Courts, Criminal Procedures, and Deterrence

This chapter studies the performance of Latin American criminal courts and prosecutor offices in fighting crime and instilling deterrence and systematically analyzes one of the critical and understudied topics in the region: Impunity. It analyzes criminal justice statistics and inmate survey data. In this chapter I argue that while numerous penal reforms in the region welcomed strong protections of individual rights they had limited success in developing effective prosecution and administration of justice to curtail criminality. This chapter uses information from 6,000 inmates, the “voice” of the indicted, to document the court and prosecutorial processes and contrasts this perspective to the “official voice” of the courts of law.

Sentencing Indigenous Offenders in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

In common law countries that have been colonized, the colonized peoples are overrepresented in criminal justice statistics and in rates of incarceration. Sentencing laws and court processes have, for some time, undergone changes to reduce or address the continuing rise of indigenous over-incarceration. This essay focuses on three colonized common law countries: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in examining what legal strategies have been used to transform judicial reasoning and practice to take into account the particular experiences and circumstances of indigenous offenders. Whether these changes have improved the situation in practice is explored in this essay. The essay concludes by examining what role and responsibilities judicial officers should have in administering justice for peoples who have been, and continue to be, dispossessed of their culture, laws, and language by the process of colonization, and suggests directions for future research.