Book review: Who Are the Criminals? The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age of Reagan
| Author | David O. Friedrichs |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612450377 |
| Published date | 01 August 2012 |
| Date | 01 August 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Theoretical Criminology
16(3) 365 –376
© The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480612450377
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Book reviews
John Hagan, Who Are the Criminals? The Politics of Crime Policy from the Age of Roosevelt to the Age
of Reagan, Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2010; 301 pp.: 978-0-691-148380, $29.95
Reviewed by: David O. Friedrichs, University of Scranton, USA
The author of this book, John Hagan, is one of the most versatile, prolific and accom-
plished living criminologists. He has received many major, well-deserved awards,
most recently the Stockholm Prize in Criminology in 2009. The book under review has
an ambitiously broad scope to it, insofar as it aspires to provide an overall understand-
ing (to concerned citizens as well as criminologists) of the basic parameters of the
American perception of and responses to crime during the course of the past 80 years
or so. The core thesis of this book is as follows: during the ‘Age of Roosevelt’ (1933–
1973), the ‘framing’ of crime was focused upon structural dimensions of American
society and th e failures of social control to respond effectively to criminogenic condi-
tions. During the ‘Age of Reagan’(1974–2008), a focus on criminal offenders (includ-
ing ‘career criminals’) led to a massive increase in the imprisonment of conventional
offenders, while a free market ideology during this period of time led to deregulation
across the board and a massive amount of white-collar crime. Altogether, Hagan
argues convincingly that American society has over-controlled street crime—with
devastating consequences for the African-American inner city community in particu-
lar—and under-controlled suite crime—with devastating consequences for all
Americans. Following a Prologue of ‘Washington Crime Stories’, Chapters 1 through
6 systematically document the replacement of one crime frame with another, some
factors driving this shift, and the consequences of the shift. The review of the standard
criminological theories undertaken in Chapters 3 and 4 covers ground thoroughly
familiar to all criminologists (and their students), but Hagan elegantly extracts core
themes of these different theories to illustrate his fundamental framework shift thesis.
Chapter 7 is devoted to what might arguably be characterized as the worst of all
crimes: war crimes and crimes of states. In recent years Hagan has authored or co-
authored a series of books addressing such crimes—including rape as a crime of war
and genocide—and the justice system response to such crime, especially by the
International Criminal Court. State crimes both reflect and intersect with the frame
shift in the domestic realm.
450377TCR16310.1177/1362480612450377Book reviewsTheoretical Criminology
2012
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