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.
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.
An examination of the treatment of serious violence by men against women in nineteenth-century England. During Victoria's reign the criminal law came to punish such violence more systematically and ...heavily, while propagating a new, more pacific ideal of manliness. Yet this apparently progressive legal development called forth strong resistance, not only from violent men themselves but, from others who drew upon discourses of democracy, humanitarianism and patriarchy to establish sympathy with 'men of blood'. In exploring this development and the contest it generated, Professor Wiener analyzes the cultural logic underlying shifting practices in nineteenth-century courts and Whitehall, and locates competing cultural discourses in the everyday life of criminal justice. The tensions and dilemmas this book highlights are more than simply 'Victorian' ones; to an important degree they remain with us. Consequently this work speaks not only to historians and to students of gender but also to criminologists and legal theorists.
The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice focuses on the growing worldwide movement aimed at decolonizing state policies and practices, and various disciplinary knowledges ...including criminology, social work and law. The collection of original chapters brings together cutting-edge, politically engaged work from a diverse group of writers who take as a starting point an analysis founded in a decolonizing, decolonial and/or Indigenous standpoint. Centering the perspectives of Black, First Nations and other racialized and minoritized peoples, the book makes an internationally significant contribution to the literature. The chapters include analyses of specific decolonization policies and interventions instigated by communities to enhance jurisdictional self-determination; theoretical approaches to decolonization; the importance of research and research ethics as a key foundation of the decolonization process; crucial contemporary issues including deaths in custody, state crime, reparations, and transitional justice; and critical analysis of key institutions of control, including police, courts, corrections, child protection systems and other forms of carcerality. The handbook is divided into five sections which reflect the breadth of the decolonizing literature: • Why decolonization? From the personal to the global • State terror and violence • Abolishing the carceral • Transforming and decolonizing justice • Disrupting epistemic violence This book offers a comprehensive and timely resource for activists, students, academics, and those with an interest in Indigenous studies, decolonial and post-colonial studies, criminal legal institutions and criminology. It provides critical commentary and analyses of the major issues for enhancing social justice internationally. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Privatising Criminal Justice explores the social, cultural and political context of privatisation in the criminal justice sector. In recent years, the criminal justice sector has made various ...strategic partnerships with the private sector, exemplified by initiatives within the police, the prison system and offender services. This has seen unprecedented growth in the past 30 years and a veritable explosion under the tenure of the coalition government in the UK.
This book highlights key areas of domestic and global concern and illustrates, with detailed case studies of important developments. It connects the study of criminology and criminal justice to the wider study of public policy, government institutions and political decision making. In doing so, Privatising Criminal Justice provides a theoretical and practical framework for evaluating collaborative public-and private-sector response to social problems at the beginning of the twenty first century.
An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, criminal justice, sociology and politics and all those interested in how privatisation has shaped the contemporary criminal justice system.
Backed up by the best science, Todd Clear and Natasha Frost make a compelling case for why the nation's forty-year embrace of the punitive spirit has been morally bankrupt and endangered public ...safety. But this is far more than an expose of correctional failure. Recognizing that a policy turning point is at hand, Clear and Frost provide a practical blueprint for choosing a different correctional future - counsel that is wise and should be widely followed. - Francis T. Cullen, Distinguished Research Professor of Criminal Justice, University of CincinnatiOver the last 35 years, the US penal system has grown at a rate unprecedented in US history - five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. This growth was part of a sustained and intentional effort to get tough on crime, and characterizes a time when no policy options were acceptable save for those that increased penalties. InThe Punishment Imperative, eminent criminologists Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost argue that America's move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the early 2000s was more than just a response to crime or a collection of policies adopted in isolation; it was a grand social experiment. Tracing a wide array of trends related to the criminal justice system,The Punishment Imperativecharts the rise of penal severity in America and speculates that a variety of forces - fiscal, political, and evidentiary - have finally come together to bring this great social experiment to an end.Clear and Frost stress that while the doubling of the crime rate in the late 1960s represented one of the most pressing social problems at the time, this is not what served as a foundation for the great punishment experiment. Rather, it was the way crime posed a political problem - and thereby offered a political opportunity - that became the basis for the great rise in punishment. The authors claim that the punishment imperativeis a particularly insidious social experiment because the actual goal was never articulated, the full array of consequences was never considered, and the momentum built even as the forces driving the policy shifts diminished. Clear and Frost argue that the public's growing realization that the severe policies themselves, not growing crime rates, were the main cause of increased incarceration eventually led to a surge of interest in taking a more rehabilitative, pragmatic, and cooperative approach to dealing with criminal offenders.The Punishment Imperativecautions that the legacy of the grand experiment of the past forty years will be difficult to escape. However, the authors suggest that the United States now stands at the threshold of a new era in penal policy, and they offer several practical and pragmatic policy solutions to changing the criminal justice system's approach to punishment. Part historical study, part forward-looking policy analysis,The Punishment Imperativeis a compelling study of a generation of crime and punishment in America.Todd R. Clear is Dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He is the author of Imprisoning Communities and What Is Community Justice? and the founding editor of the journal Criminology and Public Policy.
In 1806 General Thomas Picton, Britain's first governor of Trinidad, was brought to trial for the torture of a free mulatto named Louisa Calderon and for overseeing a regime of terror over the ...island's slave population. James Epstein offers a fascinating account of the unfolding of this colonial drama. He shows the ways in which the trial and its investigation brought empire 'home' and exposed the disjuncture between a national self-image of humane governance and the brutal realities of colonial rule. He uses the trial to open up a range of issues, including colonial violence and norms of justice, the status of the British subject, imperial careering, visions of development after slavery, slave conspiracy and the colonial archive. He reveals how Britain's imperial regime became more authoritarian, hierarchical and militarised but also how unease about abuses of power and of the rights of colonial subjects began to grow.
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