In this book six leading criminologists address the central issues of ideology, crime and criminal justice in a series of essays originally presented at a symposium held in honour of Sir Leon Radzinowicz in Cambridge in March 2001. This book is concerned with the key themes of the history of criminal justice, the history and development of criminological thought, and criminal justice policy. Each of the contributed chapters makes an original and important contribution to the development of the discipline of criminology. This book is valuable reading for anybody interested in the past and present of the discipline of criminology, explored through essays on morality, prisons, policing, criminal justice and penal policy.

Labour has embarked upon a root and branch remaking of the criminal justice system in England and Wales, with a mass of new legislation implemented or planned. It has ensured a continuously high profile for criminal justice issues, and they have been at the centre of wider political discourse. Yet the basis and evidence on which these reforms are being introduced is both uncertain and highly controversial. Despite spending tens of millions of pounds of research into the criminal justice system in the name of evidence-based policy, evidence has counted only in relation to lowlevel technocratic issues. On the big issues the clear weight of evidence points in opposite directions to those which the government has taken. The primary drivers of recent policies have rather been the emulation of recent USA policies (at a time when these are now being abandoned in the USA because they have been shown to be ineffective); and a media-driven agenda with a focus on conspicuous crime prevention which have had the effect of heightening rather than assuaging public fears and concerns. This provocative yet authoritative book seeks to expose and to unravel what has really driven the making of criminal justice policy in the UK. It will be essential reading for anybody interested in knowing what is going on in criminal justice, and why it is so central to political debate more generally.

Labour has embarked upon a root and branch remaking of the criminal justice system in England and Wales, with a mass of new legislation implemented or planned. It has ensured a continuously high profile for criminal justice issues, and they have been at the centre of wider political discourse. Yet the basis and evidence on which these reforms are being introduced is both uncertain and highly controversial. Despite spending tens of millions of pounds of research into the criminal justice system in the name of evidence-based policy, evidence has counted only in relation to lowlevel technocratic issues. On the big issues the clear weight of evidence points in opposite directions to those which the government has taken. The primary drivers of recent policies have rather been the emulation of recent USA policies (at a time when these are now being abandoned in the USA because they have been shown to be ineffective); and a media-driven agenda with a focus on conspicuous crime prevention which have had the effect of heightening rather than assuaging public fears and concerns. This provocative yet authoritative book seeks to expose and to unravel what has really driven the making of criminal justice policy in the UK. It will be essential reading for anybody interested in knowing what is going on in criminal justice, and why it is so central to political debate more generally.

Sentencing matters. Life, liberty, and property are at stake. Convicted offenders and victims care about it for obvious reasons, while judges and prosecutors also have a moral stake in the process. Never-the-less, the current system of sentencing criminal offenders is in a shambles, with a crazy quilt of incompatible and conflicting laws, policies, and practices in each state, not to mention an entirely different process at the federal level. In Sentencing Fragments, Michael Tonry traces four decades of American sentencing policy and practice to illuminate the convoluted sentencing system, from early reforms in the mid-1970's to the transition towards harsher sentences in the mid-1980's. The book combines a history of policy with an examination of current research findings regarding the consequences of the sentencing system, calling attention to the devastatingly unjust effects on the lives of the poor and disadvantaged. Tonry concludes with a set of proposals for creating better policies and practices for the future, with the hope of ultimately creating a more just legal system. Lucid and engaging, Sentencing Fragments sheds a much-needed light on the historical foundation for the current dynamic of the American criminal justice system, while simultaneously offering a useful tool for potential reform.

Thinking about Punishment pulls together the key writings by Michael Tonry on penal policy trends in western countries, racial and ethnic disparities, and sentencing policies, practices, and theories. Recent research in the past few decades shows that these topics are inextricably interrelated. Tonry argues that the distinct historical and cultural characteristics of a country offer the best explanation of national patterns of punishment at any one time, and over time. More general theories and models fall apart when applied to individual national experiences. In the United States, the key factors explaining both penal policy trends and sentencing patterns and policies include historical patterns of race relations, obsolete constitutional arrangements, moral attitudes related to the continental expansion of the United States and the country's fundamentalist Protestant religious origins. Comparable - but different - characteristics explain other countries' experiences. This excellent collection of Michael Tonry's work is essential reading for anyone interested in penal policy and criminal justice.

In this book a group of leading authorities in the field address the key issues surrounding the future of sentencing in Britain, in the light particularly of the highly influential Halliday Report. These proposals for reform amount to the single most ambitious and comprehensive set of proposals for reconstituting the sentencing system of a common-law country, and include proposals to replace existing sentencing statutes, the establishment of a sentencing commission and sentencing guidelines, and the creation of a sentence review function in the judiciary. As well as addressing the major issues of the Halliday Report the chapters in this book go beyond this to explore the broader set of policy problems and implications which are raised, drawing upon experiences of reform in other jurisdictions and contexts, particularly that of the USA. This book will be essential reading for anybody with an interest in the future of sentencing or the future direction of the criminal justice system as a whole.

From Labour's promise to be 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' through to the White Paper and new criminal justice legislation, controlling crime and reforming the criminal justice system has been one of the government's key priorities. This book provides a detailed review of the thinking behind these new plans and legislation, looking at policies and proposals in the field of punishment, particularly those embodied in the Halliday Review of the Sentencing Framework (2001), the government White Paper Justice for All (2002), and the 2002 Criminal Justice Bill. The contributors to the book subject to scrutiny the evidence for the 'evidence-based policy making' that is often claimed as a distinctive new feature to these processes, examining approaches to drug-dependent offenders, dangerous sex offenders, nuisance offenders, procedural and evidential protections in the courts, sentencing guidelines, sentencing management, racism in sentencing, custody plus, custody minus, and reducing the prison population.

Our knowledge of crime is based on three types of sources: the criminal justice system, victims, and offenders. For technological and other reasons the criminal justice system produces an increasing stream of information on crime. The rise of the victimization survey has given the victims a much larger role in our study of crime. There is, however, no concomitant development regarding offenders. This is unfortunate because offenders are the experts when it comes to offending.In order to understand criminal behavior, we need their perspective. This is not always a straightforward process, however, and information from offenders is often unreliable. This book is about what we can do to maximise the validity of what offenders tell us about their offending. Renowned experts from various countries present their experiences and insights, with a clear focus on methodological issues of fieldwork among various types of offender populations. Each contribution deals with with a few central issues: * How can offenders be motivated to participate in research? * How can offenders be motivated to tell the truth on their offending? * How can the information that offenders provide be checked and validated? * What can we learn from offenders that cannot be accessed from other sources? * With the aim of obtaining valid and reliable information, how, where and under which conditions should we observe offenders and talk to them?

Our knowledge of crime is based on three types of sources: the criminal justice system, victims, and offenders. For technological and other reasons the criminal justice system produces an increasing stream of information on crime. The rise of the victimization survey has given the victims a much larger role in our study of crime. There is, however, no concomitant development regarding offenders. This is unfortunate because offenders are the experts when it comes to offending.In order to understand criminal behavior, we need their perspective.

This is not always a straightforward process, however, and information from offenders is often unreliable. This book is about what we can do to maximise the validity of what offenders tell us about their offending. Renowned experts from various countries present their experiences and insights, with a clear focus on methodological issues of fieldwork among various types of offender populations. Each contribution deals with with a few central issues:

• How can offenders be motivated to participate in research?
• How can offenders be motivated to tell the truth on their offending?
• How can the information that offenders provide be checked and validated?
• What can we learn from offenders that cannot be accessed from other sources?
• With the aim of obtaining valid and reliable information, how, where and under which conditions should we observe offenders and talk to them?

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.

From Labour's promise to be 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' through to the White Paper and new criminal justice legislation, controlling crime and reforming the criminal justice system has been one of the government's key priorities. This book provides a detailed review of the thinking behind these new plans and legislation, looking at policies and proposals in the field of punishment, particularly those embodied in the Halliday Review of the Sentencing Framework (2001), the government White Paper Justice for All (2002), and the 2002 Criminal Justice Bill. The contributors to the book subject to scrutiny the evidence for the 'evidence-based policy making' that is often claimed as a distinctive new feature to these processes, examining approaches to drug-dependent offenders, dangerous sex offenders, nuisance offenders, procedural and evidential protections in the courts, sentencing guidelines, sentencing management, racism in sentencing, custody plus, custody minus, and reducing the prison population.

In this book six leading criminologists address the central issues of ideology, crime and criminal justice in a series of essays originally presented at a symposium held in honor of Sir Leon Radzinowicz in Cambridge in March 2001. Two of the papers focus on the history of criminal justice. Clive Emsley, in a major historiographical essay, examines the history of British policing, situating this within a broader European perspective. Sean McConville explores the contours of criminal justice history, focusing on the experience of Irish political prisoners and how they tested the limits of the criminal justice system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The second key theme is the history and development of criminological thought. David Garland looks at ideas expressed in Radzinowic's Ideology and Crime, considers their salience in the context of the beginning of the twentieth century, and tests them against the development of criminological thought over the last thirty years.

In this book a group of leading authorities in the field address the key issues surrounding the future of sentencing in Britain, in the light particularly of the highly influential Halliday Report. These proposals for reform amount to the single most ambitious and comprehensive set of proposals for reconstituting the sentencing system of a common-law country, and include proposals to replace existing sentencing statutes, the establishment of a sentencing commission and sentencing guidelines, and the creation of a sentence review function in the judiciary. As well as addressing the major issues of the Halliday Report the chapters in this book go beyond this to explore the broader set of policy problems and implications which are raised, drawing upon experiences of reform in other jurisdictions and contexts, particularly that of the USA. This book will be essential reading for anybody with an interest in the future of sentencing or the future direction of the criminal justice system as a whole.

Prosecutors are powerful figures in any criminal justice system. They decide what crimes to prosecute, whom to pursue, what charges to file, whether to plea bargain, how aggressively to seek a conviction, and what sentence to demand. In the United States, citizens can challenge decisions by police, judges, and corrections officials, but courts keep their hands off the prosecutor. Curiously, in the United States and elsewhere, very little research is available that examines this powerful public role. And there is almost no work that critically compares how prosecutors function in different legal systems, from state to state or across countries. Prosecutors and Politics begins to fill that void. Police, courts, and prisons are much the same in all developed countries, but prosecutors differ radically. The consequences of these differences are enormous: the United States suffers from low levels of public confidence in the criminal justice system and high levels of incarceration; in much of Western Europe, people report high confidence and support moderate crime control policies; in much of Eastern Europe, people's perceptions of the law are marked by cynicism and despair. Prosecutors and Politics unpacks these national differences and provides insight into this key area of social control. Since 1979 the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cure.

For most Americans, The Godfather, The Sopranos, and the Cosa Nostra exemplify organized crime. In Asia the term conjures up images of Japanese yakuza and Chinese triads, in Italy the Cosa Nostra and 'Ndrangheta, in Latin America Mexican narco-gangs and Colombian drug cartels, in the Netherlands transnational drug and human trafficking, and in Scandinavia outlaw motorcycle gangs. Some but not all those organizations are "mafias" with centuries-long histories, distinctive cultures, and complicated relationships with local communities and governments. Others are new, large but transitory and with no purpose other than maximizing profits from illegal markets. Organized crime organizations have existed for centuries. Serious scholarly, as opposed to journalistic or law enforcement, efforts to understand them, however, date back only a few decades. Authoritative overviews were, until very recently, impossible. Rigorous, analytically acute, and methodologically sophisticated literatures did not exist. They have begun to emerge. They have developed in many countries, involve work in different languages and disciplines, and deploy a wide range of methods. Organizing Crime: Mafias, Markets, and Networks provides the most exhaustive overview ever published of knowledge about organized crime. It provides intensive accounts of American, Italian, and Dutch developments, covers both national mafias and transnational criminality, and delves in depth into gender, human capital, and money laundering issues. The writers are based in seven countries. To a person they are, or are among, the world's most distinguished specialists in their subjects. At last, credible explanations and testable hypotheses are available concerning when, why, and under what circumstances mafias and other organized crime organizations come into being, what makes them distinctive, what they do and with what effects, and how to contain them.

Volume 44 of Crime and Justice is essential reading for scholars, policy makers, and practitioners who need to know about the latest advances in knowledge concerning crime, its causes, and its control. Contents include Robert D. Crutchfield on the complex interactions among race, social class, and crime; Cassia Spohn on race, crime, and punishment in America; Marianne van Ooijen and Edward Kleemans on the "Dutch model" of drug policy; Beau Kilmer, Peter Reuter, and Luca Giommoni on cross-national and comparative knowledge about drug use and control drugs; Michael Tonry on federal sentencing policy since 1984; Kathryn Monahan, Laurence Steinberg, and Alex R. Piquero on the growing influence of bioscience and developmental psychology on juvenile justice policy and practice; Cheryl Lero Jonson and Francis T. Cullen on prisoner reentry programs; James P. Lynch and Lynn A. Addington on cultural changes in tolerance of violence amd their effects on crime statistics; Brandon C. Welsh, David P. Farrington, and B. Raffan Gowar on benefit-cost analysis of crime prevention; Torbjorn Skardhamar, Jukka Savolainen, Kjersti N. Aase, and Torkild H. Lyngstad on the effects of marriage on criminality; and John MacDonald on the effects on crime rates and patterns of urban design and development.

American Sentencing surveys what is known about the hottest topic in American criminal law reform. Massive efforts are underway to make sentencing more just and sentences more effective, and to reduce the use of imprisonment. The writers are the leading scholars of their subjects and equally concerned with the law in action and on the books. Lawyers, public officials, criminologists, sociologists, political scientists, just about anyone who wants to know how sentencing works, why it doesn't, and how it can be made better, will find the answers in American Sentencing.

Violent and property crime rates in all Western countries have been falling since the early and mid-1990s, after rising in the 1970s and 1980s. Few people have noticed the common patterns and fewer have attempted to understand or explain them. Yet the implications are essential for thinking about crime control and criminal justice policy more broadly. Crime rates in Canada and the United States, for example, have moved in parallel for 40 years, but Canada has neither increased its imprisonment rate nor adopted harsher criminal justice policies. The implication is that something other than mass imprisonment, zero-tolerance policing, and "three-strikes" laws explains why crime rates in our time are falling. The essays in this 43rd volume of Crime and Justice explore the possibilities cross-nationally. They document the common rises and falls in crime and look at possible explanations, including changes in sensitivity to violence generally and intimate violence in particular, macro-level changes in self-control, and structural and economic developments in modern states.
The contributors to this volume include Marcelo Aebi, Eric Baumer, Manuel Eisner, Graham Farrell, Janne Kivivuori, Tapio Lappi-Seppala, Suzy McElrath, Daniel S. Nagin, Richard Rosenfeld, Rossella Selmini, Nico Trajtenberg, and Kevin T. Wolff.

Human Development and Criminal Behavior proposes an exten- sive agenda for crime research. The book is part of a pio- neering effort to understand the causes of crime, particu- larly its developmental course. It defines and sets the con- ditions necessary to conduct an accelerated longitudinal study of individuals at risk to become engaged in criminal careers. This work offers a blueprint for research to eluci- date and possibly prevent crime in our society.

The fundamental contrast between the ideas that punishment is morally justified because people have behaved wrongly (retributivist) and that punishment is morally justified only when it has good consequences (consequentialist/utilitarian) has long existed and most likely always will. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, retributivist ways of thinking became much more influential than they had been for the preceding century, but it is clear now that no paradigm shift from consequentialist to retributivist ideas occurred, and that thinking about punishment is in a period of flux.
RetributivismHas a Past: Has It a Future? reconsiders the extent of its resurgence and its current prospects. Essays by major figures in punishment theory, law, and philosophy and many prominent younger contributors to these debates engage with contemporary ideas about restorative justice, therapeutic jurisprudence, rehabilitation of offenders, and mandatory punishments that are difficult to reconcile with retributive analytical frameworks. It is crucial to understand why and when individuals can be deprived of their property, their liberty, and their lives in the pursuit of collective interests, and this book grapples anew with contemporary debates over these perennial questions.

Punishment policies and practices in the United States today are unprincipled, chaotic, and much too often unjust. The financial costs are enormous. The moral cost is greater: countless individual injustices, mass incarceration, the world's highest imprisonment rate, extreme disparities, especially affecting members of racial and ethnic minority groups, high rates of wrongful conviction, assembly line case processing, and a general absence of respectful consideration of offenders' interests, circumstances, and needs. In Doing Justice, Preventing Crime, Michael Tonry lays normative and empirical foundations for building new, more just, and more effective systems of sentencing and punishment in the twenty-first century. The overriding goals are to treat people convicted of crimes justly, fairly, and even-handedly; to take sympathetic account of the circumstances of peoples' lives; and to punish no one more severely than he or she deserves. Drawing on philosophy and punishment theory, this book explains the structural changes needed to uphold the rule of law and its requirement that the human dignity of every person be respected. In clear and engaging prose, Michael Tonry surveys what is known about the deterrent, incapacitative, and rehabilitative effects of punishment, and explains what needs to be done to move from an ignoble present to a better future.

Much of the scholarly literature and principal books on criminal justice and crime control policy take the operations of the criminal justice system, the causes of crime and delinquency, theories about crime and justice, and crime prevention as the central topics for study and policy analysis. But law enforcement and public officials create policy responses to specific crimes, not broad categories of offenses. In order to develop the most effective policies, one needs to understand why particular crimes occur and what approaches might best prevent them or minimize the harm they cause.
Taking this fresh perspective, The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Public Policy offers a comprehensive examination of crimes as public policy subjects. Michael Tonry, a leading authority on criminology, has brought together the most distinguished active scholars in the field to present a wide-ranging overview and analysis of violent and sexual crimes, property crimes, transactional crimes, transnational crimes, and crimes against morality. The crimes investigated range from often-discussed offenses (homicide, auto theft, sexual violence) to those that only recently began to receive attention (child abuse, domestic violence, environmental crimes); it includes new crimes (identity theft, cybercrime) as well as age-old crimes (drug abuse, gambling, prostitution). Written in a straightforward and accessible manner, each chapter explains why crimes happen, how often, and what we know about efforts to prevent or control them.
Aimed at a wide audience of scholars, students, and policy makers, the Handbook is the definitive reference work on crimes and public policy responses to them.

Volume 51 is a thematic volume on Prisons and Prisoners. Since 1979, the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cures. In both the review and the occasional thematic volumes, Crime and Justice offers an interdisciplinary approach to address core issues in criminology. Volume 51 of Crime and Justice is the first to reprise a predecessor, Prisons (Volume 26, 1999), edited by series editor Michael Tonry and the late Joan Petersilia. In Prisons and Prisoners, editors Michael Tonry and Sandra Bucerius revisit the subject for several reasons. In 1999, most scholarly research concerned developments in Britain and the United States and was published in English. Much of that was sociological, focused on inmate subcultures, or psychological, focused on how prisoners coped with and adapted to prison life. Some, principally by economists and statisticians, sought to measure the crime-preventive effects of imprisonment generally and the deterrent effects of punishments of greater and lesser severity. In 2022, serious scholarly research on prisoners, prisons, and the effects of imprisonment has been published and is underway in many countries. That greater cosmopolitanism is reflected in the pages of this volume. Several essays concern developments in places other than Britain and the United States. Several are primarily comparative and cover developments in many countries. Those primarily concerned with American research draw on work done elsewhere. The subjects of prison research have also changed. Work on inmate subcultures and coping and adaptation has largely fallen by the wayside. Little is being done on imprisonment’s crime-preventive effects, largely because they are at best modest and often perverse. An essay in Volume 50 of Crime and Justice, examining the 116 studies then published on the effects of imprisonment on subsequent offending, concluded that serving a prison term makes ex-prisoners on average more, not less, likely to reoffend. In 1999, little research had been done on the effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ families, children, or communities, or even—except for recidivism— on ex-prisoners’ later lives: family life, employment, housing, physical and mental health, or achievement of a conventional, law-abiding life. The first comprehensive survey of what was then known was published in the earlier Crime and Justice: Prisons volume. An enormous literature has since emerged, as essays in this volume demonstrate. Comparatively little work had been done by 1999 on the distinctive prison experiences of women and members of non-White minority groups. That too has changed, as several of the essays make clear. What is not clear is the future of imprisonment. Through more contemporary and global lenses, the essays featured in this volume not only reframe where we are in 2022 but offer informed insights into where we might be heading.  

This handbook provides an accessible, high-quality, and comprehensive introduction to and overview of the operation of the American criminal justice system. It is divided into five sections covering the purposes and functions of the system, its problems and priorities, and its main institutions-police and policing, prosecution and sentencing, and community and institutional corrections. Highly regarded in the field, Michael Tonry brings together a mix of established, senior scholars and up-and-coming writers to provide authoritative and cutting-edge contributions on hot-button topics, from the justice system's handling of immigration and terrorism to racial profiling, parole, and re-entry, as well as bread-and-butter issues like incapacitation, jails, drugs, and police strategy. As countries vary substantially in the detailed operation of some agencies and few scholars have detailed knowledge of the operation of two or more countries' systems, the focus is principally, though not exclusively, on the American justice system.

How can it be, in a nation that elected Barack Obama, that one third of African American males born in 2001 will spend time in a state or federal prison, and that black men are seven times likelier than white men to be in prison? Blacks are much more likely than whites to be stopped by the police, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned, and are much less likely to have confidence in justice system officials, especially the police.
In Punishing Race, Michael Tonry demonstrates in lucid, accessible language that these patterns result not from racial differences in crime or drug use but primarily from drug and crime control policies that disproportionately affect black Americans. These policies in turn stem from a lack of white empathy for black people, and from racial stereotypes and resentments provoked partly by the Republican Southern Strategy of using coded "law and order" appeals to race to gain support from white voters. White Americans, Tonry observes, have a remarkable capacity to endure the suffering of disadvantaged black and, increasingly, Hispanic men. Crime policies are among a set of social policies enacted since the 1960s that have maintained white dominance over black people despite the end of legal discrimination. To redress these injustices, Tonry offers a number of proposals: stop racial profiling by the police, shift the emphasis of drug law enforcement to treatment and prevention, eliminate mandatory sentencing laws, and change sentencing guidelines to allow judges discretion to take account of offenders' life circumstances. Those proposals are all attainable and would all reduce unjustifiable racial disparities and the collateral human and social harms they cause.
A damning indictment of decades of misguided criminal justice policy, Punishing Race takes a crucial look at persisting racial injustice in America.