Dual Justice:
America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime
(University of Chicago Press, Forthcoming 2024)
America is the global leader incarceration, locking up its own citizens at a rate that dwarfs that of any other developed nation. At the same time, it has historically struggled to prosecute corporate crime. Why has the American state developed the capacity to incarcerate its citizens at globally and historically unprecedented rates, but never developed the ongoing capacity to prosecute corporate criminals?
I argue that the criminal justice system’s divergent treatments of street and corporate criminals share common and self-reinforcing institutional and ideological origins. Through an analysis of intellectual history, legal and policy debates, and institutional development dating back to the late nineteenth century, my research demonstrates how the punitive character and class biases of contemporary criminal law and penal policy emerged and took root. Across eight chapters, I illustrate how contrasting political constructions of street and corporate crime have historically reflected common ideas and assumptions about what causes and constitutes crime. During formative historical junctures ranging from the Progressive Era to today, policymakers have drawn on prevailing intellectual and ideological discourses about crime to justify punishment for street crimes and lenience for corporate crimes. These developments embedded class inequalities into the criminal justice institutions that facilitated the carceral state’s rise while the regulatory state has become the government’s primary means of controlling corporate crime.
This provides new insights into how and why crime policy has hardened class divides in American society. The development of the carceral state, regulatory state, and corporate criminal law should not be viewed as as separate developmental threads, but as processes that have overlapped and intersected in ways that have reinforced politically constructed understandings about what counts as “crime” and who counts as a “criminal" in America.