ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that advanced industrial societies are experiencing not a crisis of crime and punishment but a crisis of governance that has led them to prioritize crime and punishment as the preferred contexts for governance. The degree to which a society was governed through penal laws and sanctions, as opposed to civil law and contractual agreements, provided a kind of index to the modernizing process. The priority of governing through crime might sensibly be thought to arise in response to a genuine increase in crime. An observer of political discourse in the United States might believe that people were increasingly governed by a logic that left virtually everything important in life to personal choice disciplined only by the fear of unremitting punishment for those who stepped across the lines drawn by the criminal law. The cost of governing through crime is a part of the cost of living, working, and consuming in the United States.
