Jonathan Simon picks up this story in the twentieth century, arguing that the American balance of crime and government tilted in an ominous direction shortly after the middle of the twentieth century. Reversing Cutler and Bonaparte, Simon worries that Americans have given too much power to their national government. Though aware of Franklin Roosevelt's war on crime, Robert F. Kennedy's prosecutorial zealotry, and Barry Goldwater's exploitation of crime as a political issue in 1964, Simon argues that governing through crime really began with the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. This seems a remarkable claim, so it may be best to quote Simon's words saying that the Safe Streets Act "mark[ed] the birth of ¥governing through crime'" (89). Thereafter, the government's fight against crime changed political authority, even invading private spaces once free from governmental intervention. Penitentiaries became "waste disposal" facilities rather than opportunities for penitence and schools followed a worrisomely similar path. According to Simon, police have become overly intrusive when investigating domestic abuse cases. Crime control undermined the New Deal political order, Simon writes, suggesting that a better time preceded Americans' venal obsessions.

     There are points in this book when the author's confidence in a better past seems more nostalgic than rooted in evidence. For example, Simon complains at length about public schools' system of in-school suspension where school administrators place misbehaving students in a time-out room. This chapter neglects to mention that administrators turned to in-school suspension not as a substitute for a trip to the office, as he imagines happened in the good old days, but for paddling—beating students. School administrators devised in-school suspension as a way of maintaining discipline after paddling fell out of favor with parents and the public generally.

     Simon also strikes a nostalgic note when he writes that the "new emphasis on incarceration" places "group association" ahead of individual guilt (270). This neglects the work of numerous scholars working on race and law in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century whites often saw blacks as a criminal class; white Southerners used plantations as a substitute for prisons, according to Michael Stephen Hindus. Rather than too much government, a lack adequate policing by government actually promoted lynching, which, after all, largely decided guilt on group association.

     Simon correctly notes that after the 1960s Americans developed an enlarged interest in crime victims. Simon provides an interesting march through American history based on Congressional understandings of the archetypal American, from landowning farmer to freed slave to industrial worker and, finally, to victim. But when Simon writes that this new concern with crime victims (white suburbanites) could have led to victims becoming "just one more rent-seeking interest group" (76), but did not, his neglect of hate crime laws shows. Critics of hate crime laws have argued that concerns with particular kinds of victims (emphatically not white suburbanites) have, in fact, divided Americans into competing "rent-seeking interest groups" with blacks, gays, women, the disabled, and religious groups all lobbying for special protections under law. Simon may well disagree with this interpretation, but considering it would have both complicated and enriched his analysis.

     This book provides an interesting critique of early twenty-first century governance. For historians, it will one day be a valuable primary source. It now provides provocative glimpses of American history while making an argument more normative than historical.