Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment. By Hadar Aviram. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. 272 pp. $29.95 paper.For years, politicians on both sides of the aisle avoided all talk of criminal justice reform. As many scholars have pointed out, being tough on crime was seen as politically necessary (Beckett 1997; Simon 2007). Since the late 2000s, however, that has begun to change. Supported by such varied organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and Koch Industries, calls for criminal justice reform have become commonplace. For example, in 2015, the Brennan Center for Justice published a book of essays on criminal justice reform by a wide range of national leaders including politicians Hillary Rodham Clinton, Martin O'Malley, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul (Chettiar & Waldman, 2015).In her timely new book, Cheap on Crime, Hadar Aviram argues that efforts like these are facilitated by which she describesasasetofrhetoricalarguments, political strategies, correctional policies, and cultural perceptions that focuses on cost-saving and financial prudence as its raison d'^etre (p. 11). She claims that since the 2008 recession, the discourse of humonetarianism has come to dominate public conversations about corrections, and has been utilized in a way that disarms the political impasse and allows politicians, policy makers, businesspeople, and taxpayers to find common ground and reach significant compromises in the penal field that otherwise would have been difficult (p. 4).Aviram begins in Chapter 1 by presenting the theoretical framework for the book. She reviews the Marxist literature on punishment and social structure, which would suggest that the increase in unemployment that resulted from the recession would lead to increased punitiveness, and the economics literature on the costs of crime. While thought-provoking, this discussion is largely descriptive and adds little to the overall argument in the book. More interesting is Chapter 2, in which Aviram tells the story of the economic and aspects of the rise of mass incarceration. Here, she adds a new dimension to the traditional explanations for the rise in prison populations with a particular emphasis on the federalization of state law. She describes the rise of punitive laws backed by federal funding (p. 42) but also explains how state and local governments ended up paying for much of the mandatory sentencing promoted by the federal government. She further argues that the methods for financing much of the prison construction hid the true costs of prison expansion from taxpayers.After briefly reviewing, in Chapter 3, the financial crisis of 2008, its impact on state and local budgets, and the beginnings of humonetarianism, Aviram spends Chapters 4-7 discussing particular areas of criminal justice where, she argues, the discourse of humonetarianism can be seen in practice: the death penalty, marijuana legalization, private prisons, and the inmate as consumer. In all of these chapters, Aviram presents concrete examples that support her thesis. For example, humonetarianism seems to have clearly been at work in the effort to abolish the death penalty in California. As she points out in Chapter 4, not only was the Initiative called SAFE California (Saving, Accountability, and Full Enforcement) but also volunteers were specifically instructed to avoid discussing the death penalty in human rights terms and instead were told to discuss its fiscal viability (p. 73). Similarly in Chapter 5, she cites the examples of the Smart on Crime and Right on Crime initiatives, both of which emphasize cost-effective alternatives to incarceration.Perhaps the strongest example cited by Aviram is the effort to legalize marijuana at the state level. Since 2010, three states have seen campaigns to legalize marijuana. As she demonstrates, all of these campaigns featured smart on crime cost-centered messaging (p. …
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Jul 15, 2019
Open Access
Stephen Owusu Afriyie + 4