ABSTRACT
According to collective memory and scholarly opinion, the sixties’ ‘law ‘n order’ issue,1 reached unprecedented levels of public concern in the US. Further, the era’s social insurgencies allegedly provoked heightened crime fears within the public, especially among white Americans, and led to a number of important outcomes, including:
the 1968 election of conservative Republican Party nominees Richard • Nixon and Spiro Agnew to the presidency, marking the end of the liberal policies of the Great Society under Democratic President Lyndon Johnson; the subsequent (and still ongoing) criminal justice system’s expansion, • unhinged in its growth from actual changes in index offending rates;2
a shift in the public’s mood towards greater intolerance, punitiveness, • self-centeredness and stinginess; and the supplanting of the New Deal/FDR• 3 class alliance by a social/ religious/race issues-driven Republican Party alliance.
