NCJ Number
217131
Journal
Punishment & Society: The International Journal of Penology Volume: 9 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2007 Pages: 5-26
Date Published
January 2007
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This article analyzes the changing public discourse about crime and punishment in the United States.
Abstract
The main argument is that the current environment of budgetary constraint has set the stage for a discussion in which the rhetoric of punishment is open to change. The authors illustrate how the fiscal realities of the 21st century have made it impossible to hold on to the rhetoric of punishment and resulting punitive criminal justice policies that dominated public policy during the 1980s and 1990s. The “Get Tough” policies of the 1980s and 1990s turned out to be outrageously expensive, rendering them no longer economically sustainable as State governments struggled with growing expenses and shrinking budgets. Indeed, four out of six of the States under examination entered into special legislative sessions to determine how to balance the rising costs of corrections with diminished State resources. The newspaper data indicate that legislators are attempting to reconstruct drug crimes to change the way the public views these types of offenders so that punishments other than incarceration seem more palatable. The authors term this type of rhetorical reconstruction as the “redistribution of danger talk.” In order to analyze public rhetoric about reform, the authors examined debates among reform advocates that were published in a sample of newspaper articles during the 2003 legislative sessions in six sample States: Arkansas, Iowa, Nevada, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin. Newspaper articles were chosen based on the criteria that they posted their articles on Lexis Nexus, they had a wide readership, and they regularly covered the legislative session. The sample included 150 articles that were published between January 2003 and 1 week after the end of each State’s legislative session. Newspaper articles were coded by emerging theme with the help of Atlas-ti, a software program designed to aid qualitative analyses. Future research should use a longitudinal research design to track reform rhetoric over time. Tables, references