"Liberal Law-and-Order" 

Simon's Rock and the Bard Sociology Department cordially invite you to join us for a talk, "Liberal Law-and-Order," by alum Sebastian Spitz in Ba Win Hall on Thursday, November 5 from 5 to 6 pm, followed by an informal reception.  

Talk abstract: In this talk, I reconstruct the ideology of liberal law-and-order as it was articulated at its height in the Johnson administration, argue for its empirical viability, and apply it to prison reform. Johnson-era proponents recognized that crime was a grave social problem, disproportionately affecting African-Americans and the poor. The welfare state could be used to address crime's root cause, poverty, but was insufficient on its own; it needed to be supplemented by the penal state. Yet the existing criminal justice system was under-resourced, inefficient, inhumane, and in dire need of reform. I compare this liberal approach to three rival ideologies: abolitionism, conservative law-and-order, and libertarianism. I argue that contemporary social science supports its premises. Finally, I construct a liberal horizon for prison reform: incarceration should be safe, rehabilitative, and rare. I describe what liberal prison reform looks like, and the addressable political-economic barriers—fiscal constraints, a lack of supervisory state capacity, and the Principle of Less Eligibility—that obstruct its realization.