The politics of crime contributed to the change in penology, and the 1960s heralded the change. This decade was a period of increasing crime, youthful experimentation with drugs, police repression of civil rights demonstrators, draft-card and flag burning, Stokely Carmichael, Jane Fonda, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Panthers, Richard Speck, the appearance of a University of Chicago Law School graduate [Bernadine Dohrn] on the F.B.I.'s ten-most-wanted list, sexual liberation, the Chicago Eight, and the Warren Court's due process revolution. Although political calls for tough punishments were nothing new, the presidential election of 1964 appears to have been the first in which a major-party candidate, Barry Goldwater, made crime a national issue. Goldwater lost badly, but in 1968 Richard Nixon supported the "peace forces" against the "criminal forces," called for a new attorney general, and won. Crime remained an issue in subsequent presidential elections—perhaps most notably in 1988 when George H. W. Bush, after carefully testing voter responses to potential campaign issues, made Willie Horton and the Massachusetts prison furlough program a model of negative campaigning and appeal to fear.
(Albert W. Alschuler, "The Changing Purposes of Criminal Punishment: A Retrospective on the Past Century and Some Thoughts About the Next," The University of Chicago Law Review 70 [winter 2003]: 1-22, at 13 [footnote omitted])
Note from KBJ: Why is it negative campaigning to point out the insidious effects of one's opponent's policies? Why is it an appeal to fear to inform prospective voters that one's opponent has adopted policies that put dangerous criminals into our midst? I think what Professor Alschuler is saying is that he wanted Michael Dukakis to be president. Since the advertisements of George Herbert Walker Bush hurt Dukakis, they can't have been legitimate. They must have been "negative" and they must have appealed merely to fear (an emotion) rather than to the intellect. How much do you want to bet that Alschuler voted for Dukakis? (For the record, I did, too.)
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 