In the 1970s, the death penalty catapulted to the center of debates over crime and punishment in the United States and remained stubbornly lodged there, deforming U.S. penal policies and disfiguring U.S. society in ways not seen in other Western countries. Specifically, capital punishment was critical to reframing the politics of punishment so as to bolster the emergence and consolidation of a conservative victims' movement premised on calls for victims' rights that marginalized questions about limits to the state's power to punish. The death penalty became such a potent contributor to the punitive law-and-order environment not merely because select politicians and public officials decided beginning in the 1960s to exploit this issue for electoral or ideological reasons. It is important to appreciate the nuances of the institutional and political context in which they did this. They made their moves at a time when capital punishment was already firmly anchored in the judicial process, as shown in Chapter 8. Groups and organizations likely to oppose the death penalty remained focused on the legal arena.