Over the last decade, police departments and state's attorney's
offices across the country have adopted mandatory arrest and
no-drop prosecution policies to handle cases of intimate abuse. In
addition to protecting victims from future violence, these policies
are intended to change abusers by punishing them for their
behavior. Emerging at a time when various dimensions of U.S.
society are being "governed through crime," mandatory arrest and
no-drop prosecution have proven controversial. While critics charge
that the policies disempower women by removing decision making from
them and aggravate the negative consequences of criminal justice
interventions in poor and minority communities, proponents maintain
that the measures are needed to protect battered women and provide
them the same legal protections afforded to other victims of
violent crime. Somewhat overlooked in this debate has been how
mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution affect abusers, a critical
question for understanding the power of criminal punishment to
combat intimate partner abuse. In Arresting Abuse, Keith Guzik
answers this question. Drawing both from firsthand observations of
a police department and a criminal court following mandatory
policies and extensive interviews with 30 offenders arrested and
prosecuted for domestic violence, Arresting Abuse provides a
critical assessment. While mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution
allow the state to extend formal legal supervision over an
increasing number of violent men and women, thus seemingly
increasing its power over them, offenders prove resistant to
change. They see themselves as victims of injustice, continue to
view their violence as justified, and devise new strategies to
preserve their definition and enactment of self. The reasons for
these outcomes rest in the nature of power itself-in the state
tactics, structures of social inequality, and modes of individual
agency through which mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution are
realized. A key contribution to domestic violence literature as
well as to socio-legal scholarship on the power of the law as a
force for social change, Arresting Abuse argues that the promise
for defeating intimate partner abuse lies in better matching the
tactics of state power to the goals of victim empowerment and
offender responsibility and to exercise such force through
mechanisms that do not exacerbate social inequality.
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