Crime and Punishment

Civil rights protesters who intentionally violated laws rather than work within the law to change it; feminists who flouted conventional gender roles and asserted a right to abortion; gays and lesbians who claimed a right to serve openly in the military and enter into same-sex marriages—all were evidence, at least in the opinion of some, that the nation had lost its moral bearings. Such misgivings had spiked in the late 1960s, as antiwar protests closed down college campuses and race riots ravaged cities. Violent crime increased. Many called for restoration of “law and order.” The phrase had been used repeatedly by Nixon and Agnew, whose own troubles with the law caused the phrase to temporarily slip from view. But during the 1970s and 1980s conservative activists, borrowing strategies from activist movements on the left, succeeded in implementing many of the goals of the “law and order” movement. They elected officials who passed tougher laws, hired more police, and built additional prisons.

The shift toward capital punishment was symptomatic. During the 1960s only a handful of criminals were executed. When the Supreme Court ruled

Narcotics policemen in Bridgeport, Connecticut, arrest a suspect for selling crack near housing projects in 1994.

In 1972 in the Furman decision that jury-imposed capital punishment was racially biased and thus unconstitutional, the matter seemed moot: No criminal had been executed since 1967. The practice simply had fallen from favor. But in response to the conservative demand for tough legislation against criminals, legislators rewrote capital punishment statutes in light of the Furman decision, depriving juries of discretion in sentencing. The Supreme Court upheld these laws and capital punishment resumed in 1976. Since then, over a thousand convicts have been executed.

Increasingly conservative state legislatures imposed tougher sentences and made it more difficult for prisoners to obtain parole. In 1973 New York State passed laws that mandated harsh sentences for repeat drug offenders. In 1977 California replaced its parole system with mandatory sentencing, which denied convicts the prospect of early release. Ten other states adopted similar parole restrictions. Nationwide, the proportion of convicts serving long, mandatory sentences increased sharply.

Another manifestation of the crackdown on crime was the increase in the nation’s prison population. In 1973 the nation’s prisons—state and federal—held about 200,000 convicts. By 1990 the number of prisoners exceeded 750,000, and by 2004, 2 million. This required the construction of a 1,000-bed prison every week. In 1995, for the first time, states spent more on prisons than on higher education. By 2010, the United States incarcerated more people than any country in the world, except perhaps communist China, which did not disclose such information.

•••-[Read the Document United States of America v. Timothy James McVeigh—Sentencing (August 14, 1997) at Www. myhistorylab. com