The New Social Contract: America's Journey from Welfare State to Police State

by Joseph Dillon Davey

Overview

According to the Justice Department's National Crime Survey, the crime rate in the United States is lower today than it was when Nixon was in the White House. In spite of this, political leaders demand nationwide prison construction as a response to the war on drugs and to accommodate the results of the new three strikes law. At the same time, the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever and the needs of the non-disruptive poor are being ignored by the economic and political elites to the point of unprecedented homelessness. The author predicts this widening gap will prompt the return of 1960s-style civil turmoil which will lead to the end of the war on drugs and the emptying of hundreds of thousands of cells so the protesting poor can be plausibly threatened with incarceration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780275952396
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/30/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1470L (what's this?)

About the Author

JOSEPH DILLON DAVEY is a lawyer, political scientist, and writer of numerous journal articles on public policy. He has taught law, political science, and criminal justice on the undergraduate and graduate level for the past 20 years.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Poverty
Urban Riots and the Beginning of the New Social Contract
The Restoration of Order and the Reduction in Social Provision: Poverty in the 1990s
The New Homelessness: The Reagan Legacy
Crime
The Explosion of the Criminal Justice System: The Muscle of the New Social Contract
The F.B.I.'s "Dirty Little Secret": Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
The Media and Public Hysteria About Crime
Legal Change
Assault on the Constitution: Penal Code Reforms
Assault on the Constitution: The Death of the Fourth Amendment
The End of the War on Drugs
Conclusion
The New Social Contract
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Emerging from the author's Ph.D. dissertation in political science at the Graduate Center of CUNY, this volume examines the massive expansion of funding and legal authority of agencies of social control as a means to "restrain the growing number of disgruntled poor who have watched their jobs relocate to the Third World and their government reduce its commitment to abolishing poverty." It examines changes in public policy concerning poverty, inequality, welfare, and homelessness, and then compares those policies and expenditures with the policies concerning criminal justice over the past two decades. Shows the expert tutelage of Francis Fox Piven, whose guidance the author acknowledges. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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