Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime

Available via the University of Chicago Press [link] and Amazon [link]
While America incarcerates its most marginalized citizens at a unparalleled rate, the nation has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. Dual Justice unearths the intertwined histories of these two phenomena and reveals that they constitute more than just modern hypocrisy.
By tracing the carceral and regulatory states’ evolutions from 1870 through today, Dual Justice shows that America’s divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct. Across eight chapters, the book reveals how these contrasting constructions of street and corporate crime have shaped American politics since the nineteenth century, embedding deep inequalities into the criminal justice institutions that facilitated the carceral state’s rise while the regulatory state has become the government’s primary means of controlling corporate crime.
Since then, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Dual Justice analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America’s legal system. This reveals that the development of the carceral state, regulatory state, and corporate criminal law should not be viewed as as separate developmental threads, but as processes that have overlapped and intersected in ways that have reinforced politically constructed understandings about what counts as “crime” and who counts as a “criminal" in America.
While America incarcerates its most marginalized citizens at a unparalleled rate, the nation has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. Dual Justice unearths the intertwined histories of these two phenomena and reveals that they constitute more than just modern hypocrisy.
By tracing the carceral and regulatory states’ evolutions from 1870 through today, Dual Justice shows that America’s divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct. Across eight chapters, the book reveals how these contrasting constructions of street and corporate crime have shaped American politics since the nineteenth century, embedding deep inequalities into the criminal justice institutions that facilitated the carceral state’s rise while the regulatory state has become the government’s primary means of controlling corporate crime.
Since then, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Dual Justice analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America’s legal system. This reveals that the development of the carceral state, regulatory state, and corporate criminal law should not be viewed as as separate developmental threads, but as processes that have overlapped and intersected in ways that have reinforced politically constructed understandings about what counts as “crime” and who counts as a “criminal" in America.