Legitimation crisis and penal severity: Constructing a radical theoretical explanation of legitimation crisis and mass incarceration in the post World War II United States

Starting in the early 1970s American penal severity, as measured by imprisonment rates, ended a long period of moderation and decline and began a continuous increase that has reached a historically unprecedented level that some commentators characterize as mass incarceration. Conventional explanations do not explain American mass incarceration. I work within the radical tradition of the sociology of punishment generally owing to Georg Rusche's landmark thesis on the political economy of punishment to develop a plausible theory of penal severity in the post World War II United States by systematically integrating the radical political-economic concept legitimation crisis as penal severity's root cause. This theory posits that the dramatic rise in penal severity in recent decades has been one of the American site's defensive responses to the increasingly severe legitimation crisis during these decades rather than a response to crime or punitive public sentiments.; A legitimation crisis occurs when an objective crisis within the capitalist political economy disrupts the symbolic domain of cultural and social activity called the life-world, in turn making the public less willing and able to meet the state's demand upon them. By employing the radical concepts capitalist long cycle and social structure of accumulation , I am able to explain why the American legitimation crisis began setting in during the early 1970s when penal severity began rising. During this period elite capitalists have responded to the economic crisis by increasing their demands that the state facilitate private capital accumulation even though this has impaired the state's ability to legitimize itself and has made penal expansion a structurally and ideologically rational defensive crisis response. The expanded surplus-labor population and increased economic performance demands on the American workforce, thus worsening the legitimation crisis and making punitive populism and rising penal severity ideologically tolerable. The so-called underclass provides the raw material necessary for developing mass incarceration as a means of managing the legitimation crisis. This dissertation represents the first attempt to combine the legitimation crisis concept with the literature on capitalist long cycles and social structures of accumulation to construct a general theory of postwar American imprisonment within the Marxian perspective.