Interview: Historian Julilly Kohler-Hausmann ’97 on the Destruction Wrought by “Common Sense” Crackdowns on Crime and Welfare in ’70s America
“People often understand the 1970s as a time when the penal system repudiated (or at least de-emphasized) the goal of rehabilitation in favor of simply delivering punishment. This was not just a shift in language. It accompanied real changes in how penal institutions functioned,” Kohler-Hausmann tells Salon. “Tough policies forwarded the argument that certain marginalized populations were unsuitable for full citizenship and ungovernable without coercion or containment. They helped produce the racist idea that there were hyper-threatening discrete groups in society, steeped in a matriarchal ‘culture of poverty’ and totally divorced from dominant social norms, that could only be managed by prisons and policing.”
Post Date: 06-02-2021
Post Date: 06-02-2021