A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
With the resurgence of fascism and authoritarianism across the globe, the rise of white supremacist and xenophobic violence, and the continued brutality of state-sanctioned and extrajudicial killings by police, border patrols, and ordinary citizens, there is a pressing need to critically analyze our political present. These essays bring to bear the critical force of Derrida’s and Foucault’s biopolitical thought to practices of mass incarceration, the death penalty, life without parole, immigration and detention, racism and police violence, transphobia, human and animal relations, and the legacies of colonization. At the heart of their biopolitics, the volume shows, lies the desire to deconstruct and resist in the name of a future that is more just and less policed. It is this impulse that makes reading their work together, at this moment, both crucial and worthwhile.
Often seen as a political sop to the racial fears of white voters, aggressive policing and draconian sentencing for illegal drug possession and related crimes have led to the imprisonment of millions of African Americans—far in excess of their representation in the population as a whole. Michael Javen Fortner shows in this eye-opening account that these punitive policies also enjoyed the support of many working-class and middle-class blacks, who were angry about decline and disorder in their communities. Black Silent Majority uncovers the role African Americans played in creating today’s system of mass incarceration.
Current anti-drug policies are based on a set of controversial laws first adopted in New York in the early 1970s and championed by the state’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. Fortner traces how many blacks in New York came to believe that the rehabilitation-focused liberal policies of the 1960s had failed. Faced with economic malaise and rising rates of addiction and crime, they blamed addicts and pushers. By 1973, the outcry from grassroots activists and civic leaders in Harlem calling for drastic measures presented Rockefeller with a welcome opportunity to crack down on crime and boost his political career. New York became the first state to mandate long prison sentences for selling or possessing narcotics.
Black Silent Majority lays bare the tangled roots of a pernicious system. America’s drug policies, while in part a manifestation of the conservative movement, are also a product of black America’s confrontation with crime and chaos in its own neighborhoods.
In this first thorough study of the origins of clemency, Dowling provides a vivid look at the ideology of clemency and new philosophies of mercy and cruelty in Western society, through an examination of ancient art, literature, historical documents, and archaeological artifacts. By illuminating the emergence of mercy and forgiveness as social concepts, and the mechanisms by which peoples are transformed in response to changes in power structures, Dowling makes an important contribution to the study of the ancient Roman world, as well as to modern Western culture.
Community Courts are designed to handle a city’s low-level offenses and quality-of-life crimes, such as littering, loitering, or public drunkenness. Court advocates maintain that these largely victimless crimes jeopardize the well-being of residents, businesses, and visitors. Whereas traditional courts might dismiss such cases or administer a small fine, community courts aim to meaningfully punish offenders to avoid disorder escalating to apocalyptic decline.
Courting the Community is a fascinating ethnography that goes behind the scenes to explore how quality-of-life discourses are translated into court practices that marry therapeutic and rehabilitative ideas. Christine Zozula shows how residents and businesses participate in meting out justice—such as through community service, treatment, or other sanctions—making it more emotional, less detached, and more legitimate in the eyes of stakeholders. She also examines both “impact panels,” in which offenders, residents, and business owners meet to discuss how quality-of-life crimes negatively impact the neighborhood, as well as strategic neighborhood outreach efforts to update residents on cases and gauge their concerns.
Zozula’s nuanced investigation of community courts can lead us to a deeper understanding of punishment and rehabilitation and, by extension, the current state of the American court system.
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.
Volume 40, Crime and Justice in Scandinavia, offers the most comprehensive and authoritative look ever available at criminal justice policies, practices, and research in the Nordic countries. Topics range from the history of violence through juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice, and sentencing to controversial contemporary policies on prostitution, victims, and organized crime. Contributors to this volume include Jon-Gunnar Bernburg, Ville Hinkkanen, Cecilie Høigård, Hanns von Hofer, Charlotta Holmström, Janne Kivivuori, Lars Korsell, Tapio Lappi-Seppälä, Paul Larsson, Martti Lehti, Torkild Hovde Lyngstad, Sven-Axel Månsson, Anita Rönneling, Lise-Lotte Rytterbro, Torbjørn Skardhamar, May-Len Skilbrei, and Henrik Tham.
This volume covers what students, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers need to know about how sentencing really works, what a half century’s “reforms” have and have not accomplished, how sentencing processes can be made fairer, and how sentencing outcomes can be made more just. Its writers are among America’s leading scholarly specialists—often the leading specialist—in their fields.
Clearly and accessibly written, American Sentencing is ideal for teaching use in seminars and courses on sentencing, courts, and criminal justice. Its authors’ diverse perspectives shed light on these issues, making it likely the single, most authoritative source of information on the state of sentencing in America today.
While disassociating law from a strictly legalist approach, the volume showcases a number of highly original studies on topics such as the role of law in processes of state formation and social and political conflict, the resonance between legal and cultural phenomena, and the contested nature of law-enforcing discourses and practices. Treating law as an ambiguous and malleable arena of struggle, the contributors to this volume—scholars from North and Latin America who represent the new wave in legal history that has emerged in recent years-- demonstrate that law not only produces and reformulates culture, but also shapes and is shaped by larger processes of political, social, economic, and cultural change. In addition, they offer valuable insights about the ways in which legal systems and cultures in Latin America compare to those in England, Western Europe, and the United States.
This volume will appeal to scholars in Latin American studies and to those interested in the social, cultural, and comparative history of law and legal phenomena.
Contributors. Carlos Aguirre, Dain Borges, Lila Caimari, Arlene J. Díaz, Luis A. Gonzalez, Donna J. Guy, Douglas Hay, Gilbert M. Joseph, Juan Manuel Palacio, Diana Paton, Pablo Piccato, Cristina Rivera Garza, Kristin Ruggiero, Ricardo D. Salvatore, Charles F. Walker
The Chinese were writing detective stories at least three hundred years before Edgar Allan Poe and courtroom drama about two hundred years before that. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, courtroom drama was a popular sub-genre—with the judge-hero Pao Cheng of the Sung dynasty as a principal character—and crime and punishment as its most important themes.
In Crime and Punishment in Medieval Chinese Drama George A. Hayden translates three Judge Pao plays: "Selling Rice at Ch'ien-chu," "The Ghost of the Pot," and "The Flower in the Back Courtyard." In his introduction Professor Hayden explains the structure of the dramas, which were sung as well as spoken, and their moral significance in the light of traditional Chinese ethics. He also traces the legend of the wise and incorruptible but very human Judge Pao through the years to its high point in Yuan and early Ming drama. The book is annotated for the general reader as well as for the specialist and contains a list of twenty-seven courtroom plays and a list of late Ming anthologies in which these plays appear.
In this collection, Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring present nine groundbreaking essays about the carceral system and its development over time. Topics range from activism against police brutality to the peculiar path of southern prison reform to the fraught introduction of the electric chair. The essays tell nuanced stories of rapidly changing state institutions, political leaders who sought to manage them, and African Americans who appealed to the regulatory state to protect their rights.
Contributors: Pippa Holloway, Tammy Ingram, Brandon T. Jett, Seth Kotch, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Vivien Miller, Silvan Niedermeier, K. Stephen Prince, and Amy Louise Wood
Russians from all walks of life poured into the streets of the imperial capital after the February Revolution of 1917, joyously celebrating the end of Tsar Nicholas II’s monarchy. One year later, with Lenin’s Bolsheviks now in power, Petrograd’s deserted streets presented a very different scene. No celebrations marked the Revolution’s anniversary. Amid widespread civil strife and lawlessness, a fearful citizenry stayed out of sight.
In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia’s revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people. When the Provisional Government assumed power after Nicholas II’s abdication, it set about instituting liberal reforms, including eliminating the tsar’s regular police. But dissolving this much-hated yet efficient police force and replacing it with a new municipal police led rapidly to the breakdown of order and services. Amid the chaos, crime flourished. Gangs of criminals, deserters, and hooligans brazenly roamed the streets. Mass prison escapes became common. And vigilantism spread widely as ordinary citizens felt compelled to take the law into their own hands, often meting out mob justice on suspected wrongdoers.
The Bolsheviks swept into power in the October Revolution but had no practical plans to reestablish order. As crime continued to escalate and violent alcohol riots almost drowned the revolutionary regime, they redefined it as “counterrevolutionary activity,” to be dealt with by the secret police, whose harshly repressive, extralegal means of enforcement helped pave the way for a Communist dictatorship.
In Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness, Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson explore how societal beliefs about free will and moral responsibility have shaped current policies and they identify the differences among the goals, ethos, and actions of the legal and health care systems. Drawing on high-profile cases, the authors provide a critical analysis of topics, including legal standards for competency, insanity versus mental illness, sex offenders, psychologically disturbed juveniles, the injury and death rates of mentally ill prisoners due to the inappropriate use of force, the high level of suicide, and the release of mentally ill individuals from jails and prisons who have received little or no treatment.
In the post-Vietnam era, the prison population has increased tenfold and the death penalty has enjoyed a renaissance. Few subjects in contemporary US society provoke as much controversy as punishment. In this context, Cruel and Unusual aims to offer the first comprehensive exploration of the history of punishment as it has been mediated in American culture.
Grounding his analysis in Marxist theory, psychoanalysis and Foucault’s influential work on discipline, Brian Jarvis examines a range of cultural texts, from seventeenth century execution sermons to twenty-first century prison films, to uncover the politics, economics and erotics of punishment.
This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary survey constructs a genealogy of cruelty through close reading of novels by Hawthorne and Melville, fictional accounts of the Rosenberg execution by Coover and Doctorow, slave narratives and prison writings by African Americans and the critically neglected genre of American prison films.
In the process, Cruel and Unusual unmasks a fundamental conflict between legends of liberty in the Land of the Free and the secret, silenced histories of sadomasochistic desire, punishment for profit and social control.
The Cultural Prison brings a new dimension to the study of prisoners and punishment by focusing on how the punishment of American offenders is represented and shaped in the mass media through public arguments. The study is based on an analysis of 642 articles collected by the author from American popular journals and magazines, as well as newspaper accounts, films, and public speeches, spanning the years 1950 to 1992. By piecing together and studying these popular narratives, he divides the history of prisoners and punishment into four eras, each marked by a shift in value system. He argues that the discourse, or rhetoric, surrounding prisoners and punishment on the public level works as a historical force that shapes contemporary culture.
The author is concerned that the public seems to have an inability or unwillingness to question or resist cultural definitions of normalcy and legal behavior. He explains that ideally moral behavior should be a matter of public debate rather than of unquestioned perpetuation, and he urges increased understanding of institutional and cultural discipline and our questioning the ways in which the constitution of punishment and prisoners influences us culturally.
The"cultural prison" refers to the way in which this study acts as an investigation of "the discipline of discipline"; it is an examination of the way in which discipline is shaped and formed in public discourse. The volume concludes with a fascinating account of the move to electronic means of surveillance; coupled with the representations of the prisoner along the lines of race and gender, it explains what these new techniques mean to contemporary culture.
The contributors, who include both historians and anthropologists, address instances of colonial violence from the early modern period to the twentieth century and from Asia to Africa to North America. They consider diverse topics, from the interactions of race, law, and violence in colonial Louisiana to British attempts to regulate sex and marriage in the Indian army in the early nineteenth century. They examine the political dilemmas raised by the extensive use of torture in colonial India and the ways that British colonizers flogged Nigerians based on beliefs that different ethnic and religious affiliations corresponded to different degrees of social evolution and levels of susceptibility to physical pain. An essay on how contemporary Sufi healers deploy bodily violence to maintain sexual and religious hierarchies in postcolonial northern Nigeria makes it clear that the state is not the only enforcer of disciplinary regimes based on ideas of difference.
Contributors. Laura Bear, Yvette Christiansë, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Dorothy Ko, Isaac Land, Susan O’Brien, Douglas M. Peers, Steven Pierce, Anupama Rao, Kerry Ward
Drawing on anthropology, archaeology, folklore, and literature, Roth chronicles the global history of crime and punishment—from early civilizations to the outlawing of sex crimes and serial homicide to the development of organized crime and the threat today of global piracy. He explores the birth of the penitentiary and the practice of incarceration as well as the modern philosophy of rehabilitation, arguing that these are perhaps the most important advances in the effort to safeguard citizens from harm. Looking closely at the retributions societies have condoned, Roth also look at execution and its many forms, showing how stoning, hemlock, the firing squad, and lethal injection are considered either barbaric or justified across different cultures. Ultimately, he illustrates that despite advances in every level of human experience, there is remarkable continuity in what is considered a crime and the sanctions administered.
Perfect for students, academics, and general readers alike, this interdisciplinary book provides a fascinating look at criminality and its consequences.
Winner of a Christianity Today Book Award
An incisive look at how evangelical Christians shaped—and were shaped by—the American criminal justice system.
America incarcerates on a massive scale. Despite recent reforms, the United States locks up large numbers of people—disproportionately poor and nonwhite—for long periods and offers little opportunity for restoration. Aaron Griffith reveals a key component in the origins of American mass incarceration: evangelical Christianity.
Evangelicals in the postwar era made crime concern a major religious issue and found new platforms for shaping public life through punitive politics. Religious leaders like Billy Graham and David Wilkerson mobilized fears of lawbreaking and concern for offenders to sharpen appeals for Christian conversion, setting the stage for evangelicals who began advocating tough-on-crime politics in the 1960s. Building on religious campaigns for public safety earlier in the twentieth century, some preachers and politicians pushed for “law and order,” urging support for harsh sentences and expanded policing. Other evangelicals saw crime as a missionary opportunity, launching innovative ministries that reshaped the practice of religion in prisons. From the 1980s on, evangelicals were instrumental in popularizing criminal justice reform, making it a central cause in the compassionate conservative movement. At every stage in their work, evangelicals framed their efforts as colorblind, which only masked racial inequality in incarceration and delayed real change.
Today evangelicals play an ambiguous role in reform, pressing for reduced imprisonment while backing law-and-order politicians. God’s Law and Order shows that we cannot understand the criminal justice system without accounting for evangelicalism’s impact on its historical development.
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series.
Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault's thought, these are often more general overviews or biographical précis that give little in the way of robust explanation and discussion. In contrast, Schwan and Shapiro take a plain-speaking, yet detailed, approach, specifically designed to give students a thorough understanding of one of the most influential texts in contemporary cultural theory.
It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices.
Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere.
This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.
An Open Letters Monthly Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
America’s criminal justice system is broken. The United States punishes at a higher per capita rate than any other country in the world. In the last twenty years, incarceration rates have risen 500 percent. Sentences are harsh, prisons are overcrowded, life inside is dangerous, and rehabilitation programs are ineffective. Looking not only to court records but to works of philosophy, history, and literature for illumination, Robert Ferguson, a distinguished law professor, diagnoses all parts of a now massive, out-of-control punishment regime.
“If I had won the $400 million Powerball lottery last week I swear I would have ordered a copy for every member of Congress, every judge in America, every prosecutor, and every state prison official and lawmaker who controls the life of even one of the millions of inmates who exist today, many in inhumane and deplorable conditions, in our nation’s prisons.”
—Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic
“Inferno is a passionate, wide-ranging effort to understand and challenge…our heavy reliance on imprisonment. It is an important book, especially for those (like me) who are inclined towards avoidance and tragic complacency…[Ferguson’s] book is too balanced and thoughtful to be disregarded.”
—Robert F. Nagel, Weekly Standard
Despite being one of the most avowedly secular nations in the world, Japan may have more prison chaplains per inmate than any other country, the majority of whom are Buddhist priests. In this groundbreaking study of prison religion in East Asia, Adam Lyons introduces a form of chaplaincy rooted in the Buddhist concept of doctrinal admonition rather than Euro-American notions of spiritual care.
Based on archival research, fieldwork inside prisons, and interviews with chaplains, Karma and Punishment reveals another dimension of Buddhist modernism that developed as Japan’s religious organizations carved out a niche as defenders of society by fighting crime. Between 1868 and 2020, generations of clergy have been appointed to bring religious instruction to bear on a range of offenders, from illegal Christian heretics to Marxist political dissidents, war criminals, and death row inmates. The case of the prison chaplaincy shows that despite constitutional commitments to freedom of religion and separation of religion from state, statism remains an enduring feature of mainstream Japanese religious life in the contemporary era.
Few state issues have attracted as much controversy and national attention as the application of the death penalty in Texas. In the years since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Texas has led the nation in passing death sentences and executing prisoners. The vigor with which Texas has implemented capital punishment has, however, raised more than a few questions. Why has Texas been so fervent in pursuing capital punishment? Has an aggressive death penalty produced any benefits? Have dangerous criminals been deterred? Have rights been trampled in the process and, most importantly, have innocents been executed? These important questions form the core of Lethal Injection: Capital Punishment in Texas during the Modern Era.
This book is the first comprehensive empirical study of Texas's system of capital punishment in the modern era. Jon Sorensen and Rocky Pilgrim use a wealth of information gathered from formerly confidential prisoner records and a variety of statistical sources to test and challenge traditional preconceptions concerning racial bias, deterrence, guilt, and the application of capital punishment in this state. The results of their balanced analysis may surprise many who have followed the recent debate on this important issue.
Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration.
The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment.
Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.
Was Margaret the calculating murderess and adulteress portrayed by the press? Or was she a battered wife pushed to the edge? Or was she, as she claimed to the end, innocent? Murder on the Mountain considers all sides of this fascinating and mysterious true crime story. In turn, it examines why this murder trial became front-page news, as it resonated with public discussions about capital punishment, mental health, anti-immigrant sentiment, domestic violence, and women’s independence. This is a gripping and thought-provoking study of a murder that shocked the nation.
Although the use of music for extramusical purposes has been a part of American culture for some time, the phenomenon remained largely unknown to the general public until revelations became widespread of startling military practices during the second Iraq War. In Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, Lily E. Hirsch explores the related terrain at the intersection of music and law, demonstrating the ways in which music has become a tool of law enforcement and justice through: police and community leaders’ use of classical music in crime deterrence and punishment; the use of rap lyrics as prosecutorial evidence; allegations of music as incitement to violence; and the role of music in U.S. prisons and in detention centers in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
In the course of her study, Hirsch asks several questions: How does the law treat music? When and why does music participate in the law? How does music influence the legal process? How does the legal process influence music? And how do these appropriations affect the Romantic ideals underlying our view of music?
No Bond but the Law reveals the longstanding and intimate relationship between state formation and private punishment. The construction of a dense, state-organized system of prisons began not with emancipation but at the peak of slave-based wealth in Jamaica, in the 1780s. Jamaica provided the paradigmatic case for British observers imagining and evaluating the emancipation process. Paton’s analysis moves between imperial processes on the one hand and Jamaican specificities on the other, within a framework comparing developments regarding punishment in Jamaica with those in the U.S. South and elsewhere. Emphasizing the gendered nature of penal policy and practice throughout the emancipation period, Paton is attentive to the ways in which the actions of ordinary Jamaicans and, in particular, of women prisoners, shaped state decisions.
Patricia J. Johnson demonstrates how the production of art—specifically poetry—changed dramatically during the reign of Augustus. By Ovid’s final decade in Rome, the atmosphere for artistic work had transformed, leading to a drop in poetic production of quality. Johnson shows how Ovid, in the episodes of artistic creation that anchor his Metamorphoses, responded to his audience and commented on artistic circumstances in Rome.
For more than forty years, professionals in the field of disability studies have engaged in debates over the use of aversive interventions (such as electric shock) like the ones used at the Judge Rotenberg Center. Advocates and lawyers have filed complaints and lawsuits to both use them and ban them, scientists have written hundreds of articles for and against them, and people with disabilities have lost their lives and, some would say, lived their lives because of them. There are families who believe deeply in the need to use aversives to control their children’s behavior. There are others who believe the techniques used are torture. All of these families have children who have been excluded from numerous educational and treatment programs because of their behaviors. For most of the families, placement at the Judge Rotenberg Center is the last resort.
This book is a historical case study of the Judge Rotenberg Center, named after the judge who ruled in favor of keeping its doors open to use aversive interventions. It chronicles and analyzes the events and people involved for over forty years that contributed to the inability of the state of Massachusetts to stop the use of electric shock, and other severe forms of punishment on children and adults with disabilities. It is a long story, sad and tragic, complex, filled with intrigue and questions about society and its ability to protect and support its most vulnerable citizens.
Patent law is crucial to encourage technological innovation. But as the patent system currently stands, diverse industries from pharmaceuticals to software to semiconductors are all governed by the same rules even though they innovate very differently. The result is a crisis in the patent system, where patents calibrated to the needs of prescription drugs wreak havoc on information technologies and vice versa. According to Dan L. Burk and Mark A. Lemley in The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It, courts should use the tools the patent system already gives them to treat patents in different industries differently. Industry tailoring is the only way to provide an appropriate level of incentive for each industry.
Burk and Lemley illustrate the barriers to innovation created by the catch-all standards in the current system. Legal tools already present in the patent statute, they contend, offer a solution—courts can tailor patent law, through interpretations and applications, to suit the needs of various types of businesses. The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It will be essential reading for those seeking to understand the nexus of economics, business, and law in the twenty-first century.
For the last half century, the philosophical debates over punishment have been deadlocked at two schools of thought: Utilitarianism and Retributivism. In his introduction, Koritansky provides an overview of the stymied debate by analyzing H. L. A. Hart’s argument for a philosophy unifying the theories of Utilitarianism and Retributivism. While Koritansky allows that both theories have contributed substantially to the contemporary understanding of punishment, he points out that Hart’s lack of success in combining these theories proves that both are less than ideal. From this starting point, Koritansky urges transcendence from these two theories in order to respond to new developments and circumstances surrounding the enactment of punishment today.
Conveniently divided into three sections, the book explores pagan and Christian premodern thought; early modern thought, culminating in chapters on Kant and classic Utilitarianism; and postmodern thought as exemplified in the theories of Nietzsche and Foucault. In all, the essays probe the work of Plato, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, Cesere Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault.
These essays devoted to the philosophy of punishment from the perspective of political thought delve deep into key contributions from thinkers of all eras to help further debates on punishment, provide the history of political thought in order to trace changes and effects on future theories, as well as expose the roots of the two prevailing schools of thought. This collection will engage all social scientists interested in the issue of punishment and energize the ongoing debate surrounding this complex issue.
Since the time of Blackstone's "Farewell," poetry has been seen as celestial, pastoral, solitary, and mellifluous; law as venerable, social, urban, and cacophonous. This perception has persisted even to the present, with the bourgeoning field of law and literature focusing almost exclusively on fiction and drama. Poetry of the Law, however, reveals the richness of poetry about the law.
Poetry of the Law is the first serious anthology of law-related poetry ever published in the United States. As the editors make clear, though, serious need not imply solemn. Instead, David Kader and Michael Stanford have assembled a surprisingly capacious collection of 100 poems from the 1300s to the present.
Set in courtrooms, lawyers’ offices, law-school classrooms, and judges’ chambers; peopled with attorneys, the imprisoned (both innocent and guilty), judges, jurors, witnesses, and law-enforcement officers; based on real events (think “Scottsboro”) or exploring the complexity of abstract legal ideas; the poems celebrate justice or decry the lack of it, ranging in tone from witty to wry, sad to celebratory, funny to infuriating. Poetry of the Law is destined to become an authoritative source for years to come.
Contributors Include:
W. H. Auden
Robert Burns
Lewis Carroll
John Ciardi
Daniel Defoe
Emily Dickinson
John Donne
Rita Dove
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Martín Espada
Thomas Hardy
Seamus Heaney
A. E. Housman
Langston Hughes
Ben Jonson
X. J. Kennedy
Yusef Komunyakaa
Ted Kooser
D. H. Lawrence
Edgar Lee Masters
W. S. Merwin
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sir Walter Raleigh
Muriel Rukeyser
Carl Sandburg
William Shakespeare
Jonathan Swift
Mona Van Duyn
Oscar Wilde
William Carlos Williams
from “The Hanging Judge” by Eavan Boland
Come to the country where justice is seen to be done,
Done daily. Come to the country where
Sentence is passed by word of mouth and raw
Boys split like infinitives. Look, here
We hanged our son, our only son
And hang him still and still we call it law.
A view of Persian and Hellenistic Judean communities through theological and socioeconomic lenses
Johannes Unsok Ro employs philological, historical, and sociological approaches to investigate the close connections between socioeconomic structures, social inequality, and theological developments in the Judean communities in Persian- and Hellenistic-era Palestine. Ro contends that competing points of view from communities of lay returnees, priestly returnees, and communities of resident Judeans and Samaritans were juxtaposed within the Hebrew Bible, which took shape during the postexilic period. By exploring issues such as the relationship between the shaping of the canon and literacy in the Judean community, the term strangers in the biblical law codes, the socioeconomic structures of Judean communities reflected in the biblical law codes, the development of the theological concept of divine punitive justice, the piety of the poor in certain psalms, and the concept of poverty in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Ro illustrates that the communities behind each text and its redactions can be ascertained through sociological and theological lenses.
Features
- Demonstration that a theology of the poor materialized orally among the poor but found written expression among Levites
- Insight into the socioeconomic and theological concerns of the authorial groups behind various biblical law codes
- A case that biblical “poverty” sometimes refers to humility and a theologically reflected consciousness of lowliness toward God
A pioneering history of incarceration in Western political thought.
The prison as we know it is a relatively new institution, established on a large scale in Europe and the United States only during the Enlightenment. Ideas and arguments about penal incarceration, however, long predate its widespread acceptance as a practice. The Prison before the Panopticon argues that debates over imprisonment are as old as Western political philosophy itself. This groundbreaking study examines the role of the prison in the history of political thought, detailing the philosophy of incarceration as it developed from Demosthenes, Plato, and Philo to Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes, and Jeremy Bentham.
Jacob Abolafia emphasizes two major themes that reappear in philosophical writing about the prison. The first is the paradox of popular authorization. This is the problem of how to justify imprisonment in light of political and theoretical commitments to freedom and equality. The second theme is the promise of rehabilitation. Plato and his followers insist that imprisonment should reform the prisoner and have tried to explain in detail how incarceration could have that effect.
While drawing on current historical scholarship to carefully situate each thinker in the culture and penal practices of his own time and place, Abolafia also reveals the surprisingly deep and persistent influence of classical antiquity on modern theories of crime and punishment. The Prison before the Panopticon is a valuable resource not only about the legitimacy of the prison in an age of mass incarceration but also about the philosophical justifications for penal alternatives like restorative justice.
Punishment and Culture traces three centuries of the history of punishment, looking in detail at issues ranging from public executions and the development of the prison to Jeremy Bentham’s notorious panopticon and the invention of the guillotine. Smith contends that each of these attempts to achieve sterile bureaucratic control was thwarted as uncontrollable cultural forces generated alternative visions of heroic villains, darkly gothic technologies, and sacred awe. Moving from Andy Warhol to eighteenth-century highwaymen to Orwell’s 1984, Smith puts forward a dazzling account of the cultural landscape of punishment. His findings will fascinate students of sociology, history, criminology, law, and cultural studies.
The issue’s contributors—comprising both academics and activists—examine the practices of punishment and death imposed upon citizens, particularly through penal systems. One contributor exposes how the indignation and outrage many Americans expressed toward the military torture at Abu Ghraib do not extend to similar instances of torture (beatings, “shower-baths,” sexual abuse, etc.) against inmates of color within the U.S. prison system. Another contributor reflects on the unexpected but effective alliance between antiprison activists and the environmental justice movement in California, which worked to stop the massive prison-building boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Bringing a longer sweep of Western colonialism into view, another essay reveals the racial prejudices within disciplinary processes of Puerto Rico that lingered even after the island’s emancipation from the Spanish American empire, leading to unequal distribution of punishment on both colonial and domestic subject populations.
Contributors. Ethan Blue, Rose Braz, Helena Cobban, Craig Gilmore, Alan Eladio Gómez, R. J. Lambrose, Heather Jane McCarty, Dylan Rodríguez, Kelvin Santiago-Valles, Carolyn Strange, Patrick Timmons
"Punishment and Modern Society is an outstanding delineation of the sociology of punishment. At last the process that is surely the heart and soul of criminology, and perhaps of sociology as well—punishment—has been rescued from the fringes of these 'disciplines'. . . . This book is a first-class piece of scholarship."—Graeme Newman, Contemporary Sociology
"Garland's treatment of the theorists he draws upon is erudite, faithful and constructive. . . . Punishment and Modern Society is a magnificent example of working social theory."—John R. Sutton, American Journal of Sociology
"Punishment and Modern Society lifts contemporary penal issues from the mundane and narrow contours within which they are so often discussed and relocates them at the forefront of public policy. . . . This book will become a landmark study."—Andrew Rutherford, Legal Studies
"This is a superbly intelligent study. Its comprehensive coverage makes it a genuine review of the field. Its scholarship and incisiveness of judgment will make it a constant reference work for the initiated, and its concluding theoretical synthesis will make it a challenge and inspiration for those undertaking research and writing on the subject. As a state-of-the-art account it is unlikely to be bettered for many a year."—Rod Morgan, British Journal of Criminology
Winner of both the Outstanding Scholarship Award of the Crime and Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association's Crime, Law, and Deviance Section
Most of us think of punishment as an ugly display of power. But punishment also tells us something about the ideals and aspirations of a people and their government. How a state punishes reveals whether or not it is confident in its own legitimacy and sovereignty. Punishment and Political Order examines the questions raised by the state’s exercise of punitive power—from what it is about human psychology that desires sanction and order to how the state can administer pain while calling for justice. Keally McBride's book demonstrates punishment's place at the core of political administration and the stated ideals of the polity.
"From start to finish this is a terrific, engaging book. McBride offers a fascinating perspective on punishment, calling attention to its utility in understanding political regimes and their ideals. She succeeds in reminding us of the centrality of punishment in political theory and, at the same time, in providing a framework for understanding contemporary events. I know of no other book that does as much to make the subject of punishment so compelling."
—Austin Sarat, Amherst College
"Punishment and Political Order will be welcome reading for anyone interested in understanding law in society, punishment and political spectacle, or governing through crime control. This is a clear, accessible, and persuasive examination of punishment—as rhetoric and reality. Arguing that punishment is a complex product of the social contract, this book demonstrates the ways in which understanding the symbolic power and violence of the law provides analytical tools for examining the ideological function of prison labor today, as well as the crosscutting and contingent connections between language and identity, legitimation and violence, sovereignty and agency more generally."
—Bill Lyons, Director, Center for Conflict Management, University of Akron
"Philosophical explorations of punishment have often stopped with a theory of responsibility. McBride's book moves well beyond this. It shows that the problem of punishment is a central issue for any coherent theory of the state, and thus that punishment is at the heart of political theory. This is a stunning achievement."
—Malcolm M. Feeley, University of California at Berkeley
Keally McBride is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco.
Early in the seventeenth-century boom of seafaring, piracy allowed many enterprising and lawless men to make fortunes on the high seas, due in no small part to the lack of policing by the British crown. But as the British empire grew from being a collection of far-flung territories into a consolidated economic and political enterprise dependent on long-distance trade, pirates increasingly became a destabilizing threat. This development is traced by sociologist Matthew Norton in The Punishment of Pirates, taking the reader on an exciting journey through the shifting legal status of pirates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Norton shows us that eliminating this threat required an institutional shift: first identifying and defining piracy, and then brutally policing it. The Punishment of Pirates develops a new framework for understanding the cultural mechanisms involved in dividing, classifying, and constructing institutional order by tracing the transformation of piracy from a situation of cultivated ambiguity to a criminal category with violently patrolled boundaries—ending with its eradication as a systemic threat to trade in the English Empire. Replete with gun battles, executions, jailbreaks, and courtroom dramas, Norton’s book offers insights for social theorists, political scientists, and historians alike.
From the Gospel of Matthew to numerous US Supreme Court justices, many literary and legal sources have observed that how a society metes out punishment reveals core truths about its character. The Punitive Imagination is a collection of essays that engages and contributes to debates about the purposes and meanings of punishment in the United States.
The Punitive Imagination examines some of the critical assumptions that frame America's approach to punishment. It explores questions such as:
· What is the place of concern for human dignity in our prevailing ideologies of punishment?
· Can we justly punish the socially disadvantaged?
· What assumptions about persons, social institutions, and the ordering of social space provide the basis for American punitiveness?
· Who, if anyone, can be held responsible for excessively punitive criminal sentences?
· How does punishment depend on prevailing views of free will, responsibility, desert, blameworthiness?
· Where/how are those views subject to challenge in our punitive practices?
As Sarat posits in his introduction, the way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, its understandings of mercy and forgiveness, and its particular ways of responding to evil. He goes on to discuss the history of punishment in the United States and what it reveals about assumptions made about persons that “undergird” the American system of punishment.
The five additional contributors to The Punitive Imagination seek to illuminate what American practices of punishment tell us about who we are as a nation. Synthesizing cultural, sociological, philosophical, and legal perspectives, they offer a distinctive take on the meaning of punishment in America.
In Race, Gender, and Punishment, Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin bring together twelve original essays by prominent scholars to examine not only the discrimination that is evident, but also the structural and cultural forces that have influenced and continue to perpetuate the current situation. Contributors point to four major factors that have impacted public sentiment and criminal justice policy: colonialism, slavery, immigration, and globalization. In doing so they reveal how practices of punishment not only need particular ideas about race to exist, but they also legitimate them.
The essays unearth troubling evidence that testifies to the nation's brutally racist past, and to white Americans' continued fear of and suspicion about racial and ethnic minorities. The legacy of slavery on punishment is considered, but also subjects that have received far less attention such as how colonizers' notions of cultural superiority shaped penal practices, the criminalization of reproductive rights, the link between citizenship and punishment, and the global export of crime control strategies.
Uncomfortable but necessary reading, this book provides an original critique of why and how the criminal justice system has emerged as such a racist institution.
A revealing portrait of law-breaking and law enforcement on the Florida frontier
The pervasive influence of the frontier is fundamental to an understanding of antebellum Florida. James M. Denham traces the growth and social development of this sparsely settled region through its experience with crime and punishment. He examines such issues as Florida's criminal code, its judicial and law enforcement officers, the accommodation of criminals in jails and courts, outlaw gangs, patterns of punishment, and the attitude of the public toward lawbreakers.
Using court records, government documents, newspapers, and personal papers, Denham explores how crime affected ordinary Floridians—whites and blacks, perpetrators, victims, and enforcers. He contends that although the frontier determined the enforcement and administration of the law, the ethic of honor dominated human relationships.
Sentencing without Guidelines is Rhys Hester’s deep dive into how South Carolina, which never passed sentencing guideline legislation, nonetheless created meaningful punishment reform. It achieved uniformity in sentencing with a traveling circuit of judges, informal norms among judges, and the unique phenomenon of the “Plea Judge” to manage cases.
Hester examines how prior convictions, race, and geographical differences impact sentences to explain why individuals get the criminal sentences they do. He also explores how legal reform mechanisms can influence punishment goals and policy. Sentencing without Guidelines shows the benefits and drawbacks South Carolina experienced as it met sentencing reform goals. These lessons can be translated into policy for other jurisdictions.
Spare the Rodtraces the history of discipline in schools and its ever increasing integration with prison and policing, ultimately arguing for an approach to discipline that aligns with the moral community that schools could and should be.
In Spare the Rod, historian Campbell F. Scribner and philosopher Bryan R. Warnick investigate the history and philosophy of America’s punishment and discipline practices in schools. To delve into this controversial subject, they first ask questions of meaning. How have concepts of discipline and punishment in schools changed over time? What purposes are they supposed to serve? And what can they tell us about our assumptions about education? They then explore the justifications. Are public school educators ever justified in punishing or disciplining students? Are discipline and punishment necessary for students’ moral education, or do they fundamentally have no place in education at all? If some form of punishment is justified in schools, what ethical guidelines should be followed?
The authors argue that as schools have grown increasingly bureaucratic over the last century, formalizing disciplinary systems and shifting from physical punishments to forms of spatial or structural punishment such as in-school suspension, school discipline has not only come to resemble the operation of prisons or policing, but has grown increasingly integrated with those institutions. These changes and structures are responsible for the school-to-prison pipeline. They show that these shifts disregard the unique status of schools as spaces of moral growth and community oversight, and are incompatible with the developmental environment of education. What we need, they argue, is an approach to discipline and punishment that fits with the sort of moral community that schools could and should be.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
Spare the Rodtraces the history of discipline in schools and its ever increasing integration with prison and policing, ultimately arguing for an approach to discipline that aligns with the moral community that schools could and should be.
In Spare the Rod, historian Campbell F. Scribner and philosopher Bryan R. Warnick investigate the history and philosophy of America’s punishment and discipline practices in schools. To delve into this controversial subject, they first ask questions of meaning. How have concepts of discipline and punishment in schools changed over time? What purposes are they supposed to serve? And what can they tell us about our assumptions about education? They then explore the justifications. Are public school educators ever justified in punishing or disciplining students? Are discipline and punishment necessary for students’ moral education, or do they fundamentally have no place in education at all? If some form of punishment is justified in schools, what ethical guidelines should be followed?
The authors argue that as schools have grown increasingly bureaucratic over the last century, formalizing disciplinary systems and shifting from physical punishments to forms of spatial or structural punishment such as in-school suspension, school discipline has not only come to resemble the operation of prisons or policing, but has grown increasingly integrated with those institutions. These changes and structures are responsible for the school-to-prison pipeline. They show that these shifts disregard the unique status of schools as spaces of moral growth and community oversight, and are incompatible with the developmental environment of education. What we need, they argue, is an approach to discipline and punishment that fits with the sort of moral community that schools could and should be.
Just as in medieval times, Robert Mills argues, it is the threat of violence—not the reality—that continues to structure our lives. To illustrate this "aesthetics of suspense," Mills draws on extensive and disturbing examples from medieval iconography, contemporary philosophy, and even pornography, ranging from the vivid depictions of Hell in Tuscan frescoes to Billie Holiday's famously wrenching song "Strange Fruit". Mills reveals how these uncomfortable images and texts expose a modern self-deception, and he further explores how medieval images evoked a pleasure revealingly close to that found in modern depictions of sexuality. Suspended Animation also makes a fresh contribution to theoretical debates on pre-modern gender and sexuality. Mills's comprehensive analysis demonstrates that—as wartime prisoner abuse incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay have recently indicated—our notions of ourselves as not-medieval (that is, civilized) not only fail to prepare us for modern torture and warfare but also lead us into complicity with self-proclaimed moral and civic leaders.
Whether considering a medieval painting of a Christian martyr or the immense popularity of grotesque historical tourist attractions such as the London Dungeons, Suspended Animation argues that images of death and violence are as pervasive today as they were in the Middle Ages, serving as potent reminders of the link between the modern and the medieval era.
Merback compares the images of Christ's Crucifixion with those of the two thieves who met their fate beside Jesus. In paintings by well-known Northern European masters and provincial painters alike, Merback finds the two thieves subjected to incredible cruelty, cruelty that artists could not depict in their scenes of Christ's Crucifixion because of theological requirements. Through these representations Merback explores the ways audiences in early modern Europe understood images of physical suffering and execution. The frequently shocking works also provide a perspective from which Merback examines the live spectacle of public torture and execution and how audiences were encouraged by the Church and the State to react to the experience. Throughout, Merback traces the intricate and extraordinary connections among religious art, devotional practice, bodily pain, punishment, and judicial spectatorship.
Keenly aware of the difficulties involved in discussing images of atrocious violence but determined to make them historically comprehensible, Merback has written an informed and provocative study that reveals the rituals of medieval criminal justice and the visual experiences they engendered.
Merback compares the images of Christ's Crucifixion with those of the two thieves who met their fate beside Jesus. In paintings by well-known Northern European masters and provincial painters alike, Merback finds the two thieves subjected to incredible cruelty, cruelty that artists could not depict in their scenes of Christ's Crucifixion because of theological requirements. Through these representations Merback explores the ways audiences in early modern Europe understood images of physical suffering and execution. The frequently shocking works also provide a perspective from which Merback examines the live spectacle of public torture and execution and how audiences were encouraged by the Church and the State to react to the experience. Throughout, Merback traces the intricate and extraordinary connections among religious art, devotional practice, bodily pain, punishment, and judicial spectatorship.
Keenly aware of the difficulties involved in discussing images of atrocious violence but determined to make them historically comprehensible, Merback has written an informed and provocative study that reveals the rituals of medieval criminal justice and the visual experiences they engendered.
While most philosophers who write about punishment ask, "Why may we punish the guilty?" Jacob Adler asks, "To what extent does a guilty person have a duty to submit to punishment?" He maintains that if we are to justify any system of punishment by the state, we must explain why persons guilty of an offense are morally bound to submit to punitive treatment, or to undertake it on their own. Using Rawls's theory of social contract as a framework, the author presents what he calls the rectification theory of punishment.
After examining punishment from two points of view—that of the punisher and that of the offender who is to be punished—Adler proposes the Paradigm of the Conscientious Punishee: a repentant wrongdoer who views punishment as not necessarily unpleasant, but as something it is morally incumbent upon one to undertake. The author argues that this paradigm must play a central role in the theory of punishment. Citing community service projects and penances for sin (as required by some religions), Adler argues that punishment need not involve pain or any other disvalue. Instead he defines it in terms of its justificatiory connection with wrongdoing: punishment is that which is justified by the prior commission of an offense and generally not justified without the prior commission of an offense.
The rectification theory applies particularly to offenses involving basic liberties. It is based on the assumption that each person is guaranteed the right to an inviolable sphere of liberty. Someone who commits an offense has expanded his or her sphere by arrogating excess liberties. In order to maintain the equality on which this theory rests, an equivalent body of liberties must be given up. In discussing applications of the theory, Adler demonstrates that active service (as punishment) is more effective in safeguarding important rights and interests and maintaining the social contract than is afflictive punishment.
As Dostoevsky attempts to balance the various ethical and cultural imperatives, he displays ambivalence both about punishment and about mercy. This ambivalence, Schur argues, is further complicated by what Dostoevsky sees as the unfathomable quality of the self, which hinders every attempt to match crimes with punishments. The one certainty he holds is that a proper response to wrongdoing must include a concern for the wrongdoer’s moral improvement.
Wayward Icelanders explores how the threat of crime has affected Icelanders’ collective self-identity, producing an ever greater need for social control. Historically Iceland has provided stiff sanctions for the use and abuse of mind-altering substances. Drunk driving has long been systematically punished, and even beer was prohibited for more than seventy years. The rate of conviction for these crimes is high, even in a democracy that prides itself on protecting civil liberties. Even more troubling, however, is the low rate of convictions for rape cases, which suggests that such crimes receive less attention from the state. Drawing on the classic work of Durkheim as well as Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans, Gunnlaugsson and Galliher demonstrate that an escalating war on crime can threaten freedom even in a small, affluent, and relatively nonviolent nation like Iceland with a long-standing commitment to democracy and individual rights.
At the heart of traditional songs rest the concerns of ordinary people. And folk throughout the centuries have found themselves entangled with the law: abiding by it, breaking it, and being caught and punished by it. Who Killed Cock Robin? is an anthology of just such songs compiled by one of Britain’s most senior judges, Stephen Sedley, and best-loved folk singers, Martin Carthy. The songs collected here are drawn from manuscripts, broadsides, and oral tradition. They are grouped according to the various categories of crime and punishment, from Poaching to the Gallows. Each section contains a historical introduction, and every song is presented with a melody, lyrics, and an illuminating commentary that explores its origins and sources. Together, they present unique, sometimes comic, often tragic, and always colorful insight into the past, while preserving an important body of song for future generations.
Writing tends to be characterized as a positive aspect of literacy that helps us to express our thoughts, to foster interpersonal communication, and to archive ideas. However, there is a vast array of evidence that emphasizes the counterbelief that writing has the power to punish, shame, humiliate, control, dehumanize, fetishize, and transform those who are subjected to it. In Writing as Punishment in Schools, Courts, and Everyday Life, Spencer Schaffner looks at many instances of writing as punishment, including forced tattooing, drunk shaming, court-ordered letters of apology, and social media shaming, with the aim of bringing understanding and recognition to the coupling of literacy and subjection.
Writing as Punishment in Schools, Courts, and Everyday Life is a fascinating inquiry into how sinister writing can truly be and directly questions the educational ideal that powerful writing is invariably a public good. While Schaffner does look at the darker side of writing, he neither vilifies nor supports the practice of writing as punishment. Rather, he investigates the question with humanistic inquiry and focuses on what can be learned from understanding the many strange ways that writing as punishment is used to accomplish fundamental objectives in everyday life.
Through five succinct case studies, we meet teachers, judges, parents, sex traffickers, and drunken partiers who have turned to writing because of its presumed power over writers and readers. Schaffner provides careful analysis of familiar punishments, such as schoolchildren copying lines, and more bizarre public rituals that result in ink-covered bodies and individuals forced to hold signs in public.
Schaffner argues that writing-based punishment should not be dismissed as benign or condemned as a misguided perversion of writing, but instead should be understood as an instrument capable of furthering both the aims of justice and degradation.
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