The Destabilization Phase Essay

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During the Destabilization phase, which occurred between 1960 and 1975, consisted on political individuals, policy makers, and other important bureaucrats started to question what was known as the “penal status quo”. During this time frame there were numerous new opportunities being formed, due to the civil rights initiatives as well as anti-war protests. These opportunities were not necessarily positive; these opportunities were starting to modify the penal and political fields. These changes created the perfect environment for what was termed as emergent crime politics. This basically is when a political leader or runner is benefiting off of crime to gain ground politically. This then caused a response at a state level to actually define …show more content…

During this time there were countless white individuals that were leaving the Democratic Party to go towards the Republican Party. The reasoning behind this shift is that African Americans were fighting for their civil rights. In turn, politically, there was a correlation formed between race and crime. This was a turning point in the relationship that the federal and state level shared. The state level thought that it was the civil rights protestor who were to blame for the higher crime. However, on a federal level, these individuals thought that integration would be dangerous, as well as increasing the crime. The Presidential candidates during this time frame were extremely focused on a tough on crime stance, and began to fully support and blame African Americans for this issue. There was most certainly tension between the Republicans running on this platform and the African American citizens (Campbell and Schoenfeld, …show more content…

This political influence was significant due to the heavy shift in crime control and perception. Next, federal crime control programs during this phase influenced incarceration by focusing on crime, even though it was declining. President Reagan began to focus even more on this us versus them thought process which caused a divide. Then the media kicked in, the media played a sensational role in getting society to believe that crime was a significant problem that needed to be handled federally. Moving on to federal court enforcement, during this era, there was a significant increase in the prison population due to the war on drugs. There were some states that did not want to comply however, the Supreme Court intervened and started to focus more on inmates rights (Campbell and Schoenfeld,

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