The proportionality between crime and punishment is made, and the way it is made makes for a certain kind of criminal law. By analyzing how punitive measures are justified in Swedish criminal law and crime policy through appeals to proportionality, the Article demonstrates how proportionality has been made and remade to legitimize an increasingly punitive crime policy, obscuring the reasons for these legislative changes. The Article thus calls for the principle of proportionality to be dismantled and employs a discursive approach to reverse-engineer claims of proportionality in Swedish legislative proposals. The purpose of this approach is to make visible the meanings and limits of the contemporary crime policy understanding of crime, punishment, and a just criminal law.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests dramatically increased the salience of police reform, yet the US Congress failed to pass any reforms. In contrast, state governments have passed hundreds of police-related bills since 2020. I summarize the plethora of state reforms passed over this period by grouping them into 18 key areas, including 14 I classify as pro-reform and four I classify as anti-reform. Next, I describe how party control and public opinion relate to state reforms. I find that state party control is a robust predictor of enacting pro-police reform policies, and that reforms are more likely in states with more Democratic and more pro-reform publics. While police reforms are responsive to public opinion, they are also typically incongruent.

Wrongful convictions are an increasing salient feature of criminal justice discourse in the United States. Many states have adopted reforms to mitigate the likelihood of wrongful convictions, discover errors, and provide redress in the wake of exonerations, yet we know little about why some are seemingly more committed to reducing such errors than others. We argue that public opinion is consequential for policy reform, but its effects are contingent on the electoral vulnerability of state lawmakers. We also suggest that advocacy organizations play a critical role in policy adoption. Incorporating data from all 50 states from 1989 to 2018, we investigate the adoption of five types of wrongful conviction reforms: (1) changes to eyewitness identification practices, (2) mandatory recording of interrogations, (3) the preservation of biological evidence, (4) access to postconviction DNA testing, and (5) exoneree compensation. Our results highlight a more nuanced view of how public opinion shapes policy.

Despite many important recent advances in the study of policy diffusion, this research has devoted limited attention to what happens after the adoption decision. This article attempts to fill this gap in diffusion research by examining the adoption and subsequent modification of “Three Strikes and You're Out” laws in the American states. Its analysis suggests that distinct political forces affected state-level outcomes at these two stages of the policymaking process. The rapid spread of Three Strikes laws in the 1990s seems to have occurred because states with more conservative leanings and higher proportions of African-American residents gravitated to a salient and visible policy. In contrast, the modification of Three Strikes laws appears to have been encouraged by financial necessity and shifting ideological environments but hindered by the mobilization of stakeholders with an interest in preserving the status quo, including private prison operators and prison officer unions. The contrast illustrates the usefulness of treating policy diffusion as a multistage process, and the stakeholder mobilization results provide empirical support for recent theorizing about policy feedback effects.