IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/anname/v539y1995i1p155-168.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Politics, Public Policy, and Street Crime

Author

Listed:
  • STUART A. SCHEINGOLD

Abstract

For more than two decades, the United States has been at war with street crime, but we have precious little to show for it. Our obsession with punishment at the expense of, indeed to the exclusion of, prevention is not just futile but criminogenic and divisive. This article explains what is problematic about our indiscriminately punitive response to street crime and explores the political forces driving these self-defeating policies. What emerges is an understanding of the politics of street crime that is rooted less in the fear of crime than in a variety of anxieties that transcend street crime but are affectively related to it. Criminals provide a convenient target for the anger that is widely felt, but is not quite appropriate to express, with respect to unwelcome changes in race relations, employment opportunities, homelessness, and the like. To serve their own distinct but convergent purposes, the media, the public, and the politicians all contribute to the perpetuation of our perverse approach to controlling street crime. While there are countervailing forces at work, they seem unlikely to prevail in the foreseeable future.

Suggested Citation

  • Stuart A. Scheingold, 1995. "Politics, Public Policy, and Street Crime," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 539(1), pages 155-168, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:539:y:1995:i:1:p:155-168
    DOI: 10.1177/0002716295539001012
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716295539001012
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0002716295539001012?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:539:y:1995:i:1:p:155-168. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.