The answer to this question lies, as so many answers to American social phenomenon, in the complicated and painful history of race relations in the United States. Political actors attempt to mobilize public opinion to their advantage by framing issues that prime, or bring to the top of mind, the considerations that will move public opinion in the direction favoured by the actors and their supporters (Koch 1998). According to Beckett (1997), the creation and construction of the crime issue reflect its political utility to opponents of social and racial reform. It bolstered their efforts to discredit the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s and later to attack Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs along with the structural explanations of poverty with which they were associated.

Against the backdrop of racial unrest, civil disobedience and political assassination in the 1960s, Republican Barry Goldwater campaigned on the law and order issue even though it did not appear on the list of most important issues facing the country. He was joined by vehement opponents of desegregation like Alabama Governor George Wallace who argued that the “same Supreme Court that ordered integration and encouraged civil rights legislation” was the same one now “bending over backwards to help criminals” (Beckett 1997).

The conflation of crime with civil rights activism and political dissent proved to be an effective frame for promoting the notion that poverty and crime were freely chosen by dangerous and undeserving individuals looking for an “easy way out”--an interpretation that flew in the face of the deeply-cherished mantra of the American dream that says great rewards will follow hard work. Proceeding from that rhetorical base, conservatives also identified a “culture of welfare” as an important cause of social dysfunction including crime, illegitimacy, delinquency, and drug addiction. These neoclassical and cultural interpretations both hit on a common theme of “permissiveness” as the cause of crime and drug problems and served up the self-evident solution--a rededication of government initiative toward the restoration of social control rather than pandering to the misguided, if not downright un-American, activities aimed at improving social welfare. Gradually the concepts of race, crime, violence, delinquency and drug addiction were woven together into a single metaphor--the underclass--that has proven to have great utility to those who wish to legitimize a conservative social agenda that reconstructs the state’s roles and responsibilities particularly in regard to the redistribution of wealth. When this interpretation began to resonate with white working class constituents who were finding the American dream to be ever more elusive as they shouldered a growing share of the tax burden, Democrats were not slow to take notice.

Survey research confirms that the law and order approach to the crime problem is particularly popular among those who hold racially and socially conservative views. In-depth interviews with such voters reveal that racially charged hostility toward those who seek “something for nothing” is widespread and that this hostility informs support for punitive anti-crime policies. Thus it appears that the coded racial sub-text of the conservative rhetoric on crime and punishment has not gone unnoticed but has been crucial to its acceptance among [these] swing voters (Beckett 1997:12).

At the same time that civil rights activists were being labelled as the foes of law and order, the FBI was reporting steady increases in the crime rate. Even though white victimization remained relatively constant during this period, a fact that was largely overlooked in the public discussion of the issue at the time, anxieties about crime and support for punitive policies grew substantially among white voters.

And so the stage was set for Richard Nixon’s neoclassical approach to crime that stated, in essence, that the real causes of crime were not poverty or unemployment but insufficient curbs on the appetites that naturally impel individuals towards criminal activities. By 1969, 81% of those polled believed that law and order had broken down and most blamed “negroes who start riots” and “communists” for the disintegration (Beckett 1997).