Politics of Criminal Justice

Abstract The apparent disjuncture between the reality of crime and government responses suggests that criminal justice is not simply a technical response to crime. If criminal justice were guided by technical choices, gun death would equal gun control, gun violence would be considered a public health crisis replete with public resources, and the political will to solve it. Instead what we know from the social sciences is that criminal justice tends to be caught up in morality plays about human nature and political competition over the distribution of public goods, including, but perhaps especially, security, where special interests rather than the public interest tend to hold sway. The significance of studying the politics of criminal justice lies in its capacity to account for and explain the disjuncture. Key issues for future research will be scholars' ability to close this gap.