Arab Threat and Social Control: An Exploration of the Relationship Between Ethnic Attitudes and Punitiveness Among Israeli Jews

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 498-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christi Metcalfe ◽  
Deanna Cann
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Punitive Attitudes ◽  
Ethnic Attitudes ◽  
Israeli Arabs ◽  
The Relationship

Numerous studies in the United States, as well as a smaller number of studies in other Westernized countries, have linked racial and ethnic attitudes to support for more punitive forms of crime control. The current study explores this relationship in Israel by assessing whether the degree to which Israeli Jews typify crime as an Israeli Arab phenomenon and/or resent Israeli Arabs is related to support for punitive criminal justice policies. The findings suggest that ethnic typification and resentment are related to general punitive attitudes, whereas ethnic apathy and resentment are related to greater support for the death penalty. Also, the relationship between ethnic typification and punitiveness is stronger among those who are less resentful.

scholarly journals Foucault, prison, and human rights: A dialectic of theory and criminal justice reform

2021 ◽  
pp. 136248062110159
Author(s):  
Mugambi Jouet
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Control ◽  
The United States ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
Penal Reform ◽  
Foucauldian Theory ◽  
Prison Abolition ◽  
Abolition Movement

Michel Foucault’s advocacy toward penal reform in France differed from his theories. Although Foucault is associated with the prison abolition movement, he also proposed more humane prisons. The article reframes Foucauldian theory through a dialectic with the theories of Marc Ancel, a prominent figure in the emergence of liberal sentencing norms in France. Ancel and Foucault were contemporaries whose legacies are intertwined. Ancel defended more benevolent prisons where experts would rehabilitate offenders. This evokes exactly what Discipline and Punish cast as an insidious strategy of social control. In reality, Foucault and Ancel converged in intriguing ways. The dialectic offers another perspective on Foucault, whose theories have fostered skepticism about the possibility of progress. While mass incarceration’s rise in the United States may evoke a Foucauldian dystopia, the relative development of human rights and dignity in European punishment reflects aspirations that Foucault embraced as an activist concerned about fatalistic interpretations of his theories.

Life Without Parole Sentencing

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Seeds
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Life Without Parole ◽  
The Subject ◽  
State And Local

Life without parole sentencing refers to laws, policies, and practices concerning lifetime prison sentences that also preclude release by parole. While sentences to imprisonment for life without the possibility of parole have existed for more than a century in the United States, over the past four decades the penalty has emerged as a prominent element of U.S. punishment, routinely put to use by penal professionals and featured regularly in public discourse. As use of the death penalty diminishes in the United States, life without parole serves as the ultimate punishment in more and more U.S. jurisdictions. The scope with which states apply life without parole varies, however, and some states have authorized the punishment even for nonviolent offenses. More than a punishment serving purposes of retribution, crime control, and public safety, and beyond the symbolic functions of life without parole sentencing in U.S. culture and politics, life without parole is a lived experience for more than 50,000 prisoners in the United States. Life without parole’s increasing significance in the United States points to the need for further research on the subject—including studies that directly focus on how race and racial prejudice factor in life without parole sentencing, studies that investigate the proximate causes of life without parole sentences at the state and local level, and studies that examine the similarities and differences between life without parole, the death penalty, and de facto forms of imprisonment until death.

How Exceptional Is the History of Violence and Criminal Justice in the United States? Variation across Time and Space as the Keys to Understanding Homicide and Punitiveness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph Roth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Complex Issue ◽  
Long Span ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter contends that American exceptionalism is a far more complex issue than it initially appears. Which nations are exceptional? When, and in what ways? Once the question of exceptionalism is asked over a long span of time, its answer is almost always fluid and complicated. Hence, the chapter turns to comparative historical research in isolating the most important causes of incidents like homicide and punitive penal policies, by showing that those causes recur again and again in the presence of certain phenomena. It asserts that history shows that the relationship between crime and punitiveness is far from simple.

scholarly journals Litigating in the Shadow of Innocence

2006 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence C. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Supreme Court

In 1976, the Supreme Court of the United States, allowing optimism to trump experience, accepted various states’ assurances that new death penalty procedures the states had then recently adopted would avoid the vices that had led the Court to strike down the death penalty in 1972. Now, some thirty years later, a body of evidence has developed demonstrating that this experiment has failed—that the problems of arbitrariness, racism and propensity to error are endemic to the criminal justice system (particularly with regard to capital punishment) and cannot be cured by what Justice Blackmun called “tinker[ing] with the machinery of death.” Despite the Court’s best intentions, the death penalty procedures of the 1980s and 1990s and the first half of this decade reflect little if any significant improvement over the condemned pre-1972 systems.

American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Ethnic Disparities ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Supervision ◽  
Crime And Punishment

The idea of American exceptionalism has made frequent appearances in discussions of criminal justice policies—as it has in many other areas—to help portray or explain problems that are especially acute in the United States, including mass incarceration, retention of the death penalty, racial and ethnic disparities in punishment, and the War on Drugs. While scholars do not universally agree that it is an apt or useful framework, there is no question that the United States is an outlier compared with other industrialized democracies in its punitive and exclusionary criminal justice policies. This book deepens the debate on American exceptionalism in crime and punishment through comparative political, economic, and historical analyses, working toward forward-looking prescriptions for American law, policy, and institutions of government. The chapters expand the existing American Exceptionalism literature to neglected areas such as community supervision, economic penalties, parole release, and collateral consequences of conviction; explore claims of causation, in particular that the history of slavery and racial inequality has been a primary driver of crime policy; examine arguments that the framework of multiple governments and localized crime control, populist style of democracy, and laissez-faire economy are implicated in problems of both crime and punishment; and assess theories that cultural values are the most salient predictors of penal severity and violent crime. The book asserts that the largest problems of crime and justice cannot be brought into focus from the perspective of a single jurisdiction and that comparative inquiries are necessary for an understanding of the current predicament in the United States.

Belief in Redeemability and Punitive Public Opinion: “Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal” Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 712-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander L. Burton ◽  
Francis T. Cullen ◽  
Velmer S. Burton ◽  
Amanda Graham ◽  
Leah C. Butler ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mechanical Turk ◽  
Criminal Records ◽  
Punitive Attitudes ◽  
Capacity For Change

In 2009, Maruna and King presented results from a British survey showing that the public’s belief in the redeemability of people who committed offenses curbed their level of punitiveness. Based on a 2017 national survey in the United States ( n = 1,000), the current study confirms that redeemability is negatively related to punitive attitudes. In addition, the analyses reveal that this belief predicts support for rehabilitation and specific inclusionary policies (i.e., ban-the-box in employment, expungement of criminal records, and voting rights for people with a felony conviction). Findings regarding measures for punishment and rehabilitation were confirmed by a 2019 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) survey. These results suggest that beliefs about capacity for change among people who committed offenses are key to understanding crime-control public policy.

Influence of religiosity and studying law on college students’ punitive attitudes in China

2020 ◽  
pp. 174889582095124
Author(s):  
Doris C Chu ◽  
Michael A Cretacci ◽  
Yandong Gao
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
The United States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Punitive Attitudes ◽  
Criminal Justice Students ◽  
Criminal Sanctions ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Impact

A number of studies in the United States examine the impact of religiosity on attitudes towards various types of criminal sanctioning. Research seems to indicate that more conservative denominations and faiths have a more punitive preference for criminal sanctions. Previous studies have also examined these attitudes between criminal justice and non-criminal justice students. While this area of inquiry has drawn attention in the United States, only scant attention has been paid to this phenomenon in other countries. To the best of our knowledge, no study has addressed this issue in China and our research seeks to serve as a foundation for examining this topic in that country. Using data collected from students attending universities in China, we examine the relationship between respondents’ religiosity and their punitive attitudes. We also compare the punitive attitudes between law and non-law majors. Findings indicate that students with higher levels of religious behaviour were less likely to support the death penalty. In addition, law majors were found to be less likely to endorse severe sentences. Suggestions for future research are discussed.

Sentencing for Multiple Crimes

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Criminal Offenders ◽  
Serious Crime ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Multiple Offenders

Most people assume that criminal offenders have only been convicted of a single crime. However, in reality almost half of offenders stand to be sentenced for more than one crime. The high proportion of multiple-crime offenders poses a number of practical and theoretical challenges for the criminal justice system. For instance, how should courts punish multiple offenders relative to individuals who have been sentenced for a single crime? Should a court simply determine a specific sentence for each individual crime and then impose the total sentences on the offender? If this happens, an offender convicted of a large number of crimes of low seriousness will receive a sentence comparable to that which would be appropriate to a single very serious crime. Such an outcome would violate the principle of ordinal proportionality in sentencing. This book discusses a range of questions relating to multiple crime cases from the perspective of several legal theories. It considers questions such as the overall proportionality of the crimes committed, the temporal span between the crimes, and the relationship between theories about the punitive treatment of recidivists and multiple offenders. Contributors representing six different countries and the fields of legal theory, philosophy, and psychology offer their perspectives to the volume, broadening the scope beyond that of the United States. The chapters in this volume therefore contribute to international and domestic efforts to promote a more principled approach to sentencing offenders convicted of multiple offences.

Progressive and Traditional Orientations to Prosecution: An Empirical Assessment in Four Prosecutorial Offices

2020 ◽  
pp. 009385482095667
Author(s):  
Ryan C. Meldrum ◽  
Don Stemen ◽  
Besiki Luka Kutateladze
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Factor Analysis ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Punitive Attitudes ◽  
Case Processing

In recent years, accounts of the so-called progressive prosecutor have been juxtaposed against the more traditional, law-and-order prosecutor in the United States. Yet, little effort has been made to empirically investigate these orientations among prosecutors. In this multijurisdictional study, prosecutors were asked to rate the importance of a variety of prosecutorial priorities. A factor analysis of these ratings indicates the existence of two distinct orientations toward prosecution. The first reflects a progressive orientation emphasizing social justice priorities, and the second reflects a traditional orientation emphasizing priorities pertaining to formal aspects of case processing. Results also indicate that scoring higher on the progressive orientation is associated with holding less punitive attitudes toward criminal defendants, whereas scoring higher on the traditional orientation is associated with holding more punitive attitudes. Discussion centers on the implications of the findings for recent calls regarding the reform of the criminal justice system.

Abusive Men's Use of Children to Control Their Partners and Ex-Partners

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marisa L. Beeble ◽  
Deborah Bybee ◽  
Cris M. Sullivan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intimate Partner Violence ◽  
Partner Violence ◽  
Emotional Abuse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intimate Partner ◽  
Anecdotal Evidence ◽  
Multiple Variables ◽  
The Relationship

While research has found that millions of children in the United States are exposed to their mothers being battered, and that many are themselves abused as well, little is known about the ways in which children are used by abusers to manipulate or harm their mothers. Anecdotal evidence suggests that perpetrators use children in a variety of ways to control and harm women; however, no studies to date have empirically examined the extent of this occurring. Therefore, the current study examined the extent to which survivors of abuse experienced this, as well as the conditions under which it occurred. Interviews were conducted with 156 women who had experienced recent intimate partner violence. Each of these women had at least one child between the ages of 5 and 12. Most women (88%) reported that their assailants had used their children against them in varying ways. Multiple variables were found to be related to this occurring, including the relationship between the assailant and the children, the extent of physical and emotional abuse used by the abuser against the woman, and the assailant's court-ordered visitation status. Findings point toward the complex situational conditions by which assailants use the children of their partners or ex-partners to continue the abuse, and the need for a great deal more research in this area.

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