arbitrary disparities generated by indeterminate sentencing schemes. The conservative victory is often seen as a establishing a political context in which being “tough on crime” became the only viable electoral position. The Right’s strategy involved an assault on the rehabilitative ideal that exploited the perceived failures of the Civil Rights Movement (which was linked to urban riots) and the War on Poverty (which was sold as a crime control measure but failed to produce a short-term crime reduction) to claim that crime was a choice for which individuals were personally responsible. Robert Martinson’s 1974 study of penal rehabilitation, which concluded concluded that “nothing works” to reduce recidivism, resonated with the public, penal officials, and politicians who had come to accept the notion that blacks and the poor were prone to crime. Exemplifying the conservative logic was James Q. Wilson, whose attack on judicial leniency rang of bio-deterministic claims of incorrigibility. In Thinking About Crime (1975), Wilson claimed that, “Wicked people exist. Nothing avails them except to set them apart from innocent people.” The revised 1983 edition included a chapter on rehabilitation noting the abundance of studies that validated Martinson’s conclusions and arguing that the rehabilitative ideal rested on “heroic assumptions” about criminals’ reformability. He concluded that few offenders are truly amenable to reform and criticized indeterminate sentencing as naively preoccupied with rehabilitation. The emergence of mandatory sentencing schemes followed in the 1970s and 1980s given that, in the words of one US congressman, indeterminate sentencing was “widely discredited.” The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 promulgated mandatory sentencing guidelines for federal judges that were, as one observer stated, oriented “more toward toughness rather than toward fairness” given how dramatically they increased
Conceptions of innate criminality have spread easily into neoliberal political discourse. This is epitomized by the research of John DiIulio and James Fox examining the growing population of “super-predators” in America’s inner city black communities in the 1990s. DiIluio’s 1995 Weekly Standard article painted these young men as “hardened, remorseless juveniles” who would, unless closely regulated, “do what comes ‘naturally’: murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high.” This language drew on the imagery of the born criminal, and the work of Fox and DiIulio helped facilitate the spread of punitive criminal justice policies for juveniles in the 1990s. The language carried readily into politics as Hillary Clinton, stumping for her husband’s reelection bid in January 1996, told a New Hampshire crowd that the government has to engage in “an organized effort against gangs,” but that the gangs the state has to fight “are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called ‘superpredators.’ No conscience, no empathy.” This clarifies how the popularity of the theory was largely contingent on a neoliberal crime politics seeking to take a hard line against criminals as incorrigible and individually flawed. This all suggests that support for prisoner rehabilitation from Grover Norquist, the conservative “Right on Crime” initiative, and publics in red states like Texas should be viewed skeptically. These are good signs, since rehabilitative interventions can provide chances for offenders to reform. But it should not be presumed that a reform agenda emphasizing rehabilitation faces no risk of a public backlash, especially in a neoliberal political environment and when state support for rehabilitation is tied to recidivism reductions as Norquist suggests. Given the conceptualization of criminality on which rehabilitative theory rests and the assumptions it makes about incorrigibility and