Dual Justice: America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime (Chicago Series in Law and Society)

A far-reaching examination of how America came to treat street and corporate crime so differently. While America incarcerates its most marginalized citizens at an unparalleled rate, the nation has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing.Dual Justice unearths the intertwined histories of these two phenomena and reveals that they constitute more than just modern hypocrisy. By examining the carceral and regulatory states’ evolutions from 1870 through today, Anthony Grasso shows that America’s divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins.During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers.These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate