Converging on the Poles: Contemporary Punishment and Democracy in Hemispheric Perspective |
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| Authors: | Angelina Snodgrass Godoy |
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| Affiliation: | Angelina Snodgrass Godoy is assistant professor of Law, Societies, and Justice, and of International Studies, at the University of Washington in Seattle. I am grateful to Michael McCann, Katherine Beckett, Jonathan Simon, Steve Herbert, Cameron Herrington, and others for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this essay. Any remaining omissions or errors are of course the sole responsibility of the author. The author can be contacted at . |
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| Abstract: | In this article I place U.S. punishment trends in comparative context, seeking to show that the contemporary penal regime in the United States resembles patterns of governance prevalent throughout Latin America, the world's most economically unequal region. In both the U.S. and Latin America, I argue, neoliberal reforms have produced societies characterized by ever greater divides between the haves and have-nots, and state criminal justice institutions increasingly position themselves to police this boundary rather than mitigate its effects. In this article, I examine these trends through the lens of wars on crime and terrorism, arguing that in societies polarized between a dwindling set of haves and an ever more numerous (and potentially unruly) group of have-nots, an inexorable pull makes criminal justice institutions more aggressive in their enforcement of class and racial boundaries. Hallmarks include a widening of the criminal justice net (by broadening definitions of criminal activity, for example) and a deepening of the deprivations visited on those ensnared within it. The article concludes with reflections on the need for reconfiguring conceptions of human rights and their relation to security. |
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