Katherine Beckett's Making Crime Pay

Katherine Beckett’s book Making Crime Pay challenges the dominant view that the increase in incarceration, particularly of young Black men, seen throughout the last 30 plus years has been due to a response to public concern about crime, changing demographics, and an increase in violent crime that needed to be fixed. Instead, Beckett forces us to examine the discursive and political nature of the decisions that led to tough on crime policies and in effect mass incarceration. As she summarizes, “The notion that the desire for punishment is ubiquitous and unequivocal ignores the complexity of cultural attitudes and the situation and political factors that shape their expression.”
Beckett examines the important role that race played in this process, particularly in the discourse surrounding law and order. Politicians utilized racialized language to manufacture a fear of crime and tap into the anxieties of whites in the post-civil rights period of the 1960s. Political goals and the control of the public discourse through mass media created the public perception that crime was a major issue and politicians and elites then used this …show more content…
“Assumptions about black sexuality lie at the heart of the ideological view that black households constitute deviant, disorganized, and even pathological familial forms that fail to socialize their members into societal norms” (2004:20). This ideology is still at work today with black poverty portrayed through the discourse of the absent black father. Black males, unable to conform to the normative prescriptions of the nuclear family, are deviant by default. The leap from deviant to criminal is a small one. If black males do not fit the image of how a man is supposed to relate to a woman and the larger family unit then it becomes that much easier to paint him as a predator, another not too subtle term used in modern political discourse on