ABSTRACT
As historians of crime and violence have largely come to agree, urban life in the past was more rather than less violent. Imprisonment rates in the United States fluctuated within a limited range from the beginning of reliable statistics in the 1920s through the late 1970s. Fear of crime has become a dominant theme of political culture. One penal practice that acts with particular sensitivity as a marker of modernity is the death penalty, or rather its diminution. The priority of governing through crime might sensibly be thought to arise in response to a genuine increase in crime. The implications of these risk management or security approaches to governance are a subject in their own right. They constitute an emerging alternative to the more collectivist risk distribution systems that are now in crisis. In the spring of 1997, the United States, at least, seems quite committed to governing through crime.
