Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics.

Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics by Katherine Beckett Oxford University Press. 158 pages. $27.50

The violent crime rate has been falling since 1981, but paradoxically Americans' fear of crime has increased considerably, as has support for law-and-order policies. Many pundits say this is a normal reaction to lawlessness--and to liberal approaches to the crime problem. As conservative political scientist James Q. Wilson puts it, "public opinion was well ahead of political opinion in calling attention to the problem of crime."

But Katherine Beckett demonstrates in Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics that such explanations miss the political scheming that has guided public opinion on this subject.

Making Crime Pay shows how various political actors have exploited the crime issue to further conservative aims. Beckett argues that the law-and-order agenda has been, since the 1960s, an integral part of a rightwing project aimed at redirecting the responsibilities of the state from social welfare to social control.

According to Beckett, concern about crime and illegal drug use has very little to do with the actual extent of these problems. The number of times that political elites highlight crime through the media is by far the more significant factor in generating public concern. While the mid- to late-1970s were times of dramatically increased rates of drug use and crime, "the percentage of poll respondents identifying crime and drugs as the nation's most important problem remained quite low throughout this period," she notes.

Beckett argues that Southern officials started cooking up the law-and-order rhetoric as part of their efforts to discredit the civil-rights movement. Local law-enforcement officials often characterized the movement's civil-disobedience tactics as criminal and the result of a breakdown of law and order. They called for a crackdown on hoodlums, agitators, street mobs, and lawbreakers who challenged the Jim Crow status quo.

Conservatives used similar rhetoric to attack Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Politicians and intellectuals began to point to crime, drug addiction, and delinquency as proof of an ineradicable culture of poverty. Conservatives argued that an expanding welfare state would simply reproduce and perpetuate poverty by encouraging social parasitism--both legal (welfare dependency) and illegal (crime).

The GOP targeted white Southerners. As early as 1961, Barry Goldwater argued, "We [Republicans] are not going to get the Negroes as a bloc in the 1964 or 1968 elections, so we might as well go hunting where the ducks are." In the poorest white neighborhoods of Birmingham, Alabama, the Republican vote increased from 49 percent in 1960 to 76 percent in 1964. It was during this period that law-and-order rhetoric emerged on the national level.

While Goldwater lost the 1964 election, his campaign had a significant impact on national politics. In response to increasingly conservative attitudes about crime, President Johnson gradually shifted away from "the view that the most important crime-fighting weapons were civil-rights legislation, war-on-poverty programs, and other policies aimed at promoting inclusion and social reform," Beckett writes.

Richard Nixon's 1968 Presidential campaign continued to fan the flames. And the anti-crime effort paid off, she argues: "By 1969, 81 percent of those polled believed that law and order had broken down, and the majority blamed `Negroes who start riots' and `communists' for this state of affairs," thus merging crime, political dissent, and race.

The issues of crime and drugs declined dramatically following Nixon's exit from office. During Ronald Reagan's 1980 Presidential campaign, however, street crime once again assumed center stage--most significantly in the guise of Reagan's "war on drugs."

This time, many Democrats joined their Republican counterparts in leading the "get-tough" campaign. "The result," writes Beckett, "has been an unprecedented bipartisan consensus regarding the need to expand the size, scope, and resources of the crime-control apparatus and--not coincidentally--to `end welfare as we know it."' Bill Clinton's law-and-order politics are the epitome of this new elite consensus.

Beckett contends that the conservative-led law-and-order campaign has resonated with large sectors of the American public because of its ability to provide a perceived solution "for pressing social and personal problems in ways that are compatible with popular wisdom and cultural beliefs and values."

Conservatives, Beckett writes, have successfully framed criminals (and welfare recipients) as people looking for the easy way out. Racial imagery is inextricably tied to such ideas. Thus, there is a high correlation with white support for punitive policies and prejudice against blacks.

The resulting war on crime and drugs has led to an unprecedented growth and size of the U.S. prison industry. Between 1980 and 1996, the incarcerated population in the United States grew from 500,000 to 1.63 million. Between 1979 and 1994, the percentage of federal prison inmates convicted of nonviolent drug offenses rose from 21 percent to 60 percent.

Even though illegal drug use is evenly distributed by race, minorities are disproportionately targets of the criminal-justice system. "Although survey data suggest that 13 percent of all monthly drug users are black, 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of those convicted of drug possession, and 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug possession are black," Beckett writes. In 1930, 22 percent of those in prison were black; by 1992, the figure was 51 percent.

While the contemporary social landscape is bleak, Beckett's analysis gives reason for hope. Just as the law-and-order ideology was constructed by political conservatives with help from a compliant media, there is room for progressives to advance an alternative agenda.

Public opinion on crime and punishment is surprisingly nuanced, Beckett writes. Americans' support for the death penalty, for example, drops considerably when life imprisonment without parole is offered as an alternative. There is also widespread public sentiment that a deteriorating family life plays an important role in the crime problem. Beckett suggests that by stressing the relationship between corporate-driven inequality and family difficulties, progressives could open up the debate on crime and push it in new directions.

Katherine Beckett's urgent and compelling book unravels the paradox of American attitudes toward crime and points the way to more enlightened policies.

Matthew Jardine is a researcher and activist on international affairs and human-rights issues. His most recent book, co-authored with Constancio Pinto, is "East Timor's Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance" (South End Press, 1997).