In the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, a small but still sizable constituency of Americans was calling for a government response more reflective of the “war on crime” than the emerging “war on terror.” Fearful of the kind of government surveillance that resulted in the USA Patriot Act, anticipating the widespread detention of marginalized groups at what was to become Guantanamo Prison Camp and other “black sites,” and foreseeing a security culture defined by color-coded fear, the advocates of a coordinated deployment of criminal justice strategies considered this approach to be the kinder, gentler response to the newly identified threat of terrorism. Yet, in Governing Through Crime, author Jonathan Simon argues that, though well-intentioned, those calling for a law-enforcement response to 9/11 failed to recognize that the emerging war on terrorism was largely being shaped by the very logic of governance central to the U.S. war on crime.

In a series of chapters that are both rich in detail and wide-ranging in scope, Simon illustrates how “fear” has come to define U.S. governance. Indeed, the contemporary political order is one that uses fear as a rationale for myriad public policies that are only tangential to any objective assessment of risk. First emerging during what he calls “[t]he epic battle between the Roosevelt administration and the Supreme Court over economic recovery legislation,” “war” as a metaphor for crime control helped to legitimize the expansion of federal powers (p. 47). Moreover, street crime became the symbol of the very ills created when conditions of economic depression remain unaddressed. During the New Deal, then, crime was strategically framed as a problem calling for federal intervention.

It is perhaps ironic that in the post–New Deal era, the specter of crime—and, more importantly, “victimization”—has become an essential strategy used in political campaigns designed to roll back many of the policies of the so-called welfare state. This observation frames much of Simon's thesis and helps to introduce the topical chapters that comprise the second half of his book. For the author, it was the “crisis of the New Deal political order” heralded by the political, social, and economic strife of the 1960s that led to the contemporary practice of governing through crime—that is, using the fear of crime and the symbolism of victimization to achieve ends that are neither “proximate” nor “proportionate” to the actual crime threat (pp. 25; 5). Thus, during the 1960s, white southern politicians raised the fear of crime to resist racial integration; during the 1970s, the rhetoric of victimization became an essential argument in the legal battle against the desegregation of Detroit schools through busing; and during the 1980s, highlighting fear of crime became a strategy central to the curtailment of public housing. More recently, exaggerated claims of violence in public schools have been rhetorically linked to poor school performance, which in turn has been linked to federal funding decisions via the No Child Left Behind Act. In each of these cited examples, Simon illustrates how the threat of crime and victimization is raised to legitimate government intervention into what are often non-law-enforcement matters.

At this point, it is important to note that Simon makes a clear distinction between “crime” and “victimization.” Indeed, he persuasively illustrates that the language of victimization (a term that has legal meaning exclusively in the criminal justice system) has become prominent in other legal and political circles. In the aforementioned legal battle over desegregation in the Detroit public schools, parents of children who were the subjects of “forced” busing were framed in a dissenting opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court as “victims of the State's unconstitutional conduct” (p. 136). Today, it is common to frame citizens as victims of government regulation, heavy taxation, and social welfare policies. The victim has therefore become rather far removed from the realm of criminal justice.

What is the logic of the victim as an idealized government subject? It is here that the book becomes a bit muddled in a lengthy back story. Nevertheless, Simon notes that in our culture, which prides itself on personal responsibility, crime is the ultimate breach of the social contract, and the imagined possibility of victimization is the great social unifier (even if the risk of criminal victimization is not spread evenly across demographics). The fear of victimization—criminal or otherwise—therefore emerged during the twentieth century as among the most politically strategic governing devices. A precursor to the war on terror, the war on crime continues to feed off of a widespread “fear of sudden and terrible violence” (p. 3). The result has been mass imprisonment, locked-down schools, and other repressive social policies enacted long before anyone had ever heard of Al Qaeda. And like the threat of terrorism, which today is raised by both Republicans and Democrats to expand the scope of political power, the possibility of crime allows both liberal and conservative politicians to appear legitimate in furthering their non-crime-related agendas.

For those who teach and research the politics of crime (and the crime of politics), Governing Through Crime is a much-needed treatise. At a time when the threat of terrorism eclipsed that of street crime; when concern over the burgeoning U.S. population was overshadowed by the unlawful detention of “enemy combatants”; and when the war on terrorism made any academic mention of the war on crime seem almost laughable if not politically incorrect given the universal curtailment on liberties and rights being waged, Jonathan Simon was delivering a book that connects our not-too-distant past to our present while exposing it as a common thread of political strategy. In this regard, the book works best as a “countermemory [sic] to the ‘forgetting’ induced by 9/11” (p. 261). It also serves as a warning for us to avoid being lulled by the idea that expanding the war on crime to encompass terrorism is the best means of dismantling the abuses of the war on terror. Where the book falls short is in proffering the reader counterstrategies to the logic of governing through crime. Instead, Simon calls on his readers to spark discussion about the challenge at hand. While a bit of insight into his own thinking regarding the way forward would certainly help to ignite some brainstorming, there is no doubt that many of Simon's readers will heed his call.