Going Berserk for Punishment

This chapter illustrates how California politicians went “berserk in terms of punishment” and helped balloon the prison system to a scale few could have imagined possible in the early 1970s. While determinate sentencing in itself does not ratchet up punishment, the ensuing battles in California over setting prison terms became a vehicle for the ascendance of the so-called “toughness imperative.” “Law-and-order” politicians in both parties used the displacement of the rehabilitative ideal to assert a new vision for the prison. They interpreted the upheaval in California's prisons as evidence that corporal containment and harsh, degrading punishment were the only viable response to street crime.