A Reaction to The Politics of Injustice: Book Derides Harsh Penal Measures

The criminal justice system now in place in the United States has been in a state of constant evolution over the past few hundred years. After all this time, there has yet to be a general consensus on what the ideal system is. Recently, crime and punishment have become major issues in electoral politics with consensus pointing toward the harshly punitive side. Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson, in their book The Politics of Injustice, reason, “The punitive turn in crime policy is not primarily the result of a worsening crime problem or an increasingly fearful and vengeful public. Rather, above all else, growing punitiveness reflects efforts by national politicians to shift public policy on a variety of social problems – including crime, addiction, and poverty – toward harsher, more repressive solutions” (Beckett xii). Politicians are using the politics of panic to support ill advised and harsh penal measures when other methods will more effectively address the problem.

Take capital punishment as an example of this. In America, thirty-eight states and the federal government have the death penalty (Adler 584). The main cause of crime, according to many politicians in America, is the mercy of the criminal justice system. It has been shown, by many other democratic nations such as Great Britain and Canada, that easier sentencing has more positive results. In fact, the United States is the only remaining Western democracy that has held on to capital punishment. We have clung to this antiquated form of punishment for so long because politicians are afraid to appear “soft on crime” in today’s society.