty.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 31: 202–209.
Beckett, Katherine. 1997. Making Crime Pay. New York: Oxford.
Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2001. “Do People Mean What They Say? Implications for Subjective Survey Data.” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 91: 67–72.
Bishop, George F. 2005. The Illusion of Public Opinion: Fact and Artifact in American Public Opinion Polls. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bittner, Egon. 1990. “The Police on Skid Row: A Study of Peacekeeping.” Pp. 30–62 in Aspects of Police Work. Edited by Egon Bittner. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Blalock, Hubert. M. 1967. Towards a Theory of Minority Group Relations. New York: Capricorn Books.
Blume, J. and Theodore Eisenberg. 1999. “Judicial Politics, Death Penalty Appeals, and Case Selection.” Southern California Law Review 72: 465–503.
Blumer, Herbert. 1958. “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position.” Pacific Sociological Review 1: 3–7
Blumstein, Alfred. 1993. “Rationality and Relevance.” Criminology 31: 1–16.
Bobo, Lawrence, and Vincent Hutchings. 1996. “Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer's Theory of Group Position in a Multiracial Social Context.” American Sociological Review 61: 951–972.
Brace, Paul R., and Melinda Gann Hall. 1997. “The Interplay of Preferences, Case Facts, Context, and Rules in the Politics of Judicial Choice.” Journal of Politics 59: 1206–1231.
Bright, S. B. and P. J. Keenan. 1995. “Judges and the Politics of Death: Deciding between the Bill of Rights and the Next Election in Capital Cases.” Boston University Law Review 75: 759–835.
Brooks, Clem, and David Brady. 1999. “Income, Economic Voting, and Long Term Political Change in the U.S., 1952–1996.” Social Forces 77: 1339–1374.
Burawoy, Michael. 2005. “For Public Sociology.” American Sociological Review 70: 4–28.
Burnham, James. 1970. “Notes on Authority, Morality, Power.” The National Review 123: 1283–1289.
Burstein, Paul. 2006. “Why Estimates of the Impact of Public Opinion are Too High: Empirical and Theoretical Implications.” Social Forces 84: 2273–2290.
Caldeira, Greg A., and Andrew T. Cowart. 1980. “Budgets, Institutions, and Change: Criminal Justice Policy in America.” American Journal of Political Science 24: 413–438.
Carroll, Leo, and Claire P. Cornell. 1985. “Racial Composition, Sentencing Reforms, and Rates of Incarceration, 1970–1980.” Justice Quarterly 2: 475–490.
Carter, Dan T. 1996. From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963– 1994. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Chambliss, William J. 1964. “A Sociological Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy.” Social Problems 12: 67–77.
Chambliss, William J. 1994. “Policing the Ghetto Underclass: The Politics of Law and Law Enforcement.” Social Problems 41: 177–194.
Chevigny, Paul. 1995. Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas. New York: The New Press.
Chiricos, Theodore G., and Charles Crawford. 1995. “Race and Imprisonment” Pp. 281–309 in Ethnicity, Race, and Crime. Ed. by Darnell Hawkins. Albany: SUNY Press.
Chiricos, Ted, Kelly Welch, and Marc Gertz. 2004. “Racial Typification of Crime and Support for Punitive Measures.” Criminology 42: 359–389.
Constanzo, Mark. 1997. Just Revenge: The Costs and Consequences of the Death Penalty. New York: St. Martins Press.
Converse, Phillip E. 1964. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.” Pp. 75–169 in Ideology and Discontent. Ed. by David A. Apter. New York: Free Press.
Culliver, Concetta and Robert Sigler. 1995. “Police Use of Deadly Force in Tennessee Following Tennessee v. Garner.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 11: 187–195.
Davey, Joseph D. 1998. The Politics of Prison Expansion: Winning Elections by Waging War on Crime. Westport CN: Praeger.
Dodge, Lowell, Laurie E. Eckland, Harriet C. Ganson, Lisa Cassady, James L. Flemming, and Douglas M. Sloan. 1990. “Death Penalty Sentencing.” Pp. 268–274 in Death Penalty in America. Ed. by Hugo A. Bedau. New York: Oxford.
Donohue, John J. and Justin Wolfers. 2006. “Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate.” Stanford Law Review 58: 791–845.
Edsall, Thomas B., and Mary D. Edsall. 1991. Chain Reaction. New York: W. W. Norton.
Erickson, Robert S. 1976. “The Relationship between Public Opinion and State Policy: A New Look Based on Some Forgotten Data.” American Journal of Political Science 20: 25–36.
Ericson, Richard V. 1982. Reproducing Order: A Study of Police Patrol Work. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Ericson, Richard V. 1989. “Patrolling the Facts: Secrecy and Publicity in Police Work.” British Journal of Sociology 31: 219–249.
Faulkner, Samuel. 1999. Decision Making and Legal Precedence. Columbus Ohio: Ohio Peace Officer Training Commission.
Fosset, Mark A., and K. Jill Kiecolt. 1989. “The Relative Size of Minority Populations and white Racial Attitudes.” Social Science Quarterly 70: 820–835.
Foucault, Michael. 1977. Discipline and Punish. London: Vintage.
Friedrich, R. 1977. The Impact of Organizational, Individual, and Situational Factors on Police Behavior. PhD dissertation, School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany.
Fyfe, James J. 1979. “Administrative Intervention on Police Shooting Discretion: An Empirical Examination.” Journal of Criminal Justice 7: 309–323.
Galliher, James M., and John F. Galliher. 1997. “Deha Vu All Over Again:' The Recurring Life and Death of Capital Punishment Legislation in Kansas.” Social Problems 44: 369–385.
Garland, David. 1990. Punishment and Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Garland, David. 2001. The Culture of Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Geller, William, and Kevin Karales. 1981. Split-Second Decisions: Shootings of & by Chicago Police. Chicago: Law Enforcement Study Group.
Geller, William, and Michael Scott. 1992. Deadly Force: What We Know. Washington, DC: Police Executive Forum Research.
Giles, Michael W., and Melanie A. Buckner. 1993. “David Duke and Black Threat.” Journal of Politics 55: 702–713.
Giles, Michael W., and Kaenan Hertz. 1994. “Racial Threat and Partisan Identification.” American Political Science Review 88: 317–326.
Goldfield, Michael. 1997. The Color of Politics. New York: New Press.
Goode, William J. 1972. “The Place of Force in Modern Society.” American Sociological Review 37: 507–519.
Greenberg, David, Ronald Kessler, and Colin Loftin. 1985. “Social inequality and crime control.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 76: 684–704.
Haines, Herbert H. 1996. Against Capital Punishment: The Anti Death Penalty Movement in America. 1972–1994. New York: Oxford Press.
Hall, Melinda Gann. 1992. “Electoral Politics and Strategic Voting in State Supreme Courts.” Journal of Politics 54: 427–446.
Hall, Melinda Gann. 1995. “Justices as Representatives: Elections and Judicial Politics in America.” American Politics Quarterly 23: 485–503.
Heer, David M. 1959. “The Sentiment of white Supremacy: An Ecological Study.” American Journal of Sociology 64: 592–598.
Helms, Ronald, and David Jacobs. 2002. “The Political Context of Sentencing: An Analysis of Community and Individual Determinants.” Social Forces 81: 577–604.
Hibbs, Douglas. 1987. The American Political Economy. Cambridge: Harvard
Hood, Roger. 1998. “Capital Punishment” Pp. 739–776 in The Handbook of Crime and Punishment, Ed. by Michael Tonry. New York: Oxford University Press.
Huang, W. S. Wilson, Mary A. Finn, Barry R. Ruback, and Robert R. Friedmann. 1996. “Individual and Contextual Influences on Sentence Lengths: Examining Political Conservatism.” The Prison Journal 76: 398–419.
Huber, Gregory A., and Sanford A. Gordon. 2004. “Accountability and Coercion: Is Justice Blind When It Runs for Office?” American Journal of Political Science 48: 247–263.
Hughes, Everett C. 1963. “Good People and Dirty Work.” Pp. 67–89 in The Other Side, edited by Howard Becker. New York: Free Press.
Hurwitz, Jon, and Mark Peffley. 2005. “Playing the Race Card in the Post-Willie Horton Era.” Public Opinion Quarterly 69: 99–112.
Jacobs, David. 1979. “Inequality and Police Strength: Conflict Theory and Coercive Control in Metropolitan Areas.” American Sociological Review 44: 913–925.
Jacobs, David and David W. Britt. 1979. “Inequality and the Police Use of Deadly Force.” Social Problems 26: 403–412.
Jacobs, David and Jason T. Carmichael. 2001. “The Politics of Punishment across Time and Space: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis of Imprisonment Rates.” Social Forces 80: 61–89.
Jacobs, David and Jason T. Carmichael. 2002. “The Political Sociology of the Death Penalty: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis.” American Sociological Review 67: 109–131.
Jacobs, David and Ronald Helms. 1996. “Towards a Political Model of Incarceration: A Time-Series Examination of Multiple Explanations for Prison Admission Rates.” American Journal of Sociology 102: 323–357.
Jacobs, David and Stephanie L. Kent. 2007. “The Determinants of Executions since 1951: How Politics, Protests, Public Opinion, and Social Divisions Shape Capital Punishment.” Social Problems 54: 297–318.
Jacobs, David and Richard Kleban. 2003. “Political Institutions, Minorities, and Punishment: A Pooled Cross-National Analysis of Imprisonment Rates.” Social Forces 82: 725–755.
Jacobs, David and Robert M. O'Brien. 1998. “The Determinants of Deadly Force: A Structural Analysis of Police Violence.” American Journal of Sociology 103: 837–862.
Jacobs, David, Zhenchao Qian, Jason Carmichael, and Stephanie Kent. 2007. “Who Survives on Death Row? An Individual and Contextual Analysis.” American Sociological Review 72: 610–632.
Jacobs, David and Daniel Tope. 2007. “The Politics of Resentment in the Post Civil-Rights Era: Minority Threat, Homicide, and Ideological Voting in Congress.” American Journal of Sociology 112: 1458–1494.
Jacobs, Bruce A. and Richard Wright. 2006. Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal Underworld. New York: Cambridge.
Kania, Richard, and Wade Mackey. 1977. “Police Violence as a Function of Community Characteristics.” Criminology 15: 27–48.
Kent, Stephanie L. and David Jacobs. 2005. “Minority Threat and Police Strength From 1980 to 2000: A Fixed-Effects Analysis of Nonlinear and Interactive Effects in Large U.S. Cities.” Criminology 43: 731–760.
Key, V. O. 1949. Southern Politics. New York: Vintage Books.
Kobler, Arthur L. 1975. “Figures (and Perhaps Some Facts) On Police Killings of Civilians in the United States, 1965–69.” Journal of Social Issues 31: 185–191.
Koch, Larry W., and John F. Galliher. 1993. “Michigan's Continuing Abolition of the Death Penalty and the Conceptual Components of Symbolic Legislation.” Social and Legal Studies 2: 323–346.
Kramer, John, and Darrell Steffensmeier. 1993. “Race and Imprisonment Decisions” The Sociological Quarterly 34: 357–376.
Kuklinski, James H., and John E. Stanga. 1979. “Political Participation and Government Responsiveness: The Behavior of California Superior Courts.” American Political Science Review 73: 1090–1099.
Lacey, Nicola. 1988. State Punishment. London: Routledge.
Langworthy, Robert H., and John T. Whitehead. 1986. “Liberalism and Fear as Explanations for Punitiveness.” Criminology 24: 575–591.
Levitt, Steven D. 2002. “Deterrence.” Pp. 435–450 in Crime: Public Policies for Crime Control. Ed. by James Q. Wilson and Joan Petersillia. Oakland: ICS Press.
Lipschultz, Jeremy H., and Michael L. Hilt. 2002. Crime and Local Television News: Dramatic, Breaking, and Live From the Scene. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Liebman, James S., Jeffrey Fagan, and Valerie West. 2000. “A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973–1995.” Report, Columbia University Law School.
Liska, Allen E., J. J. Lawrence, and M. Benson. 1981. “Perspectives on the Legal Order: The Capacity for Social Control.” American Journal of Sociology 87: 412–426.
Liska, Allen E., J. J. Lawrence, and A. Sanchirico. 1982. “Fear of Crime as a Social Fact.” Social Forces 60: 760–771.
Liska, Allen E., and Jiang Yu. 1992. “Specifying and Testing the Threat Hypothesis.” Pp. 53–68 in Social Threat and Social Control. Ed. by Allen Liska. Albany: SUNY Press.
Lundman, Richard J., and Robert L. Kaufman. 2003. “Driving While Black: Effects of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender on Citizen Self-Reports of Traffic Stops and Police Violations.” Criminology 41: 195–220.
Manning, Peter K. 1994. “The Police: Symbolic Capital, Class, and Control.” Pp. 80–99 in Inequality, Crime, & Social Control. Ed. by George S. Bridges and Martha A. Meyers. Boulder CO: Westview Press.
Mendelberg, Tali. 2001. The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Meyer, M. W. 1980. “Police Shooting at Minorities The Case of Los Angeles.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 452: 89–110.
Miller, Warren F., and Donald E. Stokes. 1963. “Constituency Influence in Congress.” American Political Science Review 57: 45–56.
Molnar, Thomas. 1976. Authority and its Enemies. New Rochell, New York: Arlington House.
Myers, Martha A., and Suzette M. Talarico. 1987. The Social Contexts of Criminal Sentencing. New York: Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action. New York: Schocken.
Pager, Devah and Lincoln Quillian. 2005. “Walking the Talk? What Employers Say Versus What They Do.” American Sociological Review 70: 355–380.
Parker, Robert Nash, and Allan V. Horwitz. 1986. “Unemployment, Crime, and Imprisonment: A Panel Approach.” Criminology 24: 751–773.
Paternoster, Raymond. 1991. Capital Punishment in America. New York: Lexington Books.
Paternoster, Raymond, Robert Brame, Sarah Bacon. 2008. The Death Penalty: America's Experience with Capital Punishment. New York: Oxford.
Perrow, Charles. 1987. Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay. New York: Random House.
Quillian, Lincoln. 1996. “Group Threat and Regional Change in Attitudes toward African Americans.” American Journal of Sociology 102: 816–860.
Quillian, Lincoln, and Devah Pager. 2002. “Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime.” American Journal of Sociology 107: 717–767.
Reiss, Albert J. 1972. “Police Brutality.” Pp. 178–211 In The Criminal in the Arms of the Law, Vol. 2, Crime and Justice, Leon Radzinowicz and Marvin E. Wolfgang, eds. Pp. 293–308.
Roberts, Julian V., and Don Edwards. 1989. “Contextual Effects in Judgments of Crimes, Criminals, and the Purposes of Sentencing.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 19: 902–917.
Rossi, Peter H., Richard Berk, and B. K. Edison. 1974. The Roots of Urban Discontent: Public Policy, Municipal Institutions, and the Ghetto. NY: John Wiley.
Rubenstein, Jonathan. 1973. City Police. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girioux.
Rusche, Georg, and Otto Kirchheimer. 1939. Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Russell and Russell.
Sampson, Robert J., and John H. Laub. 1993. “Structural Variations in Juvenile Court Processing: Inequality, the Underclass, and Social Control.” Law & Society Review 27: 285–311.
Savelsberg, Joachim J. 1994. “Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment.” American Journal of Sociology 99: 911–943.
Scheingold, Stuart A. 1991. The Politics of Street Crime. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Scott, W. Richard. 1987. Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Sherman, Lawrence W. 1980a. “Execution without Trial: Police Homicide and the Constitution.” Vanderbilt Law Review 33: 71–100.
Sherman, Lawrence W. 1980b. “Causes of Police Behavior.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 17: 69–100.
Sherman Lawrence W. and Robert H. Langworthy. 1979. “Measuring Homicide by Police Officers.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 70: 546–560.
Sorensen, Jonathan B., James W. Marquardt, and Deon E. Brock. 1993. “Factors Related to Killings of Felons by Police Officers: A Test of the Community Violence and Conflict Hypotheses.” Justice Quarterly 10: 417–440.
Sparger, Jerry R. and David J. Giacopassi. 1992. “Memphis Revisited: A Reexamination of Police Shootings after the Garner Decision.” Justice Quarterly 9: 211–225.
Spurr, Stephen J. 2002. “The Future of Capital Punishment: Determinants of the Time from Death Sentence to Execution.” International Review of Law and Economics 22: 1–23.
Steffensmeier, Darrell, Jeffrey Ulmer, and John Kramer. 1998. “The Interaction of Race, Gender, and Age in Criminal Sentencing: The Punishment of Being Young, Black, and Male.” Criminology 36: 763–797.
Stucky, Thomas D., Karen Heimer, and Joseph B. Lang. 2005. “Partisan Politics, Electoral Competition, and Imprisonment.” Criminology 43: 211–248.
Sundquist, James L. 1983. Dynamics of the Party System. Washington: Brookings.
Sutton, John. 2000. “Imprisonment and Social Classification in Five Common-Law Democracies, 1955–1985.” American Journal of Sociology 106: 350–386.
Taylor, Marylee C. 1998. “How white Attitudes Vary with the Racial Composition of Local Populations.” American Sociological Review 63: 512–535.
Taylor, Douglas, Kim Lane Schepele, and Arthur L. Stinchcombe. 1979. “Salience of Crime and Support for Harsher Criminal Sanctions.” Social Problems 46: 413–424.
Thorne, Melvin J., 1990. American Conservative Thought Since World War II. New York: Greenwood Press.
Wacquant, Loic. 2000. “The New Particular Institution: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto.” Theoretical Criminology 4: 377–389.
Wacquant, Loic. 2001. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment & Society 3: 95–134.
Waegel, William B. 1984. “The Use of Lethal Force by Police: The Effect of Statutory Change.” Crime and Delinquency 30: 121–140.
Walker, Samuel, Cassia Spohn, and Miriam DeLone. 1996. The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Wallace, Don. 1981. “The Political Economy of Incarceration: Trends in Late Capitalism, 1971–1977.” Insurgent Sociologist 10: 59–66.
Warr, Mark. 1995. “Poll Trends: Public Opinion on Crime and Punishment.” Public Opinion Quarterly 59: 296–310.
Weidner, Robert R., and Richard S. Frase. 2003. “Legal and Extralegal Determinants of Intercounty Differences in Prison Use.” Criminal Justice Policy Review 14: 377–400.
Weitzer, Ronald and Steven Tuch. 2002. “Perceptions of Racial Profiling: Race, Class, and Personal Experience.” Criminology 40: 435–456.
Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Whitman, James Q. 2003. Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe. New York: Oxford.
Wilson, James Q. 1971. Varieties of Police Behavior. New York: Atheneum.
Yates, Jeff and Richard Fording. 2005. “Politics and State Punitiveness in Black and white.” The Journal of Politics. 67: 1099–1121.
Zimring, Franklin E., and Gordon Hawkins. 1986. Capital Punishment and The American Agenda. New York: Cambridge.
Zimring, Franklin E. 2003. The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment. New York: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jacobs, D. (2010). The Political Sociology of Criminal Justice. In: Leicht, K.T., Jenkins, J.C. (eds) Handbook of Politics. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68930-2_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-68930-2_29
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-68929-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-68930-2
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)