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Societies have long sought security by identifying potentially dangerous individuals in their midst. America is surely no exception. This book traces the evolution of a modern technique that has come to enjoy nationwide popularity—criminal registration laws. Registration, which originated in the 1930s as a means of monitoring gangsters, went largely unused for decades before experiencing a dramatic resurgence in the 1990s. Since then it has been complemented by community notification laws, which, like the “Wanted” posters of the Frontier West, publicly disclose registrants' identifying information, involving entire communities in the criminal monitoring process. The book provides an in-depth history and analysis of criminal registration and community notification laws, examining the potent forces driving their rapid nationwide proliferation in the 1990s through today, as well as exploring how the laws have affected the nation's law, society, and governance. In doing so, it provides compelling insights into the manifold ways in which registration and notification reflect and influence life in modern America.

This book advances a broad interdisciplinary and international project to refocus attention on the scope and function of modern governance through the lens of police power in its multiple manifestations—from the family to the police station and the prison, and from municipal government to state sovereignty and global security—and techniques—surveillance, control, and licensing, as well as ordinances, regulations, and administrative, constitutional, and criminal law. In the contributions to this volume, police power emerges as a rich and flexible concept that offers a broader functional context to explain the operation of governmental institutions. The chapters reveal connections across the history of government, across systems of government within a particular state, and comparatively, across different states and levels of government. The comprehensive scope and boundless ambition of police power, the very characteristics that rest uneasily with traditional conceptions of the liberal state, make it a useful platform for interdisciplinary and international inquiries into fundamental questions of government and law.