Julie A. Beck, Ph.D. Sociology Faculty Profile
Julie A. Beck, Ph.D. Sociology
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
- E-mail: julie.beck@csueastbay.edu
- Phone: (510) 885-2487
- Office: MI 3089
- Office Hours: Thursdays and Fridays 10:00 am - 11:30 am, or by appointment.
Current Research (submitted for publication):
‘Who Are the Real Criminals?’: Men serving life in California prisons discuss how politics drove California’s parole policy during the get-tough-on-crime movement
Abstract: This paper explores the politicization of California’s parole policy during the recent “get-tough-on-crime” era. Through a content analysis of nearly 100 prison letters of men sentenced to life in prison in California, I explore punitive extremism through the systematic denial of parole to long-term inmates under the terms of Governors George Deukmejian through Arnold Schwarzenegger. I argue that California’s “lifers,” who were systematically detained long past their parole-eligibility dates, experienced a policy of indefinite detention in California that was facilitated by a politically-driven parole policy masked behind state actors’ strategic employment of crime discourse—what I am calling redoubled criminalization. I foreground the voices of prisoners—whose letters evidence legally questionable behavior and corruption by state actors—to offer a competing narrative that challenges and disrupts the common-sense assumptions about criminality of dominant crime discourse and raises alarm about due process, human rights, and the use and abuse of state power.