ABSTRACT
After more than four decades, governing through crime has fundamentally altered American democracy, forging profound changes in the institutions of democracy: legislative; executive; and judicial. The emergence of the modern democratic state coincided with the emergence of crime as a 'social problem' and the emergence of criminology as a science of criminal behavior and an expert adjunct of state power in the nineteenth century. Land legislation in the nineteenth century reflected a master strategy for fostering democracy and for governing. The transformation of US political and legal institutions around the problem of crime has also moved into civil institutions such as the family, schools, and workplace. In opposition to the country's founding tenets and to the interests of the human being, the impulse to power that characterizes established governments has manifested in a complex, entrenched, and uncontrolled pattern in the United States, of governing through crime.
