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The Lyndon B. Johnson administration sponsored legislation that became the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which provided grants to states to modernize law enforcement, expanded wiretapping authority, relaxed restrictions on criminal confessions, and created a licensing system for gun dealers. Simon points out that after the early 1970s, successful gubernatorial candidates from both political parties (including Bill Clinton) exploited the crime issue, that legislatures imposed stricter sentencing guidelines on judges, and that prosecutors gained prestige at the expense of judicial officials.

Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. By Jonathan Simon. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x, 330 pp. $29.95, isbn 978-0-19-518108-1.)

In Governing through Crime, Jonathan Simon maintains that over the last four decades the "idealized subject" for legislation has become the crime victim (p. 78). Indeed, Simon, an associate dean of jurisprudence and social policy and professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that the perceived threat of crime has reshaped political discourse in the country. He implies that the fear of crime ultimately overshadowed other developments of the 1960s-civil rights, poverty, the sexual revolution, and even the Vietnam War. In response, policy makers launched a "war on crime" that would, unfortunately, consume too much of the political and social energies of the nation. Simon concedes that his argument is "polemical, and perhaps overstated" (p. 4). Most readers are likely to agree.

Simon offers some intriguing insights. Drawing on Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle's The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 19301980 (1989), he asserts that the violence commonly associated with the racial riots and youth rebellion of the 1960s shattered old New Deal coalitions and mind-sets. The Supreme Court's Furman v. Georgia (1972) decision placed severe limitations on capital punishment and stoked anxieties among middle- and workingclass Americans about public safety. Politicians at all levels sensed the despair. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration sponsored legislation that became the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which provided grants to states to modernize law enforcement, expanded wiretapping authority, relaxed restrictions on criminal confessions, and created a licensing system for gun dealers. The Furman decisions set off major campaigns in the states to reestablish the death sentence. Simon points out that after the early 1970s, successful gubernatorial candidates from both political parties (including Bill Clinton) exploited the crime issue, that legislatures imposed stricter sentencing guidelines on judges, and that prosecutors gained prestige at the expense of judicial officials. Prisons expanded dramatically, becoming less places for rehabilitation than for "waste management" (p. 152). And Americans became more security conscious at all levelsas evidenced by tighter monitoring and detentions in schools; drug testing and sexual harassment rules in the workplace; and the rise of residential gated communities.

The major strength of Simon's book is its attention to the cluster of developments in the late 1960s and early 1970s that signaled the emergence of crime as a major issue in American life. He makes a particularly convincing case that the Furman decision was decisive in the grassroots mobilization of anticrime passions. He correctly points out that "governing through crime" was hardly a mind-set restricted to Republican or conservative politicians. On the other hand, there is precious little evidence that the fear of crime transcended other important changes of the period. One might also question Simon's singular focus on the Safe Streets Act of 1968 as the marker for the new emphasis on public safety. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970 actually captures much more of the anticrime frenzy of the period and proved to be far more conseauential.