Crime and Crime Control

Crime-control utilitarians and retributivist philosophers have long been at war over the appropriate distributive principle for criminal liability and punishment, with little apparent possibility of reconciliation between the two. In the utilitarians’ view, the imposition of punishment can be justified only by the practical benefit that it provides: avoiding future crime. In the retributivists’ view, doing justice for past wrongs is a value in itself that requires no further justification. The competing approaches simply use different currencies: fighting future crime versus doing justice for past wrongs. It is argued here that the two are in fact reconcilable, in a fashion. We cannot declare a winner in the distributive principle wars but something more like a truce. Specifically, good utilitarians ought to support a distributive principle based upon desert because the empirical evidence suggests that doing justice for past wrongdoing is likely the most effective and efficient means of controlling future crime. A criminal justice system perceived by the community as conflicting with its principles of justice provokes resistance and subversion, whereas a criminal justice system that earns a reputation for reliably doing justice is one whose moral credibility inspires deference, assistance, and acquiescence, and is more likely to have citizens internalize its norms of what is truly condemnable conduct. Retributivists ought to support empirical desert as a distributive principle because, while it is indeed distinct from deontological desert, there exists an enormous overlap between the two, and it seems likely that empirical desert may be the best practical approximation of deontological desert. Indeed, some philosophers would argue that the two are necessarily the same.

Download Full-text

Authority of Law: An Analysis of The Role of Police

Legal Studies Undergraduate Journal ◽

10.15353/lsuj.v2i0.158 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 2 ◽

Author(s):

Veronika Keir

Keyword(s):

Policy Development ◽

Crime Control ◽

Legal Theory ◽

Research Policy ◽

Further Education ◽

Full Time ◽

Legal Research ◽

Legal Studies ◽

The University

<div class="page" title="Page 3"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Veronika is a recent graduate from the Honours Legal Studies program at the University of Waterloo. Her passions are socio-legal research, policy development, feminist legal theory, and crime control development. Veronika is currently working a full-time job at Oracle Canada, planning on pursuing further education in a Masters program. </span></p></div></div></div>

Download Full-text

Sound-Politics in São Paulo

10.1093/oso/9780190660093.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Leonardo Cardoso

Keyword(s):

Crime Control ◽

State Intervention ◽

Sao Paulo ◽

The State ◽

Ethnographic Study ◽

São Paulo ◽

Cultural Rights ◽

Point Of Entry ◽

Wide Range ◽

Analytical Category

This book is an ethnographic study of controversial sounds and noise control debates in Latin America’s most populous city. It discusses the politics of collective living by following several threads linking sound-making practices to governance issues. Rather than discussing sound within a self-enclosed “cultural” field, I examine it as a point of entry for analyzing the state. At the same time, rather than portraying the state as a self-enclosed “apparatus” with seemingly inexhaustible homogeneous power, I describe it as a collection of unstable (and often contradictory) sectors, personnel, strategies, discourses, documents, and agencies. My goal is to approach sound as an analytical category that allows us to access citizenship issues. As I show, environmental noise in São Paulo has been entangled in a wide range of debates, including public health, religious intolerance, crime control, urban planning, cultural rights, and economic growth. The book’s guiding question can be summarized as follows: how do sounds enter and leave the sphere of state control? I answer this question by examining a multifaceted process I define as “sound-politics.” The term refers to sounds as objects that are susceptible to state intervention through specific regulatory, disciplinary, and punishment mechanisms. Both “sound” and “politics” in “sound-politics” are nouns, with the hyphen serving as a bridge that expresses the instability that each concept inserts into the other.

Download Full-text

Borders as penal transplants: Control of territory, mobility and illegality in West Africa

Theoretical Criminology ◽

10.1177/1362480621995457 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 136248062199545

Author(s):

Eva Magdalena Stambøl

Keyword(s):

West Africa ◽

Social Control ◽

Crime Control ◽

Border Studies ◽

Border Security ◽

Mobility Control ◽

Spatial Awareness ◽

Control Order ◽

Political Technology ◽

Geographical Scope

This article explores an increasingly significant trend in crime and mobility control that has received scant criminological attention: border externalization, specifically scrutinizing land border security-building by international actors in West Africa. Going beyond the usual focus on migration in border studies, it develops a criminologically grounded theorization of the border as a political technology of crime control and its relationship to the state. This is done by arguing that borders, theorized as ‘penal transplants’ embodying specific (western) visions of state, political power, social control/order and territoriality, are transformed and often distorted when performed in ‘heterarchical’ contexts in the global South. Further, empirically based concepts from ‘the periphery’ are suggested to enrich border criminology, broadening its geographical scope and spatial awareness.

Download Full-text