Crime Is Other People: Punitive Consciousness and the Racial Politics of Law-and-Order

Abstract

Even as rates of crime and lawbreaking in the United States have declined continuously since the second half of the 20th century, political appeals to law-and-order remains a powerful mobilization strategy across the political spectrum. Furthermore, even though law-and-order politics arose in the 1970s as a “dog whistle” for politicians to stoke racial resentment without appearing explicitly racist, the racial subtext has become increasingly overt since 2016. This dissertation seeks to explain the enduring popularity of law-and-order politics through interviews with a multiracial group of 65 liberal and conservative grassroots activists. In particular, I seek to understand how these activists make sense of and engage with two high-profile law-and-order issues—undocumented migration and racialized police violence. I make two interrelated conceptual interventions to advance scholarly understandings of law-and-order politics. First, I illustrate the need to move from punitive attitudes—often operationalized as the degree to which people prefer more severe punishments—to punitive consciousness, the collection of everyday interpretive schemas about lawbreaking and punishment. In doing so, I find that law-and-order discourses are rarely about actual crimes and lawbreaking behaviors, but a place where activists engage in constructing who the lawbreaking others are imagined to be and what the imagined lawbreaking other’s place is in the social world. Second, I argue that law-and-order politics are centrally about how people imagine their social solidarity with the imagined lawbreaking other—that is, a site to construct sameness, differences, and belonging. I find that, rather than partisan ideology or race and other social locations, the most useful way to understand where an electoral activist stand on law-and-order issues is through how they make sense of their social solidarity with the imagined lawbreaking other. For instance, regardless of partisan identification or attitudes toward the seriousness of migrant illegality, activists come to prefer pathway to citizenship for a limited subset of undocumented migrants because they were either able to envisions their shared humanity with migrants or recognize their interdependence upon migrants; yet, they also wish to circumscribe relief because they believe that migrant’s unauthorized presence either violated the entitlement of citizens or undermined social cohesion. Similarly, activists center their interdependence upon the police in making sense of racialized police violence, while believing that Black Lives Matter activists undermine the cohesion of society. This results in even liberal supporters of Black Lives Matter rebuking the call to Defund the Police. This renewed understanding of law-and-order politics as contestation of social solidarity compels scholars to attend to a distinct register of lawbreaking and punishment: not one about public safety and harms to person and property, but the one in popular imagination about which people are belonging and deserving members of the society. This insight advances research on public opinion and the criminal justice system by underscoring support for punitive policy as distinct from the political discourses around law-and-order. This renewed understanding of solidarity further provides a more dynamic framework for research on group politics to consider the place of sameness and differences.