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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Crime & criminology > Penology & punishment > General
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.
An ideal supplement to texts on judicial processes, Real Law
Stories: Inside the American Judicial Process is the only
undergraduate text dedicated to the presentation of "real-world"
interviews with lawyers, judges, and police officers. Each law
professional describes his or her job across a range of legal
activities and offers insights into the legal process in the United
States.
"Today, more than ever, Americans are asking questions about what role, if any, the death penalty should have in modern law enforcement. Professor Sarat makes an important contribution to that debate by demonstrating the essential role of mercy and clemency in the criminal justice system. This thoughtful book should be read by every citizen who cares about the issue, and by every governor and president entrusted with the power to punish or pardon."--Senator Edward M. Kennedy "In a very readable style, Austin Sarat's "Mercy on Trial" contributes mightily to the study of mercy, rehabilitation, redemption, and the complexity of the gubernatorial pardon. This work will help reform our justice system and hasten abolition."--George H. Ryan, former Governor of Illinois "As one of America's preeminent scholars of the history and philosophical underpinnings of capital punishment, Austin Sarat has debunked every myth used to rationalize the death penalty. Now, with the publication of "Mercy on Trial," Professor Sarat explores the jurisprudence and other factors surrounding capital clemency in America. He reminds us that, absent skilled advocacy, innocence offers little protection from state-sanctioned violence. Professor Sarat sends a powerful message to not only the legal community, but to every American who cares about human rights and equal justice under the law."--John D. Podesta, former Chief of Staff to President Clinton and President and CEO, Center for American Progress "Should mercy play a role in a governor's decision to commute a death sentence, to spare a condemned person? The question is important with regard to what kind of society we want to have. We are indebted to AustinSarat for addressing it in "Mercy on Trial" as well as examining Governor George Ryan's commutation of 167 death sentences in Illinois in 2003, the decline of clemency as a result of the 'tough on crime' politics of our time, and the legal, historical, and philosophical aspects of the clemency power. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand executive clemency in the United States."--Stephen B. Bright, Director, Southern Center for Human Rights "Professor Austin Sarat has written a compelling, comprehensive, and persuasive book on mercy and the death penalty--a must-read for anyone concerned about capital punishment, and one that offers deeply philosophical and reflective views on one of the most controversial issues today. Whether you support or oppose the death penalty, Sarat's book is a powerful, probative, and thorough treatment of the subject, and will be well-received in many quarters."--Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, and author of "All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half-Century of Brown v. Board of Education" "Thought-provoking, gripping, well-researched, and always passionate, "Mercy on Trial" is a splendid book on one of our most controversial issues. You will be moved by it. You will want to discuss it. Austin Sarat is one of our greatest thinkers in the areas of jurisprudence and ethics. Must reading."--Harlan Coben, author of "Tell No One," "Just Look," and "Gone for Good" "A thoroughly approachable and enjoyable read, "Mercy on Trial" is an in-depth exploration of the pardoning power and the paradox of a legal power that is not legally reviewable. With his usual interdisciplinaryflair, Austin Sarat brings together law, current events, political history, and philosophical theory, and does so in a way that is illuminating and instructive."--David Garland, New York University, author of "The Culture of Control"
Many Western countries now use electronic monitoring (EM) of some offenders as an alternative to more traditional forms of punishments such as imprisonment. While the main reason for introducing EM is the growing prison population, politicians and administrators also believe that this type of punishment achieves a positive effect by reducing recidivism and the probability of post-release marginalisation. The small existing empirical literature on the effect of EM finds mixed support for this belief, but is, however, based on very small sample sizes. The authors expand this literature by studying the causal effect of EM on social benefit dependency after the sentence has been served. They use administrative data from Statistics Denmark that include information on all Danish offenders who have served their sentence under EM rather than in prison. They compare post-release dependency rates for this group with outcomes for a historical control group of convicted offenders who would have served their sentences with EM had the option been available (ie: who are identical to the EM group on all observed and unobserved characteristics).
Many controversies in American criminal law reflect the tension between older and newer conceptions of the purposes of punishment. The English common law of crimes was centrally concerned with suppressing vengeance and asserting royal authority. Thus it enforced a royal peace by conditioning punishment on unauthorized force and harm to particular victims. The development of American criminal law has been the story of the emergence of this utilitarianism of criminal offending as the imposition of risk or the violation of consent, combined with culpability. This conception is reflected in the Model Penal Code and many state codes. Yet understanding contemporary criminal law requires that we also remember the model of offending as trespass against sovereignty out of which it emerged. In The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Criminal Law, Guyora Binder reviews the development of American criminal law and explains its key concepts and persistent controversies in light of its history. These key concepts include retribution and prevention as purposes of punishment; the requirements of a criminal act and a culpable mental state; criteria of causal responsibility; modes of violating consent; doctrines of attribution of liability for incomplete offenses, including attempt, conspiracy and complicity; and defenses of justification and excuse.
"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"
Filling a huge vacuum of scholarship on the Japanese criminal justice system, The Politics of Police Detention in Japan: Consensus of Convenience shines a spotlight on the remand procedure for criminal suspects in Japan, where the 23-day duration for which individuals can be held in police custody prior to being indicted is the longest amongst developed nations, with the majority of countries stipulating 4 days or less. Moreover, in practice, the average length of suspect detention in police cells is even longer due to multiple charges being imposed, and there is very little use of detention facilities independent of the investigation, with only 2% of suspects held in this way. Despite detention of this kind leading to criticism of Japan as a hotbed of false convictions, there has never been a systematic study of this divergent measure or its history. The Politics of Police Detention in Japan addresses this omission, first, by drawing on Japanese history-of-law scholarship to identify the origins of the modern day practice, tracing the source of legitimacy for the continuous remand of suspects with the police back to the Meiji era. There is further historical analysis addressing the post-war occupation of Japan under Allied forces through to the development of the National Police Agency, as each stage further undermines Japanese criminal procedure and limits reform. Secondly, the author conducts a political analysis of the mechanisms through which it is sustained, featuring extensive interviews with key players, including several Justice Ministers and other politicians, Ministry of Justice and Police officials, judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and NGO representatives. As the first in-depth empirical investigation of Japan's police detention arrangements, this important and engrossing book highlights how a state sets the boundary between the liberty of individuals and the security of the community - a dichotomy that is far from unique to police detention.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING MICHAEL B. JORDAN, JAMIE FOXX, AND
BRIE LARSON.
Correctional psychiatry has received increasing recognition as an area of practice with unique skills and knowledge. The Oxford Textbook of Correctional Psychiatry brings together American and international experts to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. Students and psychiatric residents will find basic information that prepares them for clinical rotations, and psychiatrists working in jails and prisons will find a detailed review of the complex issues that arise in these settings. The Oxford Textbook of Correctional Psychiatry contains 73 chapters divided into 14 sections. The first three sections address history, structure, and processes including chapters on case law, human rights, ethics, organization and funding of systems, and stages of patient management that cover initial assessments through re-entry. The next three sections review in turn a broad array of management issues, emergencies, and psychopharmacology topics. Among other topics, these sections include chapters on sleep, detoxification, reassessment of community diagnoses and treatments, diversion programs, levels of care, malingering, substance use within facilities, and formulary management. Section seven has chapters on common psychiatric disorders, relevant medical disorders, and pain management. Sections eight through ten focus on psychotherapeutic options, suicide risk management, and addictions treatment. Chapters on aggression, self-injury, and other behavioral challenges appear in Section eleven. Section twelve reviews unique assessment and treatment needs of many distinct population groups. Special topics such as forensics, psychological testing, sexual assaults, quality improvement, training, and research, appear in Section thirteen, followed by a section devoted to current resources in correctional healthcare. The range of topics covered and the number of prominent contributors set this book apart from other available resources. Readers at all stages of their careers will gain the depth of understanding and practical information they need to approach all of the common clinical, organizational, and ethical challenges they face. This print edition of Oxford Textbook of Correctional Psychiatry comes with a year's access to the online version on Oxford Medicine Online. By activating your unique access code, you can read and annotate the full text online, follow links from the references to primary research materials, and view, enlarge and download all the figures and tables. Oxford Medicine Online is mobile optimized for access when and where you need it.
Examining the theory behind the headlines and engaging with current debates, this new edition provides thoughtful, impartial, and unbiased coverage of sentencing and punishment in the UK. Collectively, Susan Easton and Christine Piper are highly experienced teachers and researchers in this field, making them perfectly placed to deliver this lively account of a highly dynamic subject area. The book takes a thorough and systematic approach to sentencing and punishment, examining key topics from legal, philosophical, and practical perspectives. Offering in-depth and detailed coverage, while remaining clear and succinct, the authors deliver a balanced approach to the subject. Chapter summaries, discussion questions, and case studies help students to engage with the subject, apply their knowledge, and reflect upon debates. Fully reworked and restructured, this fifth edition has been updated to include developments such as the Sentencing Act 2020 and changes following the 2019 general election. This is the essential guide for anyone studying sentencing and punishment as part of a law or criminology course.
Featuring experts from Europe, Australia, Japan, China, and the United States, this collection of essays follows changes in the theory and policy of China's death penalty from the Mao era (1949-1979) through the Deng era (1980-1997) up to the present day. Using empirical data, such as capital offender and offense profiles, temporal and regional variations in capital punishment, and the impact of social media on public opinion and reform, contributors relay both the character of China's death penalty practices and the incremental changes that indicate reform. They then compare the Chinese experience to other countries throughout Asia and the world, showing how change can be implemented even within a non-democratic and rigid political system, but also the dangers of promoting policies that society may not be ready to embrace.
The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising "criminal" insecurity but to the "social "insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive "workfare" and expansive "prisonfare" under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures--the teenage "welfare mother," the ghetto "street thug," and the roaming "sex predator"--and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, "Punishing the Poor" shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of "small government" but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Visit the author's website.
The state has no greater power over its own citizens than that of killing them. This remarkable and disturbing history of capital punishment in Germany deals with the politics of the death penalty and the experience and cultural significance of executions. Richards Evans casts new light on the history of German attitudes to law, deviance, cruelty, suffering and death, illuminating many aspects of Germany's modern political development. He has made a formidable contribution not only to scholarship on German history but also to the social theory of punishment, and to the current debate on the death penalty.
For most of the 20th Century, sentencing purposes and procedures
were virtually the same in all American jurisdictions. The primary
sentencing goal was rehabilitation, to be accomplished mostly in
prison. To achieve this goal, judges and parole boards were given
broad discretionary powers. In the 1970s, legal scholars and
critics began to question such unfettered discretion, and to
advocate for a system of prison-as-punishment, not as moral
reeducation. Lawmakers began to experiment with mandatory penalties
and other limits on sentencing discretion. These changes broke the
previously uniform standard of sentencing in America. Today,
sentencing purposes and procedures vary wildly between different
state and federal jurisdictions. Our fragmented sentencing system
has contributed to unprecedented increases in prison and jail
inmate populations, disproportionately affecting racial minorities
and creating a staggering drain on state budgets. The systems in
most jurisdictions are disorganized, expensive, and unfair. We need
a new vision, and a new way forward.
Respect and Criminal Justice offers the first sustained examination of 'respect' in criminal justice in England and Wales, where the value is elusive but of persisting significance. The book takes the form of a critique of the 'respect deficit' in policing and imprisonment. It is especially concerned with the ways in which both institutions are merely constrained and not characterised by respect. In the course of the critique, it emerges that they appeal to the word 'respect' but rarely and only superficially address the prior question of what it is to respect and be respected. Despite academic interest in the democratic design of these institutions in recent decades, the book concludes that respect is more akin to a slogan than a foundational value of criminal justice practice.
Winner of the 1991 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association Winner of the Outstanding Scholarship Award of the Crime and Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, USA The first comprehensive account of the role of punishment in modern society, this book buils upon the work of Durkheim, Foucault, and others, and provides a fascinating interpretation of this complex social institution, showing how penal institutions interact with strategies of power, socio-economic structures, and cultural sensibilities.
From battlefields, boxcars, and forgotten warehouses to notorious prison camps like Andersonville and Elmira, prisoners seemed to be everywhere during the American Civil War. Yet there is much we do not know about the soldiers and civilians whose very lives were in the hands of their enemies. Living by Inches is the first book to examine how imprisoned men in the Civil War perceived captivity through the basic building blocks of human experience--their five senses. From the first whiffs of a prison warehouse to the taste of cornbread and the feeling of lice, captivity assaulted prisoners' perceptions of their environments and themselves. Evan A. Kutzler demonstrates that the sensory experience of imprisonment produced an inner struggle for men who sought to preserve their bodies, their minds, and their sense of self as distinct from the fundamentally uncivilized and filthy environments surrounding them. From the mundane to the horrific, these men survived the daily experiences of captivity by adjusting to their circumstances, even if these transformations worried prisoners about what type of men they were becoming.
From childhood, Ma Thida dreamed of helping others-caring for the sick, sharing information despite censorship, and standing up for people's rights. To stand against the oppression that had been stifling Myanmar's progress for decades, she joined Aung San Suu Kyi and the many other activists in the National League for Democracy, campaigning steadfastly despite intimidation, harassment, and worse. Because of her efforts, the regime sent her to Insein Prison, where she faced serious illness and bleak conditions. However, it was in fighting the obstacles of her imprisonment and following the Buddha's teachings that Ma Thida found what it means to be truly free. In this memoir, readers join Ma Thida on her path through captivity and witness one remarkable woman's courageous quest for truth and dignity.
In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn't trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death? That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans' thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do-and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it's the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.
Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism. Exhaustively researched, Felber illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is a halting reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black Muslim communities. |
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