New Books In Critical Theory

The United States incarcerates its citizens for property crime, drug use, and violent crime at a rate that exceeds any other developed nation – and disproportionately affects the poor and racial minorities. Yet the U.S. has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. This disjuncture between the treatment of street and corporate crime is often narrated as hypocrisy. Others suggest that the disparity is rooted in a conservative backlash after the civil rights movement and the Great Society or a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the racialization of crime. In Dual Justice: America's Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (U Chicago Press, 2024), Dr. Anthony Grasso interrogates the intertwined histories of street and corporate crime to find that the differences in punishment are more than modern hypocrisy. Examining the carceral and regulatory states' evolutions from 1870 through today, Grasso argues that divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common,