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The Political Sociology of Criminal Justice

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Handbook of Politics

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

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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.”

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Notes

  1. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    David Jacobs

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  1. David Jacobs
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  1. Department of Sociology, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Kevin T. Leicht

  2. Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    J. Craig Jenkins

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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

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