Over the last two decades, and in the wake of increases in recorded crime and other social changes, British criminal justice policy has become increasingly politicised as an index of governments' ...competence. New and worrying developments, such as the inexorable rise of the US prison population and the rising force of penal severity, seem unstoppable in the face of popular anxiety about crime. But is this inevitable? Nicola Lacey argues that harsh 'penal populism' is not the inevitable fate of all contemporary democracies. Notwithstanding a degree of convergence, globalisation has left many of the key institutional differences between national systems intact, and these help to explain the striking differences in the capacity for penal tolerance in otherwise relatively similar societies. Only by understanding the institutional preconditions for a tolerant criminal justice system can we think clearly about the possible options for reform within particular systems.
How the attorney-client relationship favors the
privileged in criminal court-and denies justice to the poor and to
working-class people of color The number of Americans
arrested, brought to court, ...and incarcerated has skyrocketed in
recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and
economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly
different ways. Privilege and Punishment examines how
racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client
relationship, providing a devastating portrait of inequality and
injustice within and beyond the criminal courts. Matthew Clair
conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending
criminal hearings and interviewing defendants, lawyers, judges,
police officers, and probation officers. In this eye-opening book,
he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court
interactions. When disadvantaged defendants try to learn their
legal rights and advocate for themselves, lawyers and judges often
silence, coerce, and punish them. Privileged defendants, who are
more likely to trust their defense attorneys, delegate authority to
their lawyers, defer to judges, and are rewarded for their
compliance. Clair shows how attempts to exercise legal rights often
backfire on the poor and on working-class people of color, and how
effective legal representation alone is no guarantee of justice.
Superbly written and powerfully argued, Privilege and
Punishment draws needed attention to the injustices that are
perpetuated by the attorney-client relationship in today's criminal
courts, and describes the reforms needed to correct them.
This book examines how the democratic process and social trust shape penal sanctioning in the United States. The research shows that higher levels of civic engagement tend to support milder ...punishments whereas lower levels tend to support more coercive criminal justice policies. The book challenges a taken‐for‐granted assumption about the democratic process and punishment. It shows that the apparent link between public participation, punitiveness, and harsh justice is not only historically contingent but dependent on specific institutional contexts and patterns of civic engagement, patterns that tend to vary within the United States and across liberal democracies. But perhaps more importantly, the research suggests the opposite relationship: increased democratization can support and sustain less coercive penal regimes. By comparing state‐level imprisonment variation and state‐level democratic traditions, this book highlights the importance of place, locality, and context in a globalizing social world.
How was law made in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Through detailed studies of what the courts actually did, Peter King argues that parliament and the Westminster courts ...played a less important role in the process of law making than is usually assumed. Justice was often remade from the margins by magistrates, judges and others at the local level. His book also focuses on four specific themes - gender, youth, violent crime and the attack on customary rights. In doing so it highlights a variety of important changes - the relatively lenient treatment meted out to women by the late eighteenth century, the early development of the juvenile reformatory in England before 1825, i.e. before similar changes on the continent or in America, and the growing intolerance of the courts towards everyday violence. This study is invaluable reading to anyone interested in British political and legal history.
Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital ...city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.ButCity of Inmatesis also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.
Beginning with the premise that the principal function of a criminal trial is to find out the truth about a crime, Larry Laudan examines the rules of evidence and procedure that would be appropriate ...if the discovery of the truth were, as higher courts routinely claim, the overriding aim of the criminal justice system. Laudan mounts a systematic critique of existing rules and procedures that are obstacles to that quest. He also examines issues of error distribution by offering the first integrated analysis of the various mechanisms - the standard of proof, the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof - for implementing society's view about the relative importance of the errors that can occur in a trial.
This startling ethnography uncovers the other side of the incarceration saga: the little-told story of the effects of imprisonment on prisoners' families. Since 1970 the incarceration rate in the ...United States has more than tripled, and in many cities—urban centers such as Washington, D.C.—it has increased over fivefold. But the numbers don't reveal what life is like for the children, wives, and parents of prisoners, or the subtle and not-so-subtle effects mass incarceration is having on inner-city communities. Donald Braman shows that those doing time on the inside are having a ripple effect on the outside—reaching deep into the family and community life of urban America. He offers fresh insights into how criminal justice policies are furthering, rather than abating, the problem of social disorder. Drawing on a series of powerful family portraits supported by extensive empirical data, Braman shines a light on the darker side of a system that is failing the very families and communities it seeks to protect.
As reactions to the O. J. Simpson verdict, the Rodney King beating, and the Amadou Diallo killing make clear, whites and African Americans in the United States inhabit two different perceptual ...worlds, with the former seeing the justice system as largely fair and color blind and the latter believing it to be replete with bias and discrimination. The authors tackle two important questions in this book: what explains the widely differing perceptions, and why do such differences matter? They attribute much of the racial chasm to the relatively common personal confrontations that many blacks have with law enforcement – confrontations seldom experienced by whites. More importantly, the authors demonstrate that this racial chasm is consequential: it leads African Americans to react much more cynically to incidents of police brutality and racial profiling, and also to be far more skeptical of punitive anti-crime policies ranging from the death penalty to three-strikes laws.
What are the various forces influencing the role of the prison in late modern societies? What changes have there been in penality and use of the prison over the past 40 years that have led to the ...re-valorization of the prison? Using penal culture as a conceptual and theoretical vehicle, and Australia as a case study, this book analyses international developments in penality and imprisonment. Authored by some of Australia's leading penal theorists, the book examines the historical and contemporary influences on the use of the prison, with analyses of colonialism, post colonialism, race, and what they term the 'penal/colonial complex,' in the construction of imprisonment rates and on the development of the phenomenon of hyperincarceration. The authors develop penal culture as an explanatory framework for continuity, change and difference in prisons and the nature of contested penal expansionism. The influence of transformative concepts such as 'risk management', 'the therapeutic prison', and 'preventative detention' are explored as aspects of penal culture. Processes of normalization, transmission and reproduction of penal culture are seen throughout the social realm. Comparative, contemporary and historical in its approach, the book provides a new analysis of penality in the 21st century.
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