Michael Javen Fortner. Black Silent Majority

The so-called Rockefeller drug laws, New York State’s draconian 1973 sentencing rules for drug law violators, eventually led even some of its original supporters to acknowledge both the injustices present within the laws and their abject failure as a policy tool. Michael Javen Fortner’s compelling new work poses the question: what forces came together to produce such legislation at that particular moment? Fortner’s work is a sustained argument for a more complex and nuanced model of historical policy change. Fortner rightly points out that criminal justice history has been the object of some highly unsubtle interpretations in which both specific policies (including the Rockefeller drug laws) and more general policy outcomes (including mass incarceration) have been largely disconnected from the problem and policy streams—the context, in other words—from which they arise. The author promises to avoid reducing policy analysis to a single moment, and instead provides a longer-term view of policy (citing the conceptual contributions of Paul Pierson and others) in which old and new are layered together.

Argument (complex analysis) · Context (archaeology) · Criminal justice · Criminology · Economic Justice · Law and economics · Legislation · Political science · Politics · Punishment (psychology) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies