Forging a Punishing State: The Punitive Turn in U.S. Criminal and Social Policy, 1968--1980

302 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2010.This dissertation examines two intertwined recent phenomena: welfare state retrenchment and burgeoning carceral institutions. Through research on seminal struggles over welfare, drug, and criminal sentencing policy, it chronicles a profound shift during the 1970s where programs that championed punishment, expulsion, and retribution supplanted policies that stressed rehabilitation and social reintegration. Specifically, it examines New York's adoption of the nation's harshest drug penalties in the Rockefeller Drug Laws; campaigns in Illinois and California designed to control "welfare abuses" through criminalization and community surveillance; and California's passage of the first major determinate sentencing law, which abandoned rehabilitation as an aim of incarceration. The project explores legislators' motivations for these policies, their fervent public support, and the constrained agency of prisoners, welfare recipients, and drug offenders. These legislative battles served a productive cultural role in rationalizing new economic conditions, demarcating membership in the polity, and redefining state legitimacy and responsibility.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD