The Criminal Regulatory State
Files
Description
In this chapter, Rachel Barkow reconceptualizes the criminal process as an administrative bureaucracy. Prosecutors’ offices make decisions in ways that are better explained by bureaucratic pressures and institutional history than by crime rates or individualized concerns about culpability or proportionality. In fact, the explosion of the penal state and our current policies of mass incarceration can be explained at least in part by common principles of bureaucratic expansion and institutional self-interest, which in turn clarify why the penal system grew so radically even as crime rates fell. As Barkow puts it, in response to “the violence and unrest of the 1960s and 1970s ... [t]he government created agencies and actors who have a vested stake in resisting any efforts to contract the system and who seek to maintain the rules that make those bureaucracies run most efficiently.”
Source Publication
The New Criminal Justice Thinking
Source Editors/Authors
Sharon Dolovich, Alexandra Natapoff
Publication Date
2017
Recommended Citation
Barkow, Rachel E., "The Criminal Regulatory State" (2017). Faculty Chapters. 216.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/216
