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Fear and Loathing in Late Modernity

Reflections on the Cultural Sources of Mass Imprisonment in the United States

University of Miami, USA

Mass imprisonment is based in some way on the intense fear of crime in the United States but how should we think about this fear? Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) provided a productive framework for examining the relationship between social organization and risk selection in their path-breaking study of environmentalism. Douglas and Wildavsky argued that the contemporary obsession with pollution risk indicated a drift in society toward sectarian forms of social organization with weak incentives and internal social controls. This article applies the Douglas and Wildavsky framework to the fear of crime in the United States since 1980 and concludes that crime has replaced pollution as the preferred risk for America's increasingly sectarian social order.

Key Words: crime • fear • pollution • risk

Punishment & Society, Vol. 3, No. 1, 21-33 (2001)
DOI: 10.1177/14624740122228221


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