Author : Gene Healy
Publisher : Cato Institute
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 24,55 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781930865631
The American criminal justice system is becoming ever more centralized and punitive, owing to rampant federalization and mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. Go Directly to Jail examines these alarming trends and proposes reforms that could rein in a criminal justice apparatus at war with fairness and common sense.
Author : Aya Gruber
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 26,15 MB
Release : 2020-05-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0520973143
Many feminists grapple with the problem of hyper-incarceration in the United States, and yet commentators on gender crime continue to assert that criminal law is not tough enough. This punitive impulse, prominent legal scholar Aya Gruber argues, is dangerous and counterproductive. In their quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, American feminists have become soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting the problem-solving power of incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities. Deploying vivid cases and unflinching analysis, The Feminist War on Crime documents the failure of the state to combat sexual and domestic violence through law and punishment. Zero-tolerance anti-violence law and policy tend to make women less safe and more fragile. Mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration embroil poor women of color in a criminal justice system that is historically hostile to them. This carceral approach exacerbates social inequalities by diverting more power and resources toward a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system, further harming victims, perpetrators, and communities alike. In order to reverse this troubling course, Gruber contends that we must abandon the conventional feminist wisdom, fight violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state, and use criminalization as a technique of last—not first—resort.
Author : Tera Eva Agyepong
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 197 pages
File Size : 25,84 MB
Release : 2018-03-14
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1469638665
In the late nineteenth century, progressive reformers recoiled at the prospect of the justice system punishing children as adults. Advocating that children's inherent innocence warranted fundamentally different treatment, reformers founded the nation's first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Yet amid an influx of new African American arrivals to the city during the Great Migration, notions of inherent childhood innocence and juvenile justice were circumscribed by race. In documenting how blackness became a marker of criminality that overrode the potential protections the status of "child" could have bestowed, Tera Eva Agyepong shows the entanglements between race and the state's transition to a more punitive form of juvenile justice. In this important study, Agyepong expands the narrative of racialized criminalization in America, revealing that these patterns became embedded in a justice system originally intended to protect children. In doing so, she also complicates our understanding of the nature of migration and what it meant to be black and living in Chicago in the early twentieth century.
Author : Thomas Søbirk Petersen
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 19,3 MB
Release : 2019-11-28
Category : Law
ISBN : 3030346900
The book defines and critically discusses the following five principles: the harm principle, legal paternalism, the offense principle, legal moralism and the dignity principle of criminalization. The book argues that all five principles raise important problems that point to rejections (or at least a rethink) of standard principles of criminalization. The book shows that one of the reasons why we should reject or revise standard principles of criminalization is that even the most plausible versions of the harm principle and legal paternalism that have been offered so far are rendered redundant by general moral theories. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the other three principles (or versions thereof), the offense principle, legal moralism and the dignity principle of criminalization, can either be covered by the harm principle, thus making these principles also redundant, or be seen to have what look like other unacceptable implications (e.g. that versions of legal moralism are based on speculative and incorrect empirical assumptions or violate what is called the criminological levelling-down challenge). As such, there is reason to move beyond traditional principles of criminalization, and instead to investigate alternative principles the state should be guided by when attempting to justify which kinds of conduct should be criminalized. Moreover, this book presents and defends such a principle – the utilitarian principle of criminalization.
Author : J. Schonsheck
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 28,70 MB
Release : 2013-06-29
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9401581002
I begin by introducing the main issues of the work, and inviting their consideration; as enticement, I offer a sketch of their practical importance, and of the philosophical challenge they present. And I provide a preview of the work's organization and central argument. There is something so obvious that it is easily-and often-overlooked: the enforcing of criminal statutes is the most intrusive and coercive exercise of domestic power by a state. Forcibly preventing people from doing that which they wish to do, forcibly compelling people to do that which they do not wish to do-and wielding force merely attempting to compel or prevent-these state activities have extraordinarily serious ramifications. Indeed, no state institutions are likely to have more profound an impact on the lives of individual citizens than those of the criminal justice system. I endorse Herbert Packer's assessment: The criminal sanction is the law's ultimate threat. Being punished for a crime is different from being regulated in the public interest, or being forced to compensate another who has been injured by one's conduct, or being treated for a disease. The sanction is at once l uniquely coercive and, in the broadest sense, uniquely expensive. As a consequence, these state activities are in special need of moral warrant. Given the great potential for doing grave injustice, the power of the state embodied in the criminal justice system ought not be exercised in the absence of a complete and compelling moral justification.
Author : Clarice Feinman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 24,12 MB
Release : 2018-10-24
Category : Law
ISBN : 1317992008
This groundbreaking book addresses the ominous trend of introducing and passing laws and court decisions regulating the actions of women and the control of their bodies. One of the few books published on the criminalization of women’s bodies, this timely book takes a serious look at the effect these laws would have on women and the threat to their autonomy, privacy, and control; their bodily integrity; control over reproductive capacities; and their constitutional rights. From ancient literature to the literature and law of contemporary society, a woman’s value has often rested on her fulfilling expected roles as wife and mother. The lack of respect for women inherent in this predominantly male-oriented line of thinking is reinforced in this new trend of legislation and court decisions attempting to regulate women’s behavior and reproductive capacity. The Criminalization of a Woman’s Body thoroughly discusses these special laws governing women’s personal choices and the threats these laws and court decisions pose to women’s autonomy and constitutional rights. Scholars from Israel, Italy, and the United States provide a multidimensional discussion of the problem facing women in many, if not all, countries. Contributors represent various disciplines including, law, philosophy, medicine, political science, sociology, women’s studies, and criminal justice. Articles analyze sensitive issues surrounding abortion and its impending criminalization in several countries; controversial topics on contract motherhood; the power of administrative agencies to control and informally criminalize pregnant women and new mothers; policies meant to protect the fetus from pregnant women who deviate from medically, socially, and legally sanctioned behavior which may deter women from seeking any medical care; and the destruction of families due to the criminalization of pregnant women and new mothers and the consequent removal of their children and placement into foster care. Professors, students, librarians, agency workers dealing with women’s issues, and women and men in the general public will find this important book a helpful tool in sorting through the complex issues on criminalizing women’s bodies.
Author : Alexandra Natapoff
Publisher : Basic Books
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 33,2 MB
Release : 2018-12-31
Category : Law
ISBN : 0465093809
A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018
Author : Douglas Husak
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 39,45 MB
Release : 2008-01-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0198043996
The United States today suffers from too much criminal law and too much punishment. Husak describes the phenomena in some detail and explores their relation, and why these trends produce massive injustice. His primary goal is to defend a set of constraints that limit the authority of states to enact and enforce penal offenses. The book urges the weight and relevance of this topic in the real world, and notes that most Anglo-American legal philosophers have neglected it. Husak's secondary goal is to situate this endeavor in criminal theory as traditionally construed. He argues that many of the resources to reduce the size and scope of the criminal law can be derived from within the criminal law itself-even though these resources have not been used explicitly for this purpose. Additional constraints emerge from a political view about the conditions under which important rights such as the right implicated by punishment-may be infringed. When conjoined, these constraints produce what Husak calls a minimalist theory of criminal liability. Husak applies these constraints to a handful of examples-most notably, to the justifiability of drug proscriptions.
Author : Peter Edelman
Publisher : The New Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 22,9 MB
Release : 2019-07-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 162097553X
Awarded "Special Recognition" by the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Book & Journalism Awards Finalist for the American Bar Association's 2018 Silver Gavel Book Award Named one of the "10 books to read after you've read Evicted" by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the demands of social justice in America."—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy Winner of a special Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the book that Evicted author Matthew Desmond calls "a powerful investigation into the ways the United States has addressed poverty . . . lucid and troubling" In one of the richest countries on Earth it has effectively become a crime to be poor. For example, in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Department of Justice didn't just expose racially biased policing; it also exposed exorbitant fines and fees for minor crimes that mainly hit the city's poor, African American population, resulting in jail by the thousands. As Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, in fact Ferguson is everywhere: the debtors' prisons of the twenty-first century. The anti-tax revolution that began with the Reagan era led state and local governments, starved for revenues, to squeeze ordinary people, collect fines and fees to the tune of 10 million people who now owe $50 billion. Nor is the criminalization of poverty confined to money. Schoolchildren are sent to court for playground skirmishes that previously sent them to the principal's office. Women are evicted from their homes for calling the police too often to ask for protection from domestic violence. The homeless are arrested for sleeping in the park or urinating in public. A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy and senior official in the Clinton administration, Peter Edelman has devoted his life to understanding the causes of poverty. As Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy has said, "No one has been more committed to struggles against impoverishment and its cruel consequences than Peter Edelman." And former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes, "If there is one essential book on the great tragedy of poverty and inequality in America, this is it."
Author : Trevor Hoppe
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 22,6 MB
Release : 2018
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 0520291581
From the very beginning of the epidemic, AIDS was linked to punishment. Calls to punish people living with HIV—mostly stigmatized minorities—began before doctors had even settled on a name for the disease. Punitive attitudes toward AIDS prompted lawmakers around the country to introduce legislation aimed at criminalizing the behaviors of people living with HIV. Punishing Disease explains how this happened—and its consequences. With the door to criminalizing sickness now open, what other ailments will follow? As lawmakers move to tack on additional diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis to existing law, the question is more than academic.
