scholarly journals O znaczeniu fundamentalnych zasad karania w polityce karnej — uwagi na tle przyczyn i skutków „masowego uwięzienia” w Stanach Zjednoczonych

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 509-522
Author(s):  
Barbara Stańdo-Kawecka

The importance of the fundamental principles of punishment in criminal policy — remarks against a background of causes and results of “mass incarceration” in the United StatesIn the last century, in the United States, there was a significant change in the paradigms of punishment. In the 1970s the ideology of rehabilitation collapsed and reforms, which aimed at restoring justice in punishment and reduction of the prison population, were initiated. In the next decade, the movement aiming at liberal reforms lost the social and political support and was replaced with the repressive criminal policy. At the same time, a rapid increase in the prison population started which has been referred to in the criminological literature as the phenomenon of mass incarceration. After four decades of continuous growth in the number of persons deprived of their liberty there is no doubt that the social and financial consequences of a repressive system of punishment proved to be dramatic. For this reason, issues concerning the restoration of justice and rationality in punishment have again been discussed in the United States.Many European countries also experienced the “punitive turn” in the criminal policy at the end of the 20th century, although its scale was incomparable with what happened in the United States. It does not mean, however, that American discussions on the philosophy of punishment and criminal policy are irrelevant for Europe. Multidimensional negative effects of the American policy of mass incarceration indicate the dangers resulting from ignoring the basic principles of punishment that protect against abuses of the state’s power to punish. Additionally, they encourage a serious discussion about the integration of punishment theories with the empirical knowledge on the results of sentencing and sentence enforcement.

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 54-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Lytle Hernández

Convicts and undocumented immigrants are similarly excluded from full social and political membership in the United States. Disfranchised, denied core protections of the social welfare state and subject to forced removal from their homes, families, and communities, convicts and undocumented immigrants, together, occupy the caste of outsiders living within the United States. This essay explores the rise of the criminal justice and immigration control systems that frame the caste of outsiders. Reaching back to the forgotten origins of immigration control during the era of black emancipation, this essay highlights the deep and allied inequities rooted in the rise of immigration control and mass incarceration.


Author(s):  
Jessica Hardy

The objective of this paper is to provide a qualitative analysis of the effects incarceration has on family members. Incarceration affects a very large number of families in the United States and Canada, especially since the mass incarceration between the 1970s and 2000s that occurred in the United States. Incarceration was found to have both negative effects on incarcerated mothers and fathers, and it was found to increase the risk of divorce. Children were also affected by parental incarceration by raising their risks of developing mental illness, engaging in delinquent behaviour, having negative social experiences and damaging their parent-child relationship. Moreover, parental incarceration had little to no effect on a child’s academic performance and it displayed the child’s resiliency. Lastly, incarceration had negative effects on a family’s socioeconomic status and it increased the risk of second-generation offenders.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 1120-1136
Author(s):  
B Jewell Bohlinger

Over the past 30 years the U.S. prison population has exploded. With the impact of climate change already here, we are also seeing new critiques of mass incarceration emerge, namely their environmental impact. In response to these burgeoning critiques as well as calls to action by the Justice Department to implement more sustainable and cost-effective strategies in prisons, the United States is experiencing a surge in prison sustainability programs throughout the country. Although sustainability is an important challenge facing the world, this paper argues that while “greening” programs seem like attempts to reform current methods of imprisonment, sustainability programming is an extension of the neoliberalization of incarceration in the United States. By emphasizing cost cutting while individualizing rehabilitation, prisons mobilize sustainability programming to produce “green prisoners” who are willing to take responsibility for their rehabilitation and diminish their economically burdensome behaviors (i.e. excessive wastefulness). Using semi-structure journals and interviews at three Oregon prisons, this paper investigates these ideas through the lens of the Sustainability in Prisons Project.


2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Karstedt ◽  
Tiffany Bergin ◽  
Michael Koch

State prison populations in the United States have been regularly declining since 2009, and, at the end of 2014, the combined federal and state prison population was at its lowest level since 2005. Criminologists were caught by surprise by this development in the country that epitomized contemporary ‘mass incarceration’. Their theoretical accounts were steeped in a ‘punitive worldview’ that left no space for the stabilization and eventual decline in mass incarceration in the United States. This article focuses on policy processes, rather than structural conditions, as drivers of penal change. The article begins with an overview of theories of punishment and their shortcomings. The framework that guides our study is based on the concept of ‘critical junctures’, which are seedbeds of long-term transformative change that present opportunities and constraints for actors in the penal field. The empirical research presented here analyses the adoption of legal reforms aimed at reducing mass incarceration by the 50 US states. We find that a trifecta of conflicting actors – legal, political and public – accounts for the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which states move towards penal reform.


Author(s):  
Anne Daguerre

To conclude, the fundamental American social contract remains ‘mean and lean’ in comparative terms, despite the real efforts assigned to antipoverty policy under Obama. The conclusion also identifies areas of divergence and convergence between Europe and the United States in terms of legal and political support for socio-economic rights. European and American policymakers have placed a renewed emphasis on equality of opportunities as opposed to equality of outcomes. There’s been a blending of some elements of Anglo-American liberalism and the social-democrat tradition. By and large, convergence between European and U.S. social policies occurs mostly along "regressive" lines.


Author(s):  
Vincent Chiao

A popular form of retributivism insists that the permissibility of punishment is dependent solely upon the rights of the parties, with the social costs or benefits of a system of punishment relegated at best to a supporting role in justifying punishment. This chapter explains why theories of that form—despite their current popularity—cannot explain the moral judgment that the United States currently incarcerates too many people. Most commentators, including proponents of this type of theory, are inclined to believe that the United States does incarcerate too many people—that a policy of “mass incarceration” is unjustified. However, mass incarceration represents a failure of social policy, and is not readily analyzed in terms of the morality of individual transactions. The chapter concludes by briefly sketching how the political ideal of anti-deference might be brought to bear on the question of mass incarceration.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-80
Author(s):  
Jennifer Elyse James

Mass incarceration and the aging prison population in the United States is an ethical crisis, understudied in empirical bioethics research. In this article, I share one woman’s narrative to illustrate how older Black women describe accessing healthcare while incarcerated and identify sites for bioethical exploration. I argue that, due to the punitive nature of prison healthcare interactions, wherein women are seen as inmates first and patients second, healthcare providers are caught in a trap of competing ethical commitments to their patients and the state. As the prison population ages, these challenges will become more acute. Feminist bioethics has a critical role to play in imagining new possibilities for accessing, giving, and receiving care in the carceral context.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amaia Del Campo ◽  
Marisalva Fávero

Abstract. During the last decades, several studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of sexual abuse prevention programs implemented in different countries. In this article, we present a review of 70 studies (1981–2017) evaluating prevention programs, conducted mostly in the United States and Canada, although with a considerable presence also in other countries, such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The results of these studies, in general, are very promising and encourage us to continue this type of intervention, almost unanimously confirming its effectiveness. Prevention programs encourage children and adolescents to report the abuse experienced and they may help to reduce the trauma of sexual abuse if there are victims among the participants. We also found that some evaluations have not considered the possible negative effects of this type of programs in the event that they are applied inappropriately. Finally, we present some methodological considerations as critical analysis to this type of evaluations.


Author(s):  
Franklin E. Zimring

The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. Why did it happen when it happened? What explains the unprecedented magnitude of prison and jail expansion? Why are the current levels of penal confinement so very close to the all-time peak rate reached in 2007? What is the likely course of levels of penal confinement in the next generation of American life? Are there changes in government or policy that can avoid the prospect of mass incarceration as a chronic element of governance in the United States? This study is organized around four major concerns: What happened in the 33 years after 1973? Why did these extraordinary changes happen in that single generation? What is likely to happen to levels of penal confinement in the next three decades? What changes in law or practice might reduce this likely penal future?


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