American criminal laws and criminal justice systems are harsher, more punitive, more afflicted by racial disparities and injustices, more indifferent to suffering, and less respectful of human dignity than those of other Western countries. The explanations usually offered—rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s, public anger and anxiety, crime control politics, neoliberal economic and social policies—are fundamentally incomplete. The deeper explanations are four features of American history that shaped values, attitudes, and beliefs and produced a political culture in which suffering is fatalistically accepted and policy makers are largely indifferent to individual injustices. They are the history of American race relations, the evolution of Protestant fundamentalism, local election of judges and prosecutors, and the continuing influence of political and social values that emerged during three centuries of western expansion. The last, encapsulated in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” is interwoven with the other three. Together, they explain long-term characteristics of American criminal justice and the extraordinary severity of penal policies and practices since the 1970s.

中文翻译：

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宿命论与冷漠：边疆对美国刑事司法的影响

与其他西方国家相比，美国的刑法和刑事司法制度更严厉、更具惩罚性、更受种族差异和不公正的折磨、对苦难更漠不关心、更不尊重人的尊严。通常提供的解释——1970 年代和 1980 年代犯罪率上升、公众的愤怒和焦虑、犯罪控制政治、新自由主义经济和社会政策——基本上是不完整的。更深层次的解释是美国历史的四个特征，它们塑造了价值观、态度和信仰，并产生了一种政治文化，在这种文化中，苦难被宿命地接受，政策制定者在很大程度上对个人的不公正漠不关心。它们是美国种族关系的历史，新教原教旨主义的演变，法官和检察官的地方选举，以及在三个世纪的西方扩张中出现的政治和社会价值观的持续影响。最后一个，封装在弗雷德里克杰克逊特纳的“前沿论文”中，与其他三个交织在一起。他们一起解释了自 1970 年代以来美国刑事司法的长期特征以及刑事政策和实践的异常严厉。