Criminal Punishment, State Capacity and the Condition of US Federalism

• In Event: Federalism in Action

Abstract

Within the context of the United States, scholars still debate the role of decentralization in the study of policy diffusion given the role of states as “laboratories of democracy”. What remains less considered, however, is how the exercise of state power intersects between the federal and state levels. This paper considers the domain of criminal punishment as a unique area within the governance of the US where multi-level contests of state capacity operate at both formal and informal levels. These include both a legal structure that defines crime as federal or state depending on certain criteria as well as the street-level bureaucracies which operate as decentralized loci of power. There are also cases to examine where a shift in domain may appear in spite of the typical operations of federalism — for example, federal consent decrees on local police departments or state prisons, or U.S. border patrol by state police (i.e. Texas). Are either of such cases perversions of U.S. federalism in pursuit of a new kind of punitive control, or merely continuations of business as usual? This paper thus investigates the condition of US federalism through the lens of how the criminal justice functions today as a manifestation of contested state power dynamics.

Author

• Elizabeth Pfeffer, Dartmouth College