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Megan's Law: Crime and Democracy in Late Modern America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Jonathan Simon
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Abstract

To an unprecedented degree American society at the turn of the twentieth century is governed through crime. Nearly three percent of adults are in the custody of the correctional system. Crime and fear of crime enter into a large part of the fundamental decisions in life: where to live, how to raise your family, where to locate your business, where and when to shop, and so on. The crime victim has become the veritable outline of a new form of political subjectivity. This essay explores the complex entanglements of democracy and governing through crime. The effort to build democratic governance after the American Revolution was carried out in part through the problem of crime and punishment. Today, however, the enormous expansion of governing through crime endangers the effort to reinvent democracy for the twenty-first century.

Type
Symposium: Law, Democracy, and Society
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , Fall 2000 , pp. 1111 - 1150
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2000 

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