ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the key descriptive landmarks of governing through crime to observe signs of continuity and change. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 might seem to confirm that little has changed given candidate Trump’s emphasis on violent crime and its connection to illegal immigration. For legislatures, the emergence of crime control as a major opportunity for law-making in the late 1960s went along with a revision of the citizen-voter as a potential crime victim. Americans face a plethora of major threats that demand collective political solutions including climate change, infrastructure disinvestment, and precarious employment, while reported crime is lower than it has been in decades in huge swaths of the country. Governing through crime was described as a variant of liberal democratic governance, and not, primarily, a form of direct authoritarianism. Dictatorships have their own radically visible forms of governing through crime.
