COHEN’S FRAMEWORK APPLIED TO MASS INCARCERATION

Cohen’s framework was intended to be a taxonomy of works that examined the shift that he, himself, examined in Visions of Social Control: the punitive turn to incarceration in the progressive era. Visions, it is important to remember, was published in 1985, when a rise in incarceration patterns in both the United States and the United Kingdom was already becoming evident, but the nightmare that mass incarceration would become was close to unimaginable. Moreover, in the early 1980s, Cohen would not have been privy to statistics pointing to declining crime rates in the United States (Zimring Reference Zimring2006) or the United Kingdom (Arnett Reference Arnett2014), as the decline became a noticeable trend only in the 1990s. Nonetheless, Cohen’s framework remains fresh and relevant, and is applicable not only to sociohistorical analyses of the Progressive Era, but also to new works making sense of more recent developments in social control.

Using Cohen’s taxonomy to classify and understand newer work is interesting because it enables us to examine shifts not only in the subjects of the observation (newer policies) but also in the perspectives of the observers themselves. Indeed, the work of Cohen and others was not merely descriptive but constitutive: chroniclers of mass incarceration in the 2000s and 2010s were raised on radical critical literature, particularly Marxist and radical criminologies and the works of Michel Foucault—fresh, cutting-edge perspectives at the time Visions was published, and now a fundamental part of the canonical punishment scholarship (Garland Reference Garland1992). Moreover, the entry of the term “neoliberalism” into the criminological conversation (Brown Reference Brown2011; Metcalf Reference Metcalf2017) yielded works that built on, and updated, Marxist concepts, linking hypercapitalism, the death of welfare, and racial segregation to punitive crime control (Simon Reference Simon2007; Wacquant Reference Wacquant2009; Soss et al., Reference Soss, Fording and Schram2011). In particular, racial critiques of mass incarceration focus on racial hierarchy and domination as an organizing principle for punitive oppression (Muhammad Reference Muhammad2010; Alexander Reference Alexander2010), sometimes referencing conflict and Marxist criminology as their theoretical point of reference (Hawkins Reference Hawkins1987).

Because of these theoretical inspirations, it is not surprising that current literature tends to skew toward Cohen’s “discipline and mystification” category. In general, you would be hard pressed to find a major work in punishment and society that perceives the mass incarceration trajectory as “uneven progress.” Virtually all punishment and society scholars agree that mass incarceration has been, overall, an unqualified evil; the few works that offer cautious optimism—including my own—focus on late mass incarceration, from 2008 onward, and offer unqualified criticism of the four decades that preceded the turn (Simon Reference Simon2014; Aviram Reference Aviram2015; Dagan and Teles Reference Dagan and Teles2016). Law and Society literature tends to critically view even developments that could be simplistically perceived as progress: for example, Sarat problematizes the presumably positive shift from public executions to private, medicalized ones, highlighting the negative effects of sublimation and the persistent rate of botched executions (Reference Sarat2002; Reference Sarat2014). Similarly, Schlanger warns us that transferring inmates out of California’s diseased state prison into county jails may result in a “hydra problem,” yielding dozens of lawsuits against ill-equipped county jails rather than one against the state prison system (Reference Schlanger2013). “Uneven progress” works tend to be either internal accounts of institutional actors or the work of self-identified conservative criminologists outside the punishment and society academic milieu (Matthews Reference Matthews2005; Wright and DeLisi Reference Wright and DeLisi2016) who are aware of their exclusion and argue for the need to restore balance to criminological theory (Wright and DeLisi Reference Wright and DeLisi2016, 3).

But what of “good intentions, disastrous consequences?” And why has the scholarship gravitated toward assuming bad intent, rather than just bad effects? Here is where Cohen’s taxonomy encounters a challenge, namely the issue of unit of analysis. Macrolevel accounts of mass incarceration rely on structural ills and inequalities for their explanations—mostly the foundations of racism and hypercapitalism—and therefore assume that the source of “discipline and mystification” is broad and diffuse: society, culture, the habitus, hegemony. The works that Cohen examined for his analysis—the writings of Michel Foucault and Marxist criminologists—were macrolevel projects through and through, and thus largely unpreoccupied with the motivations of individuals. What is interesting about the new crop of works is that they often combine macrolevel theories of structural ills with microlevel accounts of the roles of individuals in shaping punitive policies. In many of these accounts, the sinister petri dish of society’s structural ills is presented as fertile ground for individuals with sinister motivations—and bad intent is imputed, across levels of analysis, at the individual level.

IDENTIFYING “BAD GUYS”: IMPUTING STRUCTURAL EVILS TO INDIVIDUAL ACTORS

Granted, some individuals pose easy cases. In Mona Lynch’s Hard Bargains (Reference Lynch2016) she describes a hectoring Northeastern prosecutor and a downright sadistic Southern judge who see it as their mission to inflict punishments of unfathomable gravity on nonviolent drug offenders. Similarly, the prosecutor that opens Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve’s Crook County (Reference Gonzalez Van Cleve2016) is openly and savagely racist, and the rest of the court personnel offer little relief as they scold and mock defendants and witnesses and imitate their Ebonics. Even folks with a broader arc of influence can sometimes be easily classified as sinister: Joe Arpaio’s punitive excesses as Sheriff of Maricopa County have always featured an explicit element of racist, nativist, and homophobic humiliation (Lynch Reference Lynch, Reiter and Koenig2015; Mason Reference Mason2017). Similarly, Harry Anslinger—the founding crusader of the War on Drugs—was openly racist and explicitly linked drugs to particular ethnic populations for the purpose of racial oppression and domination (Jenison Reference Jenison2016). And the classic macrolevel accounts of mass incarceration find easy culprits at the national helm in Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (Beckett Reference Beckett1999; Hinton Reference Hinton2016)—with ample evidence, especially in the case of the former, for bad animus (LoBianco Tom 2016).

But newer works push the “discipline and mystification” framework even farther by expanding the circle of blame to institutions and individuals previously perceived as part of the “good guys” bloc. These works impute deeply misguided (at best) and downright bad (at most) motives to reformers and progressives as well as conservatives—and sometimes even more so. The tamest example is Jonathan Simon’s Governing Through Crime (Reference Simon2007), in which he argues that politicians of every stripe, including progressives, benefit from posturing as tough on crime and fostering punitive policies. More indicative of this trend are works that focus specifically on Democrats and liberals and accuse them of a considerable share of the blame. In The Prison and the Gallows (Reference Gottschalk2006), Marie Gottschalk faults prisoners’ rights advocates and death penalty opponents for some key wrong turns in the arc of progress, which contributed to mass incarceration. In The First Civil Right (Reference Murakawa2014), Naomi Murakawa attributes much of the evil of mass incarceration to civil-rights liberal politicians—specifically Harry Truman, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton, accusing them of “establish[ing] a law-and-order mandate: build a better carceral state, one strong enough to control racial violence in the streets and regimented enough to control racial bias in criminal justice administration” (3). And in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Reference Hinton2016), Elizabeth Hinton argues that Nixon’s punitive presidency was not so much an aberration, but rather a direct continuation of the oppressive, paternalistic, racist approaches to crime control of his predecessors, Kennedy and Johnson, who were assisted by the oppressive, paternalistic, and racially unsavory top-down policies espoused by their academic advisors, criminologists Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward.

Each of these assertions can be the topic of lively academic debate, focusing not only on factual evidence but on its interpretation. As Ashley Rubin (Reference Rubin2019) points out, ascribing bad or good intentions to criminal justice reformers and institutional actors often fails to “understand the actors on their own terms” (6), which requires acknowledging that multiple motives can exist at the same time. Referring to Progressive Era prison administrators, Rubin remarks:

By adopting the intensely critical approach that imputes structural inequalities to the actions of individuals in criminal justice reform as the master framework, scholars have built upon the sophistication of macrolevel analysis, but also lost the important nuance that can be provided by the other perspectives. Again regarding early modern prison history, Pieter Spierenburg notes:

Rubin and Spierenburg’s comments on early modern carceral histories are generalizable to literature about the later punitive turn. It is possible to understand the recent project of blaming liberals and civil rights organizations for their role in mass incarceration as a scholarly effort to “overcorrect” previous literature, which relegated the blame to Nixon and Reagan and left it at that. But telling a monolithic story of bad intentions and unscrupulous class and race interests misses out on rich detail, which is better exposed in works that take criminal justice reformers on their own terms. Two recent works stand out as engaging in the latter: James Forman’s Locking Up Our Own (Reference Forman2017) and Heather Schoenfeld’s Building the Prison State (Reference Schoenfeld2018). I now turn to these works.

UNDERSTANDING ACTORS ON THEIR OWN TERMS: LOCKING UP OUR OWN AND WELL-MEANING AFRICAN AMERICAN STAKEHOLDERS

Locking Up Our Own is a case study of the punitive turn in Washington D.C., a city characterized by robust participation of African American politicians and law enforcement officials in its structure of policymaking structure. Forman’s main concern in the book is the question of complicity of African American stakeholders, who supported, and often pioneered, criminal justice policies that brought about increased crime control crackdowns in the streets, as well as punitive sentencing practices. The book revolves around several historical axes: the advent of the war on drugs, the adoption of lax gun control policies, sentencing policies, the response to the crack epidemic, and the expansion of stop-and-frisk police strategies.

What is important about Forman’s account is that at no point does he make light of the gravity of the problems faced by the African American community. Violent crime and drug-related devastation, as well as the proliferation of illegally obtained weapons, were all real things that were happening in real neighborhoods to real people, and raised serious problems that imperiled and burdened communities already burdened by institutional racism (of course, these problems themselves originated from institutional racism as well; this is the tragic double-winged problem of racialized law enforcement, that both criminality and criminalization stem from the same fountain of stunted opportunities and crippling poverty). Moreover, Forman does not doubt at all the altruistic motivation of the actors—police chiefs, journalists, lawmakers—who, in the name of wanting to assist their community in its plight, ended up espousing policies that, in hindsight, yielded disastrous consequences. The urge to clean up the streets from drugs led to aggressive, disproportionate enforcement. The desire to help people help themselves against armed assailants exacerbated the proliferation of guns. Sentencing reforms filled prisons and fueled punitive animus; making stop and frisk a central component of the police’s toolbox disintegrated the already shaky trust between the police and the communities they were hoping to serve.

But it is important to recognize that, even as African American stakeholders participated in locking up their own, their biographies and stories show their genuine good intentions. Forman’s account shines with historical nuance when he delves into the personal history of Burtell Jefferson, Washington, DC’s first African American Chief of Police. Jefferson rose through the ranks, overcoming immense structural racism and outsmarting the racist selection policies by excelling in the promotion tests so that his blackness could not count against him. Jefferson stands out as someone whose truly admirable rise was motivated by a desire to do well for a community in plight, and as someone who spent monumental effort in mentoring others who followed in his footsteps. Jefferson is just one example of the people Forman introduces in the book, most of whom were motivated by a similar genuine desire to help their communities. Their motivations, except when he finds evidence to the contrary, are taken at face value; they were individuals leading individual lives as well as protagonists in a wider situational drama of racial projects and inequality.

Forman’s answer to the main question animating his book is therefore not one of evil, mystification, and bad faith. Rather, he argues, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the absence of workable public health models for handling the drug crisis, or a memory of using more innovative models, people sought, in good faith, to represent the interests of the community and assist it in its plight. It is valuable to acknowledge, as Forman does, the tragedy in the fact that violent crime—which was and is a real problem in urban neighborhoods—disproportionally implicates as well as victimizes people of color. Because of this, the politicians’ and police’s demands for a crackdown is not merely motivated by racial animus, but by the value of protecting the very community that produced both the crime and the victimization. Was the fix worse than the problem? Sure. Could it be avoided? We can only tell in hindsight. Can we fault the architects of the fix? Only for their lack of prescience.

UNDERSTANDING ACTORS ON THEIR OWN TERMS: BUILDING THE PRISON STATE AND SHORT-SIGHTED PRISON REFORMERS

Heather Schoenfeld’s Building the Prison State offers a similarly nuanced analysis, though her take on the reformers is somewhat less benign than Forman’s. The book looks at the growth of mass incarceration in Florida, identifying the root of the problem as a cynical exploitation of a loophole left in the consent decree in Costello v. Wainwright, a prisoners’ rights case centered on remedying prison overcrowding. In Schoenfeld’s case study, the interventions that paved Florida’s path toward astronomical growth in incarceration were not so much front-end policing reforms but rather the construction of additional institutions. The growth of the state’s population by two million throughout the sixties, as well as the actual rise in crime and the new policing techniques, meant that between 1968 and 1972 the prison population grew by thirty-one percent (Schoenfeld 74). The warden, Wainwright, was amid a modernization project and saw the overcrowded and outdated facilities as hurdles on his path to implement more rehabilitative programming behind bars. Civil rights attorney Toby Simon, who fought for the inmates suffering from overcrowding, prevailed in the lawsuit, but so did prison officials who wanted updated facilities. Since the entire Florida system was overcrowded, Wainwright would not be able to reduce overcrowding by moving inmates from facility to facility, but by pursuing one of two courses of action: releasing prisoners (via good behavior or parole) or increasing capacity (via building more prisons.) The political developments in the years that followed, argues Schoenfeld, and the law-and-order sense that releasing inmates was a nonstarter, led to the latter strategy—which was not only technically compliant with the consent decree in Costello, but also true to its spirit: Judge Scott gave equal weight to both strategies. It was the historical aftermath, complete with the rise in racist animus, that led to the increase in incarceration.

At each junction of her narrative, Schoenfeld emphasizes that the disastrous outcomes of the implementation of Costello could have been avoided. But her accounts of the motives of individuals show an interesting mix of institutional agents along the political spectrum, most of whom genuinely wanted to fix what they perceived as substandard incarceration conditions. That the outcome became coopted as the raison d’être of a big construction project does not contradict the fact that, absent evidence to the contrary, people’s good intentions—both Simon’s and Wainwright’s—are taken at face value.

Schoenfeld’s answer to the question why incarceration spiked in Florida is therefore nuanced and complicated; a combination of the federal court’s reluctance to lean on the state and a lack of prescience about the implications of mass prison construction.

Both Forman and Schoenfeld’s accounts of mass incarceration are attentive to the structural constraints—as Schoenfeld calls them, racial projects—underlying assumptions about crime, criminality, and the need to protect the public. But neither of them goes as far as to deem the disastrous outcome foreseeable, planned, or self-serving. The characters they describe operate within these constraints, but they are not powerless pawns in the clutches of an oppressive machine: they wield power to do what they genuinely believe will make the situation better. This approach is sensitive to the convergence of institutional interests and to the dilution and perversion of ideals. But it does not assume “intelligent design” in the carceral architecture.

WHY INTENTIONS MATTER: THE CASE OF BAN-THE-BOX POLICIES AND THE PROTEAN QUALITY OF RACISM

Forman and Schoenfeld’s flexible approaches toward reform intent, and their nimble shifts from macro- to microlevels of analysis, are promising for several reasons. First, sensitive analysis that examines multiple contexts offers a more genuine account from a historical perspective. Delving into the microlevel of institutional and individual motivations does not superimpose our current ideas about governmentality or neoliberalism on the data. Analyses in the tradition of the “discipline and mystification” family of approaches can play out in ahistorical ways, ascribing bad intentions and villainy to people and ideas in ways that were far from obvious in their time. A good example is Hinton’s critique, mentioned earlier, of Lloyd Ohlin’s support for top-down reforms to address juvenile delinquency. Ohlin, a prominent criminologist, did a substantial amount of public service as special consultant on delinquency to the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for the Kennedy administration, associate director of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice for the Johnson administration, and a member of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice for the Carter administration. Today’s scholarship on racialized criminal control, infused by the deconstructionist approaches exemplified in Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness (Reference Muhammad2010), question and critique the emergence of a link between race and criminality; but in a world in which Merton’s now-obvious arguments about inequality and criminality (Reference Merton1949) were still new, Cloward and Ohlin’s attribution of crime among low income people of color as a product of diminished opportunities (Reference Cloward and Ohlin2001 [1960]) was fresh and revolutionary. In other words, they made strides that today seem reactionary but at the time were perceived as—and indeed were—progressive, rehabilitative, and far less oppressive than the alternative. Should they have built on community strengths, rather than espousing a top-down approach that focused on the pathologies of the black family as the cause of crime? In hindsight, of course. But progressive criminologists in the 1960s who hoped to bring about positive change and be regarded as legitimate by government actors did not have the benefit of Muhammad and Hinton’s scholarship. Moreover, much of the literature that now criticizes Ohlin’s participation in the racial project builds on his own opportunity theory. Hinton admits that Ohlin’s and others’ intentions were likely good, but her analysis for the most part criticizes them for being, essentially, a product of their time. In other words, relying on “good intentions-disastrous outcomes” as the default position fosters another virtue that we tend to fall short on in criminological research: a historically informed approach fosters some understanding, empathy, and forgiveness for reformers, who—like us—wanted to do what they thought as best.

Another advantage of pausing before attributing bad will is that the way we analyze history also sheds light on how we should make sense of the present. A classic example is the Ban the Box initiative, which aimed at eliminating the requirement to admit to a criminal record at the initial screening level for employment. Many progressives strongly supported Ban-the-Box policies in the hopes of bringing about a reality in which people with criminal records are not excluded from employment and opportunity, not only in order to improve the fraught prospects of reentry and integration of returning citizens into society, but to ameliorate the ways in which discrimination on the basis of criminal records disproportionately burdens people of color, widening interracial gaps in employment. But much to the activists’ collective dismay, the successful campaign on behalf of Ban the Box has had mixed outcomes.

The policy has increased callback rates for people with criminal records and has possibly “effectively eliminated” the effect of having a criminal record on receiving a callback. Case studies from specific cities support these results, showing that hiring rates for people with criminal records increased after Ban the Box was implemented. Additionally, Ban the Box as a social movement has drawn attention to the plight of people with criminal records and has increased awareness of the challenges they face beyond employment. But recent research has concluded that Ban the Box also reduces the likelihood that employers call back or hire young black and Latino men. These findings suggest that when information about a person’s criminal history is not present, employers may make hiring decisions based on their perception of the likelihood that the applicant has a criminal history. Racism, harmful stereotypes, and disparities in contact with the justice system may heavily skew perceptions against young men of color. In other words, rather than using people’s criminal records as a proxy for their race, in the post-Ban-the-Box world we use people’s race as a proxy for their possible criminal records (Doleac and Hansen Reference Doleac and Hansen2016; Agan and Starr Reference Agan and Starr2016; Stacy and Cohen Reference Stacy and Cohen2017).

An improvement in reentry odds, employment, and racial equality? Not quite. But does this mean that Ban-the-Box supporters and advocates should be seen solely as middle-class, paternalistic, pseudo-benevolent actors marinated in racialized environments? Despite the disastrous consequences of the policy—which we must strive to correct—the very fact that a coalition advocating for reentry and equal opportunity was formed is important; it fosters hope that it is possible to organize and advocate. The lessons from the failure of Ban the Box might be more complicated. Maybe we should conclude that we have to be more imaginative in our predictions of unintended consequences. Maybe we should be wary of falling in love with particular reforms, and maintain the flexibility required to “course correct” once it is evident that a proposed reform does not work in practice as well as we had hoped. Or, more pessimistically, maybe the embedded racial animus in society, and the protean quality of racism in America means that racism always finds a way to manifest itself and sabotage the dream of equality and opportunity, and we have to find ways to work on racial and class inequalities at their root, rather than via policy fixes. In any case, the Ban the Box example, as well as the examples Forman and Schoenfeld discuss, remind us that some humility is in order whenever assessing failed criminal justice reforms.

A third reason to consider reformers’ own perspectives on their actions, including benign ones, is strategic more than scholarly. In her critique of Murakawa’s The First Civil Right, Margo Schlanger (Reference Schlanger2015) argues that Murakawa’s analysis of the liberal contribution to mass incarceration is factually inaccurate, and in terms of its rhetoric, “sounds in perversity,” in that it promotes “drastic but salutary change (that is, revolution) by making the current state of affairs more intolerable.” This kind of critique “accuses ‘reformist’ rights of taming the aspirations of oppressed groups, legitimating and therefore entrenching the oppressive system without achieving much by way of amelioration.” It is the kind of argument that appeals not only to radical progressives, but to academics of all stripes, because “perversity arguments are counter-intuitive, attention-grabbing.” Schlanger continues:

The concern about perversity arguments is not only about the gap between their rhetorical appeal and their historical nuance, but also about the ability to build coalitions. While academics operate in a different sphere than reformers or policymakers, many people who write about mass incarceration also actively speak out against it and hope to bring about its end. If so, and if different interpretations are possible, even abolitionist punishment and society scholars might be wary of the interpretive gymnastics that impute blame for structural conditions onto individuals within the system, be they policymakers or reformers. Liberal reformers and radical revolutionaries need each other to effect change. Often—albeit not always—their vision of a good world, the end goal, is strikingly similar; the debate is on the way to get there. There is nothing to be gained strategically from arguing that well-meaning reformers like Burtell Jefferson or Toby Simon “built prison America.” Plenty of card-carrying progressives and radicals advocated for determinate sentencing to decrease sentencing disparities, only to see that the system that resulted was no better than the one they eradicated; the energy that drove that movement is still needed today, and imputing the immense obstacle of structural racism that they faced to the activists themselves, is not just factually inaccurate—it is destructive. If mischaracterizing Ban-the-Box advocates as cronies of a structurally flawed system seems unrealistic, perhaps the same yardstick should apply to reformers of the past and of the present in other areas of criminal justice reform. Arguing (and coming to an agreement) about the ways to achieve less punitiveness and more equality is likely to be more effective where good faith is assumed and the blame game is kept to a minimum.

CONCLUSION: RUBIN’S FACE/VASE, OR THE IMPORTANCE OF AMBIGOUS “SEEING” IN PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY SCHOLARSHIP

In 1915, Edgar Rubin created an intriguing visual illusion, the face/vase, an image that can be perceived either as a vase or as two faces in profile, facing each other (Rubin Reference Rubin1915). What is remarkable about the face/vase illusion is that anyone can see the image as either faces or a vase, but not simultaneously. Later research shows that different regions of the brain are involved in each of these perceptions: the fusiform face area, which is responsible for facial recognition, becomes activated when a person perceives the two faces, and remains inactive when the same person perceives the vase (Andrews et al. Reference Andrews, Schluppeck, Homfray, Matthews and Blakemore2004). Reading much of the recent literature on mass incarceration—with notable exceptions such as Forman and, to a lesser degree, Schoenfeld—suggests that Cohen’s last two categories are like this illusion. One can either focus on the individuals at the microlevel, examine them on their own terms, and see their complicated set of motivations and the expected and unexpected outcomes, or focus on structural inequality, racism, and neoliberalism, and see the outcomes as inevitable and stemming from these inherent social ills. For cultural and epistemological reasons, the field’s collective brain has a bias in favor of perceiving macroexplanations—sometimes by rejecting individual-level analyses as naïve and sometimes by not seeing the relevance of individual-level analysis at all in light of the insurmountable structural problems.

Cohen’s analysis in Visions of Social Control is a case in point. His narrative clearly favors the “discipline and mystification” framework, especially when presenting the “widening the net” problem. As Cohen posits, a policy ostensibly aimed at reducing incarceration by introducing methods of noncarceral community supervision resulted instead in an overall dramatic increase of the people caught in the system’s net. Indeed, Cohen finds the need to address policymakers on their own terms irrelevant to his scholarly project. He relies on an analogy by Saul Alinsky, telling of a fisherman who sees a body floating down the river. The fisherman jumps into the water downstream and give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the body, but as he does so he sees more bodies floating downstream. Should he remain downstream and do what he can to help the bodies floating down or go upstream to find out who is pushing people into the river? Cohen is refreshingly honest when he says:

But he tellingly adds:

Many punishment and society scholars attempt to engage in two seemingly incompatible tasks: studying the macrolevel causes of mass incarceration can lead to despair, because of the persistent confirmation of intractable systemic problems. Getting into the stream to offer guidance and advice to the world as it tackles microlevel problems, however, requires assuming a more flexible model of agency. The politicians, reformers, journalists, and criminal justice actors that academics encounter treading this path are complicated people with a multiplicity of motives and opinions, and taking these actors at face value while admitting the complexity, rather than negating their agency and seeing them as part of the giant machine, is a path that has the potential boon of coalition-building, nuanced dissemination of knowledge, and hope. It is hard to see the face and the vase at the same time. But writers can alternate between the two, as Forman and Schoenfeld so nicely demonstrate, and given the realities that punishment and society scholars face and write about, that is perhaps the imperative of our times.