Publication Feature: Dual Justice: America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime
Dual Justice: America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime
A far-reaching examination of how America came to treat street and corporate crime so differently.
While America incarcerates its most marginalized citizens at an unparalleled rate, the nation has never developed the capacity to consistently prosecute corporate wrongdoing. Dual Justice unearths the intertwined histories of these two phenomena and reveals that they constitute more than just modern hypocrisy.
By examining the carceral and regulatory states’ evolutions from 1870 through today, Anthony Grasso shows that America’s divergent approaches to street and corporate crime share common, self-reinforcing origins. During the Progressive Era, scholars and lawmakers championed naturalized theories of human difference to justify instituting punitive measures for poor offenders and regulatory controls for corporate lawbreakers. These ideas laid the foundation for dual justice systems: criminal justice institutions harshly governing street crime and regulatory institutions governing corporate misconduct.
Since then, criminal justice and regulatory institutions have developed in tandem to reinforce politically constructed understandings about who counts as a criminal. Grasso analyzes the intellectual history, policy debates, and state and federal institutional reforms that consolidated these ideas, along with their racial and class biases, into America’s legal system.
This summer, Dual Justice was honored with the 2025 American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Gladys M. Kammerer Award for exceptional publications in U.S. national policy.
The award is presented annually to honor the best book published in the last year in the field of United States national policy.
“I am honored to receive this award from APSA,” said author Anthony Grasso, assistant professor for political science at Rutgers University–Camden. “The book began as my dissertation research and subsequently developed into a long-term project. It is deeply gratifying to have my work recognized by the committee.”
Grasso’s book examines the history of the U.S. legal system and why individuals convicted of street crimes are viewed and treated differently than those convicted of corporate crimes. Beginning with the policies and principles of the Progressive Era, Grasso analyzes how intellectual history, policy debates, state and federal institutional reforms, as well as racial and class biases, have shaped America’s criminal law system.
Read more about the award here.
Learn more about the book here.
About Anthony Grasso
Anthony Grasso is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Camden. His research focuses on inequality and the development of American law, with a particular focus on criminal justice. As a political scientist, he studies the law as a product of politics, and remains particularly attentive to how the contemporary legal system reflects and reinforces the inequalities prevalent in American social and economic life.
His research adopts a historical institutional perspective that emphasizes how ideas, interests, and institutions have interacted over the course of American history in ways that define contemporary politics. His current book project is an examination of class inequalities in the criminal justice system that studies how economic inequalities have shaped the development of the American state’s distinctive approaches to punishing street and corporate crime.
