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Introduction Societies characterized by high degrees of structural inequality and social injustice will typically experience high rates of and violence. Political states in such societies will typically pursue repressive social control policies in an effort to maintain order and to protect legitimacy by trying to provide at least a minimum of social peace. These policies include capital punishment, extensive use of imprisonment, and other rituals of exclusion. More egalitarian societies, which generally have far less violent crime, tend to respond to trouble with less punitive means and with various forms of ritualized reconciliation (Michalowski, 1985; Pfohl, 1985). For the past 25 years the United States, under various conservative governments, has pursued increasingly punitive crime-control policies. This has led to the restoration of the death penalty and has given the United States the highest rate of incarceration in the world (Mauer, 1993). Though this get tough with crime approach produced an imprisonment binge and a prison crisis, it did little to control violent (Irwin and Austin, 1994). Despite the demonstrable failure of ever more repressive measures to lessen in any significant way, politicians continue to call for even more of the same. In the spring of 1995, the nation took a giant step toward the 19th century when the states of Alabama and Arizona reinstituted chain gangs in the hope that the experience would be sufficiently humiliating to deter both offenders and observers from (Yozwiak, 1995). Crime-control practices in the United States after the election of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, have continued essentially along the same trajectory that they followed under the Republican administrations of Reagan and Bush. Imprisonment rates continue to rise. The death penalty is being used ever more frequently. Moreover, the brutalizing of prisoners in overcrowded, underfunded facilities remains the norm, though some states have now adopted the additional brutality of chaining prisoners together to perform slave labor. On the surface, the election of a president from a different party seems to make no difference when control in the United States is concerned. How is it possible that after a campaign apparently promising new directions in crime-control policy, the administration has produced mostly warmed-over conservative strategies? When Bill was elected in 1992, many people, from centrists to the Left, had reason to hope that a new set of more progressive social policies would be forthcoming. After all, the laissez-faire Reagan-Bush government had passed from the stage, and a new, supposedly more liberal generation of policymakers now had their hands on the levers of state power. Some even dared to hope that the conservatives' of inequality and failed repressive policies would be replaced by a progressive strategy of inclusion that would attack the underlying structural roots of and violence (Currie, 1993; Michalowski, 1993). These hopes were never very realistic to begin with, but they were seriously diminished by the actions of the administration during its first two years The radical Right's capture of Congress in 1994 all but eliminated remaining hopes. As Norman Solomon's (1994) book title indicated, the hope some progressives had placed in was nothing more than false hope. In particular, the crime-control policies offered by this administration differ little from those advocated by Reagan and Bush. What is occasionally different is the rhetoric about issuing from Bill Clinton. As Solomon (Ibid.: 45) noted, Clinton has a flair for rhetoric that some might hear as pleasantly radical. He can strike a populist tone and inspire people with a call for change, while at the same time, through actions and other words, satisfying elites that he will not rock their boats much. With a rhetorical flourish, can swerve the car to the right and still have people believe that he is driving left of center. …
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