Our Punitive Society

Our Punitive Society
Author: Randall G. Shelden
Publisher: Waveland Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478646780

This reader-friendly exploration of the primary forces relevant to punishment—poverty and political powerlessness—highlights the necessity for humane alternatives to our current incarceration binge. This provocative overview looks at the business of punishment and at the historical patterns of control regarding slavery, the death penalty, women, the LGBTQ community, juveniles, and supervision. The United States has the world’s highest rate of incarceration—a form of punishment that separates the least privileged from the rest of society, creating populations of damaged lives. All of society pays the price for overly punitive sanctions. Equal justice is not possible in an unequal society. Up-to-date statistics illustrate the race, class, and gender inequalities in the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system has expanded for half a century. Will challenges to policing succeed in narrowing the net of social control? Will the cost of maintaining a massive system stimulate a transformation, or will stakeholders support minimal reforms that do not threaten their interests? The public is largely unaware of most of the workings of the criminal justice system. Through this engaging text, the authors hope to provide insights that encourage readers to examine the collateral effects of policies to address crime and the role of punishment.

The Punitive Society

The Punitive Society
Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2018-08-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1250183936

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society. Praise for Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France Series “Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s], but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.”—Bookforum “Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are...[He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture.”—The Nation “[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual coded and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.”—The New York Review of Books

Our Punitive Society

Our Punitive Society
Author: Randall G. Shelden
Publisher:
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-12-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9781478639787

This reader-friendly exploration of the primary forces relevant to punishment-poverty and political powerlessness-highlights the necessity for humane alternatives to our current incarceration binge. This provocative overview looks at the business of punishment and at the historical patterns of control regarding slavery, the death penalty, women, the LGBTQ community, juveniles, and supervision.The United States has the world's highest rate of incarceration-a form of punishment that separates the least privileged from the rest of society, creating populations of damaged lives. All of society pays the price for overly punitive sanctions. Equal justice is not possible in an unequal society. Up-to-date statistics illustrate the race, class, and gender inequalities in the criminal justice system.The criminal justice system has expanded for half a century. Will challenges to policing succeed in narrowing the net of social control? Will the cost of maintaining a massive system stimulate a transformation, or will stakeholders support minimal reforms that do not threaten their interests? The public is largely unaware of most of the workings of the criminal justice system. Through this engaging text, the authors hope to provide insights that encourage readers to examine the collateral effects of policies to address crime and the role of punishment.

The Punitive Turn

The Punitive Turn
Author: Deborah E. McDowell
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813935210

The Punitive Turn explores the historical, political, economic, and sociocultural roots of mass incarceration, as well as its collateral costs and consequences. Giving significant attention to the exacting toll that incarceration takes on inmates, their families, their communities, and society at large, the volume’s contributors investigate the causes of the unbridled expansion of incarceration in the United States. Experts from multiple scholarly disciplines offer fresh research on race and inequality in the criminal justice system and the effects of mass incarceration on minority groups' economic situation and political inclusion. In addition, practitioners and activists from the Sentencing Project, the Virginia Organizing Project, and the Restorative Community Foundation, among others, discuss race and imprisonment from the perspective of those working directly in the field. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, the essays included in the volume provide an unprecedented range of perspectives on the growth and racial dimensions of incarceration in the United States and generate critical questions not simply about the penal system but also about the inner workings, failings, and future of American democracy. Contributors: Ethan Blue (University of Western Australia) * Mary Ellen Curtin (American University) * Harold Folley (Virginia Organizing Project) * Eddie Harris (Children Youth and Family Services) * Anna R. Haskins (University of Wisconsin–Madison) * Cheryl D. Hicks (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) * Charles E. Lewis Jr. (Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy) * Marc Mauer (The Sentencing Project) * Anoop Mirpuri (Portland State University) * Christopher Muller (Harvard University) * Marlon B. Ross (University of Virginia) * Jim Shea (Community Organizer) * Jonathan Simon (University of California–Berkeley) * Heather Ann Thompson (Temple University) * Debbie Walker (The Female Perspective) * Christopher Wildeman (Yale University) * Interviews by Jared Brown (University of Virginia) & Tshepo Morongwa Chéry (University of Texas–Austin)

Locking Up Our Own

Locking Up Our Own
Author: James Forman, Jr.
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0374712905

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTON ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWS' 10 BEST BOOKS LONG-LISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, CURRENT INTEREST CATEGORY, LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZES "Locking Up Our Own is an engaging, insightful, and provocative reexamination of over-incarceration in the black community. James Forman Jr. carefully exposes the complexities of crime, criminal justice, and race. What he illuminates should not be ignored." —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative "A beautiful book, written so well, that gives us the origins and consequences of where we are . . . I can see why [the Pulitzer prize] was awarded." —Trevor Noah, The Daily Show Former public defender James Forman, Jr. is a leading critic of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on people of color. In Locking Up Our Own, he seeks to understand the war on crime that began in the 1970s and why it was supported by many African American leaders in the nation’s urban centers. Forman shows us that the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office amid a surge in crime and drug addiction. Many prominent black officials, including Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry and federal prosecutor Eric Holder, feared that the gains of the civil rights movement were being undermined by lawlessness—and thus embraced tough-on-crime measures, including longer sentences and aggressive police tactics. In the face of skyrocketing murder rates and the proliferation of open-air drug markets, they believed they had no choice. But the policies they adopted would have devastating consequences for residents of poor black neighborhoods. A former D.C. public defender, Forman tells riveting stories of politicians, community activists, police officers, defendants, and crime victims. He writes with compassion about individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas—from the men and women he represented in court to officials struggling to respond to a public safety emergency. Locking Up Our Own enriches our understanding of why our society became so punitive and offers important lessons to anyone concerned about the future of race and the criminal justice system in this country.

A Punitive Society

A Punitive Society
Author: John Pratt
Publisher: Bridget Williams Books
Total Pages: 48
Release: 2013-12-10
Genre: Criminal justice, Administration of
ISBN: 1927277272

‘New Zealand has one of the highest levels of imprisonment in the Western world. Yet the growth of imprisonment in New Zealand has occurred when the crime rate here, as in most other Western societies, has been in significant decline. Why, then, the disjuncture?’ In this penetrating BWB Text, John Pratt describes the dramatic transformation in penal thought that has recently taken place in this country. Rising imprisonment in New Zealand, against the background of a falling crime rate, is connected with changes in how we, as a society, think about the purpose and function of punishment. This growth of ‘penal populism’, Pratt asserts, has caused enormous and lasting damage to New Zealand’s social fabric.

Punishment Without Crime

Punishment Without Crime
Author: Alexandra Natapoff
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2018-12-31
Genre: 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

Punished

Punished
Author: Victor M.. Rios
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2011
Genre:
ISBN: 081477637X

Punishment and Modern Society

Punishment and Modern Society
Author: David Garland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0226922502

In this path-breaking book, David Garland argues that punishment is a complex social institution that affects both social relations and cultural meanings. Drawing on theorists from Durkheim to Foucault, he insightfully critiques the entire spectrum of social thought concerning punishment, and reworks it into a new interpretive synthesis. "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

Race, Incarceration, and American Values

Race, Incarceration, and American Values
Author: Glenn C. Loury
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2008-08-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262260948

Why stigmatizing and confining a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to all Americans. The United States, home to five percent of the world's population, now houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison inmates. Our incarceration rate—at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising—is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans—vastly disproportionately black and brown—with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.