American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment

Across the U.S., there was an explosion of severity in nearly every form of governmental response to crime from the 1970s through the 2000s. This book examines the typically ignored forms punishment in America beyond incarceration and capital punishment to include probation and parole supervision rates-and revocation rates, an ever-growing list of economic penalties imposed on offenders, and a web of collateral consequences of conviction unimaginable just decades ago. Across these domains, American punitiveness exceeds that in other developed democracies-where measurable, by factors of five-to-ten. In some respects, such as rates of incarceration and (perhaps) correctional supervision, the U.S. is the world "leader." Looking to Europe and other English-speaking countries, the book's contributors shed new light on America's outlier status, and examine its causes. One causal theory examined in detail is that the U.S. has been exceptional not just in penal severity since the 1970s, but also in its high rates of high rates of homicide and other serious violent crimes.

With leading researchers from many fields and national perspectives, American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment shows that the largest problems of crime and justice cannot be brought into focus from the vantage point of any one jurisdiction. Looking cross-nationally, the book addresses what it would take for America to rejoin the mainstream of the Western world in its uses of criminal penalties.

Kevin R. Reitz is James Annenberg La Vea Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota.

List of Contributors
List of Figures and Tables
Introduction, Kevin Reitz

Part 1: American Exceptionalism: Perspectives
Chapter 1: American Exceptionalism in Crime, Punishment, and Disadvantage: Race, Federalization, and Politicization in the Perspective of Local Autonomy, Nicola Lacey and David Soskice

Chapter 2: The Concept of American Exceptionalism and the Case of Capital Punishment, David Garland

Chapter 3: Penal Optimism: Understanding American Mass Imprisonment from a Canadian Perspective, Cheryl Marie Webster and Anthony N. Doob

Chapter 4: The Complications of Penal Federalism: American Exceptionalism or Fifty Different Countries?, Franklin E. Zimring

Part 2: American Exceptionalism in Crime
Chapter 5: American Exceptionalism in Comparative Perspective: Explaining Trends and Variation in the Use of Incarceration, Tapio Lappi-Seppälä

Chapter 6: How Exceptional Is the History of Violence and Criminal Justice in the United States? Variation across Time and Space as the Keys to Understanding Homicide and Punitiveness, Randolph Roth

Chapter 7: Making the State Pay: Violence and the Politicization of Crime in Comparative Perspective, Lisa L. Miller

Chapter 8: Comparing Serious Violent Crime in the United States and England and Wales: Why it Matters, and How It Can be Done, Zelia Gallo, Nicola Lacey, and David Soskice

Part 3
Chapter 9: American Exceptionalism in Community Supervision: A Comparative Analysis of Probation in the United States, Scotland, and Sweden, Edward E. Rhine and Faye S. Taxman

Chapter 10: American Exceptionalism in Parole Release and Supervision: A European Perspective, Dirk van Zyl Smit and Alessandro Corda

11. Collateral Sanctions and American Exceptionalism: A Comparative Perspective, Nora V. Demleitner

Notes
References
Index