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The Emergence of Penal Extremism in California: A Dynamic View of Institutional Structures and Political Processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Michael C. Campbell
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Abstract

This article examines legal and political developments in California in the 1970s and early 1980s that led to extreme changes in the state's use of imprisonment. It uses historical research methods to illustrate how institutional and political processes interacted in dynamic ways that continuously unsettled and reshaped the crime policy field. It examines crime policy developments before and after the passage of the state's determinate sentencing law to highlight the law's long-term political implications and to illustrate how it benefited interest groups pushing for harsher punishment. It emphasizes the role executives played in shaping these changes, and how the law's significance was as much political as legal because it transformed the institutional logics that structured criminal lawmaking. These changes, long sought by the law enforcement lobby, facilitated crime's politicization and ushered in a new era of frenetic and punitive changes in criminal law and punishment. This new context benefited politicians who supported extreme responses to crime and exposed the crime policy process to heightened degrees of popular scrutiny. The result was a political obsession with crime that eschewed moderation and prioritized prison expansion above all else.

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Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 377 - 409
Copyright
© 2014 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The author would like to thank Josh Page, Heather Schoenfeld, Phil Goodman, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments in improving the article. Also, I would like to thank Chieh Tung for her research assistance.

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