ABSTRACT
The central argument of my 2007 book Governing Through Crime, was that crime, especially violent urban street crime, had become a symbolically privileged “problem” for governing at levels of the state, and in many domains more or less independent of the state, i.e., the school, the family, and the workplace. That logic or rationality of government, was, in my account, the underlying “cause” (in the limited historical sense that the book leveraged) of the “organized barbarism” of mass incarceration and the rule of “paternalistic or brutal police” that Doris Lessing described with unfailing and acute observation at the very moment of origin in her 1969 novel The Four-Gated City.1
