| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. By Jonathan Simon. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x, 330 pp. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-518108-1.)

In Governing through Crime, Jonathan Simon maintains that over the last four decades the "idealized subject" for legislation has become the crime victim (p. 78). Indeed, Simon, an associate dean of jurisprudence and social policy and professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that the perceived threat of crime has reshaped political discourse in the country. He implies that the fear of crime ultimately overshadowed other developments of the 1960s—civil rights, poverty, the sexual revolution, and even the Vietnam War. In response, policy makers launched a "war on crime" that would, unfortunately, consume too much of the political and social energies of the nation. Simon concedes that his argument is "polemical, and perhaps overstated" (p. 4). Most readers are likely to agree.

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