Megan's Law: Crime and Democracy in Late Modern America |
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| Authors: | Jonathan Simon |
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| Affiliation: | Jonathan Simon;is professor of Law, University of Miami. This article is a report of an ongoing investigation to which many people and institutions have contributed. The first version of this article was prepared as a paper for the Law and Society Summer Institute 1996 and revised in response to critical discussion by the other participants in that Institute, including Rob Rosen, Kim Scheppele, Tom Tyler, Mark Galanter, and Jennifer Culbert. Special thanks to Jo Carrillo and Rob Rosen for organizing the institute. Subsequent versions of the article were presented to faculty workshops at NYU and Yale. Special thanks to Bruce Ackerman, Joseph Kennedy, and Reva Siegel for comments on those drafts. |
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| Abstract: | To an unprecedented degree American society at the turn of the twentieth century is governed through crime. Nearly three percent of adults are in the custody of the correctional system. Crime and fear of crime enter into a large part of the fundamental decisions in life: where to live, how to raise your family, where to locate your business, where and when to shop, and so on. The crime victim has become the veritable outline of a new form of political subjectivity. This essay explores the complex entanglements of democracy and governing through crime. The effort to build democratic governance after the American Revolution was carried out in part through the problem of crime and punishment. Today, however, the enormous expansion of governing through crime endangers the effort to reinvent democracy for the twenty-first century. |
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