Considering the question of how levels of security allow state power to be increased to the point at which it infringes essential civil liberties, this book explores the creeping power of the executive and the unfeasibility of widespread use of the Human Rights Act as a bulwark against the oppressive use of state power.

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society's commitment to mass incarceration. The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.

Despite very diverse approaches towards punishing crime, all Western jurisdictions punish repeat offenders more harshly (a practice known as the recidivist sentencing premium) . For many repeat offenders, their previous convictions have more impact on the penalty they receive than the seriousness of their current crime. Why do we punish recidivists more harshly? Some sentencing theorists argue that offenders should be punished only for the crimes they commit - not for the crimes committed and paid for in the past. From this perspective, punishing repeat offenders more severely amounts to double punishment. Having been punished once for an offence, the recidivist will pay for the crime again every time he re-offends. Is this fair?
This volume explores the nature and consequences of the recidivist sentencing premium on both the theoretical and empirical levels. It begins by exploring the justifications for treating repeat offenders more harshly, and then provides examples of the practice from a number of jurisdictions including England and Wales, Canada, and the United States. Particular attention is paid to the views of two important groups: convicted offenders and the general public. If offenders believe that the recidivist sentencing premium is unjustified, they are less likely to accept the legitimacy of the justice system. As for members of the public, it is important to know whether this key element of the sentencing process is consistent with community views.

Bringing together new research, this book advances current theoretical understandings of punishment and control in society. It provides a critical analysis of institutions, punishment and the law, and explores the delivery of punishment and experience of incarceration in Western societies from the early-nineteenth century.

The book offers an incisive collection of contemporary research into the problems of crime control and punishment. It has three inter-related aims: to take stock of current thinking on punishment, regulation, and control in the early years of a new century and in the wake of a number of critical junctures, including 9/11, which have transformed the social, political, and cultural environment; to present a selection of the diverse epistemological and methodological frameworks which inform current research; and finally to set out some fruitful directions for the future study of punishment. The contributions to this collection cover some of the most exciting and challenging areas of current research including terrorism and the politics of fear, penality in societies in transition, penal policy and the construction of political identity, the impact of digital culture on modes of compliance, the emergent hegemony of information and surveillance systems, and the evolving politics of victimhood.

This groundbreaking study examines patterns of offending among persistent juvenile offenders. The authors address questions that have been the focus of criminological debate over the last two decades. Are there are multiple groups of offenders in the population with distinct age-crime patterns? Are between-person differences in criminal offending patterns stable throughout the offender's life? Is there a relationship between offending at one time and at a subsequent time of life, after time-stable differences in criminal propensity are controlled? Ezell and Cohen address these issues by examining three large, separately drawn samples of serious youthful offenders from California. Each sample was tracked over a long time-period, and sophisticated statistical models were used to test eight empirical hypotheses drawn from three major theories of crime: population heterogeneity, state dependence, and dual taxonomy. Each of these three perspectives offers different predictions about the relationship between age and crime, and the possibility of crime desistance over the life of serious chronic offenders. Despite the serious chronic criminality among the sample offenders, by the time they reached their mid- to late twenties and continuing into their thirties, each of the six latent classes of offender identified by the study had begun to demonstrate a declining number of arrests. This finding has profound implications for penal policies that impose life sentences on multiple offenders, such as the Californian 'three strikes and you're out' which incarcerates inmates for 25 years to life with their 'third strike' conviction, at precisely the point when they have begun to grow out of serious crime.

The growth of Islam in Europe is reflected in the increasing numbers of Muslims in British and French prisons, but authorities have responded differently to the challenges presented by Muslim prisoners in each country. The findings of three years of intensive research in a variety of prisons show that British prisons facilitate and control the practice d of Islam, whereas French prisons discourage it and thereby sow the seeds of extremism. The policy implications of these ironic findings are examined in detail.

"Although the topics dealt with are complex, the author has been very successful in presenting and exploring them clearly. Students may find particularly helpful the summary at the end of each chapter of the main points covered in that section. The Legal Executive"...the real strength of this book lies in the critical thinking that arises from the juxtaposition of two very much unfinished debates: the question of how victims are treated by the justice system, and the practices and implications of restorative justice. "...I feel this book is particularly important because it reframes a whole series of debates and practices which, otherwise, might be in danger of getting 'stuck'. That this is also undertaken by someone who is extremely knowledgeable about the subject matter and perceptive in relation to key issues is an added bonus." VistaTwo of the principal and most influential developments within criminal justice policy - taking in a variety of common law jurisdictions during the past thirty years - have been the rise of the 'victim movement' and the emergence of a distinctive set of practices that have become associated with the term 'restorative justice'. Understanding Victims and Restorative Justice examines the origins of and the relationship between these two sets of developments, and seeks to assess their strengths and weaknesses in meeting the needs of victims as part of the overall response to crime. Written in a lively and accessible style this book is of benefit to students from a range of disciplines including criminology, sociology and the law. Also helpful to professionals, practitioners and policymakers working in voluntary agencies within the criminal justice system.

In reviving the idea of an informal approach to conflict resolution, the Restorative Justice movement attempts to break out of the freedom punitive thinking which shapes modern criminal justice. Its proponents claim that its guiding ideals - personalism, participation, and reintegration - deliver a fairer, more effective, and more humane justice than does the court system. However, a simplistic tendency both to extol the virtues of restorative justice and to denigrate all formal approaches risks blinding enthusiasts to the dangers inherent in unchecked participant power , as well as to the protection which State institutions and professionals can provide to individuals and communities. The procedural safeguard of institutional accountability helps reduce these dangers. Examining the experiences of 25 programmes in six countries, Accountability in Restorative Justice uncovers a number of neglected, overlapping, and incomplete types of accountability, including the informal type built into deliberations between victims and offenders and their supporters. This deliberative accountability can provide a rigorous check for regulating decision-making, holding state agencies accountable, and monitoring the completion of agreements reached between participants. This book also considers the role played by formal types of accountability, such as external review. It suggests a new approach, in which judges become more involved in monitoring the quality of deliberation in restorative justice conferences than with enforcing traditional sentencing principles.

This book addresses the role of victims in our criminal justice system and the shortcomings they perceive in the way they are treated. It examines whether restorative justice can offer them more justice than they receive from the formal court-based system. Research into the shortcomings of the court-based system has identified a number of issues that victims want to address. In brief, they want a less formal process where their views count, more information about both the processing and the outcome of their case, a greater opportunity for participation in the way their case is dealt with, fairer and more respectful treatment, and emotional as well as material restoration as an outcome. Over the past three decades, the victim movement worldwide has agitated for an enhanced role for victims in criminal justice. Despite some successes, it appears that structural as well as political factors may mean that victims have won as much as they are likely to gain from formal justice. A series of randomized controlled trials in Canberra, known as the Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE), has provided an opportunity to compare rigorously the impact on victims of court-based justice with a restorative justice program known as conferencing. In these experiments, middle-range property and violent offences committed by young offenders were assigned either to court (as they would normally have been treated) or to a conference. Empirical evidence from RISE examined in this book suggests that the restorative alternative of conferencing more often than court has the capacity to give victims what they say they want in achieving meaningful victim participation and restoration, especially emotional restoration.

Among the more intriguing documentary sources from late medieval Europe are pardon letters-petitions sent by those condemned for serious crimes to monarchs and princes in France and the Low Countries in the hopes of receiving a full pardon. The fifteenth-century Burgundian Low Countries and duchy of Burgundy produced a large cache of these petitions, from both major cities (Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and Dijon) and rural communities. In Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble, Peter Arnade and Walter Prevenier present the first study in English of these letters to explore and interrogate the boundaries between these sources' internal, discursive properties and the social world beyond the written text.Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble takes the reader out onto the streets and into the taverns, homes, and workplaces of the Burgundian territories, charting the most pressing social concerns of the day: everything from family disputes and vendettas to marital infidelity and property conflicts-and, more generally, the problems of public violence, abduction and rape, and the role of honor and revenge in adjudicating disputes. Arnade and Prevenier examine why the right to pardon was often enacted by the Burgundian dukes and how it came to compete with more traditional legal means of resolving disputes. In addition, they consider the pardon letter as a historical source, highlighting the limitations and pitfalls of relying on documents that are, by their very nature, narratives shaped by the petitioner to seek a favored outcome. The book also includes a detailed case study of a female actress turned prostitute.An example of microhistory at its best, Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble will challenge scholars while being accessible to students in courses on medieval and early modern Europe or on historiography.

This book is the definitive analysis of the politics and impact of "get tough" criminal sentencing legislation. Zimring, Hawkins, and Kamin examine the origins of the law in California, compare it to other crackdown laws, and analyse large samples of offenders arrested in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco in the year before and the two years after the law went into effect. The study presents compelling evidence that the new regime has been enormously over-rated as a crime prevention measure.

Crime and Employment crystallizes the issue of work as a rehabilitative instrument in the modern correctional environment. It explores the effect of employment on crime and recidivism, with its implications for correctional programs and operations as well as for ex-offender reintegration into the community. The professionals contributing to this volume evaluate the effectiveness of employment in enabling offenders to desist from crime; the roles of prison versus community correctional services; the success of work programs for older versus younger offenders; the effect of industrial employment on reducing prison misconduct and post-release recidivism; the relevance of prior employment, substance abuse histories, poverty, and family contexts on subsequent inmate work programs; and the availability of quality employment, lawful lifestyles, and community vocational programs in sustaining economic rehabilitation of offenders. This book will be of great value to practitioners and policymakers alike in the areas of corrections, criminal justice, criminology, social problems, labor policy, social welfare, deviance and social control.

This edition includes a translator's preface, note on the text, and suggestions for further reading.

"This book is an important, systematic account of punishment and prisons in Japan from the Tokugawa period through the nineteenth century. Botsman shows quite well the ways that punishment has transformed over almost three centuries, and connects this to political power. The richness of detail--images of beheadings with a saw, severed heads, crucified bodies, crowded jails, and Benthamlike prisons--will no doubt stay with readers."--Stefan Tanaka, University of California, San Diego, author of "New Times in Modern Japan"

"I enjoyed reading this book, and learned a lot from it. Botsman avoids both the trap of attributing the rise of a modern penal complex in Japan to some authoritarian essence from time immemorial and the folly of placing all the causative weight on Western imperialism and Western ideas of crime and punishment. Further, he offers an explanation for the methods of colonization that Japanese colonialism adopted when it expanded into Asia. His clearly written work adds the significant experience of Japan to the literature on the emergence of modern systems of punishment and contributes to the comparative understanding of non-Western modernities."--Gyan Prakash, Princeton University, author of "Another Reason"

"A scholarly tour de force. This book is a unique contribution to a field of historical study that has, in the past, been marked either by a concern for central political institutions or intellectual history. Until now, there has been no serious work on Tokugawa and Meiji penal practices. But Botsman, by weaving the discursive strands of thinking about punishment into the fabric of institutional practice, has managed to give us an exemplary cultural history thatexceeds both its temporal and spatial location."--Harry Harootunian, New York University, author of "Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture," and "Community in Interwar Japan"

In this fascinating new work, Karen Duke explores the conflicts and contradictory pressures in the development of prison drugs policy in Britain from 1980 to the present. Based on interviews with key policy actors and documentary analysis, it explores how policy networks around drug issues in prisons have attempted to contain the contradictions between treatment and punishment and how their activities have been shaped by the ways in which the drugs issue is framed, the roles of research, evidence and knowledge, and the impact of wider social, political, policy and institutional contexts.

This collection explores the intersection between criminology, conflict resolution and restorative justice. It traces the role of criminological discourses in the resolution of conflict at the macro political level (in South Africa and Northern Ireland) and the micro level in settings such as local communities, indigenous justice systems and in the youth justice system. The resulting discourse, drawing upon peacemaking criminology, human rights and restorative justice frameworks, suggests an important symbiosis between the traditionally distinct disciplines of criminology and conflict resolution peace studies.

Many countries have recently established restorative justice programmes, in which those affected by a crime attend meetings in the hope of achieving the ideals of reparation, reconciliation and reintegration. To answer concerns that these meetings may degenerate into 'kangaroo courts' in which participants bully and humiliate each other, this book draws upon extensive fieldwork to explore the nature, function and effectiveness of the accountability within this kind of informal justice.

The Handbook of Criminal Justice Process is a new and authoritative account of the criminal justice system in England and Wales that engages with the central issues common to any major criminal justice system. Compiling the thoughts and opinions of leading figures in this field of law, this volume provides comprehensive coverage of all the key areas of the system presenting a sequential account from investigation through to final appeal.

Taken together, the chapters provide for the first time, a description of a dynamic and developing criminal justice system at work. This new work is essential reading for all those studying elements of criminal justice and criminology.

The relationship between offender and criminal justice practitioner has shifted throughout rehabilitative history, whether situated within psychological interventions, prison or probation. This relationship has evolved and adapted over time, but interpersonal processes remain central to offender work. However, little work has critically focused upon the challenging task of developing and sustaining positive relationships with offenders. This book addresses this gap, providing an in-depth exploration of the processes which underpin correctional relationships within probation. Through an innovative methodology, it examines how practitioners can enhance their practice by understanding how relationships form, deepen and end effectively. For the first time, it draws on the experiences of offenders and practitioners to uncover the darker side to relationships, identifying how they can rupture and break down. From this exploration, it presents alternative ways in which relationships can be repaired and safeguarded within correctional practice. In essence, this book assists practitioners in becoming successful supporters of change. In an increasingly competitive and politicised climate, this book outlines how political and organisational tensions can impact upon the flow of relationships across the criminal justice system. Uniquely, this book examines how these tensions can be overcome to produce transformative changes. Lewis suggests that therapeutic correctional relationships can thrive within a number of correctional settings and presents the core principles of relational practice and dynamic model of therapeutic correctional relationships to assist in achieving quality and sustainable practice. This book will appeal to criminological and psychological scholars as well as students studying probation and prison practice, offender rehabilitation and desistance.

In 2004 on Palm Island, an Aboriginal settlement in the "Deep North" of Australia, a thirty-six-year-old man named Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white police officer. Forty minutes later he was dead in the jailhouse. The police claimed he'd tripped on a step, but his liver was ruptured. The main suspect was Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley, a charismatic cop with long experience in Aboriginal communities and decorations for his work.
Chloe Hooper was asked to write about the case by the pro bono lawyer who represented Cameron Doomadgee's family. He told her it would take a couple of weeks. She spent three years following Hurley's trail to some of the wildest and most remote parts of Australia, exploring Aboriginal myths and history and the roots of brutal chaos in the Palm Island community. Her stunning account goes to the heart of a struggle for power, revenge, and justice. Told in luminous detail, "Tall Man" is as urgent as "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and "The Executioner's Song." It is the story of two worlds clashing--and a haunting moral puzzle that no reader will forget.

This volume brings together a collection of articles on penal reform in the United States, Europe, Japan, and other English-speaking countries. Unique and wide-ranging, it offers some of the broadest efforts to charaterise recent penal trends and analyse their consequences.

This groundbreaking double-volume engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control. This analysis disrupts the politics of carceral feminism as conversations about the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex continue.

This collection of original essays surveys the evolution of sentencing policies and practices in Western countries over the past twenty-five years. Contributors address plea-bargaining, community service, electronic monitoring, standards of use of incarceration, and legal perspectives on sentencing policy developments, among other topics. Sentencing and Sanctions in Western Countries provides a range of scholars and students excellent cross-national knowledge of sentencing laws and practices, when and why they have changed over time, and with what effects.

Twenty-five years ago, the Supreme Court temporarily halted capital punishment. This collection brings together the work of eleven writers to discuss the meaning of execution in American law and culture. It provides historical background on the death penalty and brings together arguments about the morality of capital punishment with arguments about its meaning. It considers whether, as many have argued, the death penalty by way of example causes the very violence to which it is supposed to respond. With contributors such as Hugh Bedau, Frank Zimring, and Jonathan Simon, it offers a range of prominent voices to the continuing debate on capital punishment.