The Operation In The Criminal Punishment System: Major Components Of Criminal Justice System

As the global leader in incarceration, America locks up its own citizens at a rate that dwarfs that of any other developed nation. Yet while racial minorities and the urban poor fill American prisons and jails for street crimes, the state has historically struggled to consistently prosecute corporate crime. Why does the American state lock people up for street crimes at extraordinary rates but demonstrate such a limited capacity to prosecute corporate crime? While most scholarship analyzes these questions separately, juxtaposing these phenomena illuminates how the carceral state’s divergent treatments of street crime and corporate crime share common and self-reinforcing ideological and institutional origins. This book is a collection of essays written in the 1990s by eminent sociologists, philosophers and political scientists, is even more relevant in the 21st century edited with a new and provocative introduction.