University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 Punishment And Privilege: The Politics Of Class, Crime, And Corporations In America Anthony Grasso University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Criminology Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, History Commons, and the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Grasso, Anthony, "Punishment And Privilege: The Politics Of Class, Crime, And Corporations In America" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3074. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3074 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3074 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Punishment And Privilege: The Politics Of Class, Crime, And Corporations In America Abstract As the global leader in incarceration, America locks up its own citizens at a rate that dwarfs that of any other developed nation. Yet while racial minorities and the urban poor fill American prisons and jails for street crimes, the state has historically struggled to consistently prosecute corporate crime. Why does the American state lock people up for street crimes at extraordinary rates but demonstrate such a limited capacity to prosecute corporate crime? While most scholarship analyzes these questions separately, juxtaposing these phenomena illuminates how the carceral state’s divergent treatments of street crime and corporate crime share common and self-reinforcing ideological and institutional origins. Analyzing intellectual history, policy debates, and institutional change relating to the politics of street crime and corporate crime from 1870 through today demonstrates how the class biases of contemporary crime policy emerged and took root during multiple junctures in U.S. history, including the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, New Deal, and post-war period. This reveals that political constructions of street criminals as pathological deviants and corporate criminals as honorable people driven to crime by market dynamics have consistently been rooted in common ideas about what causes and constitutes crime. By the 1960s, these developments embedded class inequalities into the criminal justice institutions that facilitated the carceral state’s rise while the regulatory state became the government’s primary means of controlling corporate crime. The historical development of mass incarceration, the corporate criminal law, and regulatory state should not be viewed as autonomous developmental threads, but as processes that have overlapped and intersected in ways that have reinforced politically constructed understandings about what counts as “crime” and who counts as a “criminal.” Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Political Science First Advisor Marie Gottschalk Keywords American Politics, Class, Corporations, Mass Incarceration, Race Subject Categories Criminology | Criminology and Criminal Justice | History | Political Science This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3074 PUNISHMENT AND PRIVILEGE: THE POLITICS OF CLASS, CRIME, AND CORPORATIONS IN AMERICA Anthony J. Grasso A DISSERTATION in Political Science Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________ Marie Gottschalk Professor of Political Science Graduate Group Chairperson _________________ Matthew Levendusky, Professor of Political Science Dissertation Committee Adolph Reed Professor of Political Science Rogers Smith Professor of Political Science PUNISHMENT AND PRIVILEGE: THE POLITICS OF CLASS, CRIME, AND CORPORATIONS IN AMERICA COPYRIGHT 2018 Anthony J. Grasso This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ For my Mom, my first teacher iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to the people who supported me as I completed this dissertation. First, I would like to thank my family. I have always admired my sister Christine. One of the most intelligent and positive people I know, she is an ideal role model, gifted writer, and truly good person. I could ask for no better model of perseverance than my father Tony. He taught me what it means to be committed in both a personal and professional sense. My mother Beth, to whom this project is dedicated, did not get to see me complete the dissertation, but her faith in me gave me the encouragement I needed to finish it. My dissertation committee deserves tremendous thanks. It has been a privilege to work with Marie Gottschalk. She has been an exceptional advisor since my first day of graduate school, and I am deeply grateful for the remarkable amount of time, energy, and effort she has put in to mentoring me as a scholar and encouraging me to do the project I wanted to do. Marie exhibits a rare level of commitment to her students. I am indebted to the kindness of Rogers Smith. His ability to make time for students, all while juggling a list of professional commitments and distinguished titles that sound more fit for four people than one, is a testament to his dedication to mentorship. He always provided clear and insightful feedback that spoke to the project’s most challenging aspects. And as is the case for so many people, the classes and conversations I had with Adolph Reed have been some of the most formative of my academic career. His guidance has profoundly shaped how I think about and understand American politics. His advice always left the project improved and his excitement about my research always left me feeling encouraged. There are many others at Penn who have supported me. The Penn Political Science Department and Robert A. Fox Leadership Program provided me with research funds and resources to complete my project. Bill Laufer at the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research particularly provided me with institutional support, resources, advice, and encouragement on numerous occasions to further my work. I became interested research at Rutgers, and many there deserve my thanks. Lisa Miller’s work got me engaged in questions about law, crime, and politics, and my experience as an assistant for Andrew Murphy exposed me to academic research. Perhaps no one is more responsible for getting me into academia than Milton Heumann. From advising my thesis to offering me advice through graduate school, he has always been in my corner. I am lucky to have had him as my first academic mentor and grateful to call him my friend. I am fortunuate to have been able to share my graduate school experience with a kind and supportive group of peers. I am lucky to have had many great friends who offered me encouragement, solidarity, and on occasion necessary distractions over the past six years. Their influence runs throughout these pages. Finally, my thanks to my wife Kelly, who made every aspect this process so much more enjoyable. Her immeasurable support made this project possible, and I thank her for the love, happiness, and encouragement she has given me. iv ABSTRACT PUNISHMENT AND PRIVILEGE: THE POLITICS OF CLASS, CRIME, AND CORPORATIONS IN AMERICA Anthony Grasso Marie Gottschalk As the global leader in incarceration, America locks up its own citizens at a rate that dwarfs that of any other developed nation. Yet while racial minorities and the urban poor fill American prisons and jails for street crimes, the state has historically struggled to consistently prosecute corporate crime. Why does the American state lock people up for street crimes at extraordinary rates but demonstrate such a limited capacity to prosecute corporate crime? While most scholarship analyzes these questions separately, juxtaposing these phenomena illuminates how the carceral state’s divergent treatments of street crime and corporate crime share common and self-reinforcing ideological and institutional origins. Analyzing intellectual history, policy debates, and institutional change relating to the politics of street crime and corporate crime from 1870 through today demonstrates how the class biases of contemporary crime policy emerged and took root during multiple junctures in U.S. history, including the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, New Deal, and post- war period. This reveals that political constructions of street criminals as pathological deviants and corporate criminals as honorable people driven to crime by market dynamics have consistently been rooted in common ideas about what causes and constitutes crime. By the 1960s, these developments embedded class inequalities into the criminal justice v institutions that facilitated the carceral state’s rise while the regulatory state became the government’s primary means of controlling corporate crime. The historical development of mass incarceration, the corporate criminal law, and regulatory state should not be viewed as autonomous developmental threads, but as processes that have overlapped and intersected in ways that have reinforced politically constructed understandings about what counts as “crime” and who counts as a “criminal.” vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................IV ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................