Overview

"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."

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9780190203566

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Reviews

Penal policy is complex. By adding fines, jails, probation, and parole into the sanctioning mix, some of the contributors in this volume show that the United States is an even greater outlier in its harshness of penal sanctioning than is generally recognized. Other contributors, pursuing fine-grained analyses of variations among states and counties, reveal that many local and state jurisdictions in the United States compare favorably with the most progressive Western European countries. This is an important book that should be widely read and discussed. --Malcolm M. Feeley, Claire Sanders Clements Professor of Jurisprudence and Social Policy, University of California, Berkeley School of Law Serious scholars of penal policy must read Kevin Reitz's American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment. By now, we all know that America overpunishes. But many fundamental questions have remained unanswered -'What explains these punitive policies? Are we only an outlier in incarceration, or are probation, parole, financial penalties, crime rates, collateral sanctions, and the death penalty also implicated?' Now we have answers. Reitz, the nation's premier sentencing scholar, has assembled eleven original essays from the most distinguished scholars, and each essay is serious scholarship at its best-deeply empirical, but understandable for the lay reader. This book will deepen our understanding of America's mass incarceration disaster, and could serve as a rallying cry for authentic criminal justice reform. --Joan Petersilia, Aldebert H. Sweet Professor of Law, Stanford Law School American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment breaks important new ground in the field of crime and punishment. A stellar group of authors explore aspects of American exceptionalism that have so far been overlooked by scholars. The volume broadens the scope of American exceptionalism studies to include sanctions beyond incarceration and the death penalty; as such it will inform and guide the discourse and scholarship for years to come. --Julian V. Roberts, Professor of Criminology, University of Oxford

Author Information

Kevin R. Reitz is James Annenberg La Vea Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota. He has written about sentencing law, policy, and procedure, and the American criminal justice system for more than 25 years. Over that time, he has worked with criminal justice agencies in many states, local governments, and other countries. He served as lead Reporter for the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code: Sentencing (final approval, 2017).

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