Anthony Grasso’s Dual Justice delivers a powerful account of how eugenicist ideas birthed contrasting governing strategies toward the street and corporate crime in the U.S. Progressive era when both the criminal justice and regulatory states “began to take on their modern forms” (p.3). Grasso shows how Social Darwinism influenced Gilded Age classical liberal economists, progressive reformers, eugenicists, and race scientists who “shared assumptions about racial difference but had distinct political goals” (p.29). He traces the influence of figures from Cesare Lombroso to Richard Ely and demonstrates the broad policy importance of eugenic thinking. From this policy discourse arose a class-based bifurcation in approaches toward different sorts of lawlessness. The ideas surrounding corporate regulation and criminal rehabilitation would later shed the “eugenic politics” that were “no longer require[d],” while continuing to build an inequitable state into the twenty-first century (p.7). At its best, Dual Justice masterfully combines intellectual history and American Political Development, its story driven by the potency and ironies of what Grasso calls “regulatory ideology” and “rehabilitative ideology.”

Ever since the Progressive era, Grasso explains, corporate lawbreakers have been understood as people swayed by bad structural incentives but mostly free of “moral taint,” as Louis Brandeis saw it (p.50). While some business interests sought “pure laissez-faire” and other reformers wanted “incarceration,” the prevailing approach toward corporate crime became “regulatory governance” (p.11). Grasso reminds us of the strangeness of early twentieth-century economic politics when radicals like Eugene Debs doubted the egalitarian power of antitrust law (p.105). And he tells a compelling history of the Federal Trade Commission Act and other legislation in all their contingent twists and turns (p.101). America has ever since then accommodated a “corporate capitalist economy monitored by a regulatory state” (p.18).

Grasso argues that regulatory ideology contains the seeds of its failures and setbacks, including tolerance toward corporate lawlessness, deregulation, and, paradoxically, overreliance on post-hoc punishments. In the late twentieth century, it became clear that regulatory ideology harbored both “the politics of regulation and the politics of deregulation” (p.168). The shortcomings when it came to disciplining corporate crime surfaced with the 1980s Savings & Loan crisis, whose many prosecutions Grasso attributes to insufficient regulation: “the state’s response was not inadequate because prosecution did not do enough; it was inadequate because prosecution should not have to do everything” (p.178).

In contrast to corporate criminals, street criminals have long been branded as personally wicked and best managed through punishments and rehabilitation. Ironically, the “deceptively compassionate-sounding” rehabilitative ideology has helped to construct the modern carceral state (p.4). Grasso indeed notes the early-twentieth-century challenge in even disentangling the punitive from the rehabilitative as it concerned the state-sanctioned practice of sterilization (p.74). He adds to recent scholarship questioning traditional accounts that pitted repression against reform and “penal welfarism” (p.14). Grasso’s insight on the mutually constitutive functions of punishment and rehabilitation—along with his larger “and more sinister history behind the rehabilitative model”—should and will influence the way scholars write about twentieth-century criminal justice issues (p.210).

As with regulatory ideology, rehabilitative ideology “hardened” as it reinforced the rise of governing structures (p.12). It piggybacked on “ideals of human redemption” and “civil rights and criminal justice reform organizations” (p.13) while allowing reformist politicians to play “tough on crime” (p.56). Even the late 1980s sentencing guidelines, notorious for retreating from rehabilitation, continued to rely on rehabilitative premises (p.117). Grasso argues that the rehabilitative model too contained the seeds of its failures, as those unfit for rehabilitation were more fatalistically classed as irredeemable. Recently, the overreliance on redemption curtailed the reach of the bipartisan 2018 First Step Act signed by Trump. Initially, skeptical voices like the ACLU, moved by “rehabilitation based on the word’s plain meaning,” ultimately backed the legislation, but the farming out of the process to decide who could be considered reformable constrained the law’s reformist aims (196).

Grasso radically critiques liberal governance but concedes there are dangers in both small reforms and systemic overhauls. His history is replete with good-faith humanitarianism-producing cruelties. He notes that “Populists like William Jennings Bryan inadvertently helped legitimize the expansion of state policing… by objecting to… privatization… in favor of public policing” (p.70). He laments how Robert Martinson’s criminological humility became weaponized by the carceral right in the 1970s (p.133–134). While Grasso identifies many complexities that have driven institutions toward inequity, he avoids the fatalism that characterizes the sort of Foucauldian analyses that question the very possibility of reform. While his thoughtfully radical set of criticisms seemingly demands fundamental change, his own policy preferences are sometimes rather nuanced. Grasso recognizes that “governing corporate misconduct” requires both regulations and prosecutions (p.21) and sees the “value” in both civil and criminal penalties (p.158). He concedes that the administrative state can undercut due process rights and that nationalizing banks can politicize them (p.230–31). On street crime, Grasso devotes little time to hard questions of how to redress serious violence, focusing predominantly on a welfare state that would ameliorate the conditions that foster crime. He points to policy successes like tobacco regulation which, for all their virtues, would seem a limited model for most forms of antisocial behavior (p.225). Given Grasso’s ambivalence toward both small and big changes, one wonders how we might overcome the pitfalls of regulatory and rehabilitative ideology. Grasso does not regard social democracy or democratic socialism as a panacea, but he returns repeatedly to the structural constraints of American liberalism—which he argues developed amidst an ideological thicket including “Puritan morality, utilitarian theory, retributivist philosophies, and libertarian ideals” (p.9), none of which he has the space to theorize as much as his core subjects.

This speaks to the book’s main limitation, which is neither surprising nor fatal to Grasso’s project. He is careful to define terms, even defining ideology itself as a “system of ideas providing understandings, beliefs, and vocabularies for people to make sense of their everyday reality via a coherent interpretation of the social world and its problems and prescriptions for making it better” (p.5). However, he cannot always provide the same rigor in his conceptual analyses as he does with his granular intellectual history and its dialectical interaction with policy development. For example, he gestures toward “American racial capitalism” for its explanatory clarification of power relations but does not wade into its contested meaning across the literature or the implications of those debates (p.212).

Grasso’s sustained focus on liberalism invites further questions. (I struggle myself to define liberalism, both in its continuities and its consequential transformations.) Grasso understandably focuses on individualism, explaining how to reconcile it with such fictions as the “corporate person” (p.85–6). Grasso sees “rehabilitative and regulatory ideologies” as “consistent with traditions of liberal individualism by isolating the individual as the target for social control” (p.54). Yet how many non-liberal, non-individualist policy traditions also singled out individuals for social control? As Grasso notes, progressive eugenicist reformers prioritized “protecting the social body” against the “undesirables… threatening collective national health” (p.30). Were they thus less liberal than their earlier or future counterparts? If twentieth-century liberalism, through all its changes and amidst the powerful state it has helped sustain, constitutes a compromise between individualism and collectivism, how do we test which side of the compromise is doing most of the eugenic, regulatory, or rehabilitative work? Are the elements of state development and its inequity mostly the product of individualism or collectivism, or perhaps these histories are themselves orthogonal? Undeniably, classism and social hierarchy fueled “punitive vagrancy laws” (p.56), yet these regressive features were compatible with but not unique to liberalism. An even deeper exploration into later-twentieth-century liberalism would be nice to see, perhaps to consider the interaction between carceral and regulatory governance at the historical hinge of the early 1970s. Grasso mentions the regulatory state’s expansion with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, but tellingly these last great triumphs of the twentieth-century social state were ratified by Richard Nixon, who also ushered in a new era of crime and drug control (pp.170–171).

It is difficult to write historically about recent decades, during which neoliberalism becomes important to Grasso’s story. Grasso casts neoliberalism as the “governing ideology that markets know best in all domains of life” (p.173). I think this definition overreaches in describing either the ideas of most so-called neoliberals or their demonstrated policy preferences. Dual Justice emphasizes the neoliberal hyperfocus on individualism and “cost-efficiency” but could say even more about the era’s ironic contemporaneous expansion of a costly prison state (p.184). A more nuanced archeology of the neoliberal zeitgeist—with some exploration of its foundations and bipartisan diversity—would perhaps undercut any reductive definition. The way policymakers reconciled seeming deviations from the zeitgeist, whether leftward or rightward, could further illuminate the dynamism of the ideas in play. Neoliberal economics triumphed under Jimmy Carter, who nevertheless created the Departments of Energy and Education, as well as under Ronald Reagan, who certainly did not favor a free market in drugs. As I am writing, and we find ourselves witnessing profound political transformations, one wonders if the neoliberal era is over and what this means for American liberalism more broadly.

Such criticisms and questions arise due to the book’s welcome provocations. Space will not abide my smaller quibbles. Grasso’s contribution to American Political Development and intellectual history, illuminating key elements of the government’s hard and soft power rarely discussed in tandem, qualifies as an indispensable part of the full story behind some of America’s most consequential policy and cultural challenges.