Crime and punishment (original) (raw)
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THE NEW JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN CRIMINAL LAW, 2019
At the heart of Alternative Systems of Crime Control lies what the editors eloquently describe as a 'paradigm shift' in crime control. This shift is manifested in criminal law's turn from repression to prevention, and in the multitude of alternative security regimes that sprang like mushrooms following the realization that traditional criminal law has reached its limits in the face of the modern criminal landscape. This volume brings together a series of eminent scholars and practitioners, in order to shed light on these new mechanisms of crime control. It is divided in four parts: Part 1 provides the reader with a conceptual framework and introduces her to the contributions to follow; Parts 2 and 3 focus on the national and international justice systems, respectively; and Part 4 closes the volume by drawing the reader's attention to a series of special regimes, such as antiterrorism measures. The reader will soon discover that, although the topics dealt with in this collection fit comfortably under the umbrella of alternative crime control, they nonetheless vary significantly. This variety should not be read as a sign that the collection is incoherent. There is a common thread that runs through this book, and that is the issue of whether these mechanisms adequately respect the rule of law, human rights and due process. With that in mind, let us take a closer look at the individual contributions. In the first contribution, which makes up the entirety of Part 1, Sieber takes us on a tour de force of the new crime control regimes employed in today's 'global risk society'. His contribution brings us a step closer to understanding just how numerous-and diverse-these mechanisms are. From preventive criminal law (which extends criminal liability to preparatory acts) to legal regimes that rest entirely outside the realm of criminal law (such as administrative sanctions, United Nations (UN) targeted sanctions, non-conviction-based civil confiscation, the surveillance of financial transactions and travel movements), one gets a taste for just some of today's alternative systems of crime control. And while this smorgasbord of security measures significantly increases the crime-fighting tools that states have at their disposal, the author neatly points out that there is another side to the coin: the drastic loss of civil liberties. Turning to Part 2, Billis and Knust focus our attention on the national level and, in particular, alternative conflict resolution procedures in criminal law-such as discretionary prosecutions and plea bargaining. In the penetrating analysis that follows, they scrutinize those procedures through the lens of social legitimacy and remind us that 'judicial mechanisms that are open and fair (.. .
German Law Journal, 2007
This year the Karl Mannheim Centre for Criminology at The London School of Economics hosted the 2007 annual conference of the British Society of Criminology between the 18th and 20th of September. Some 280 papers, two plenary sessions and a number of “author meets critics” sessions gave insight into the diverse fields of criminological research in the UK and abroad. The conference's theme was programmatic: “Crime and Justice in an Age of Global Insecurity”. The notion of insecurity, expressing a globalized experience and an ontological status of the human being in late modernity, termed a historical period of time. It fits to a conjuncture of theorizing the uncanniness of contemporary social life. In this way, the theme of the conference is partly to write the history of the present in terms of crime and justice. Such conferences are both a witness of the social processes surrounding the issues of crime and criminal justice, and an agent of change by providing directives for the...
Crime and modernity: continuities in left realist criminology
International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 2003
different within these communities and compared to those living in Lahore, Indonesia or the Gulf States because of the ways in which Islam combines with factors and influences in utterly different contexts. While in a short review I have focused on those aspects of the collection that most interest this reviewer, the other chapters are all informative and mostly insightful. Crime and modernity: continuities in left realist criminology John Lea; Sage, London, 2002, pp. 224, price d60 hardback, d17.99 paperback The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary society David Garland; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, pp. 307, price d19.99 hardback
Crime as governance: towards a 21st century criminology (2004)
As we enter the twenty-first century we need a new understanding of crime adequate to the new conditions in which we live. If we are to avoid the continual marginalisation of criminology we must be aware that the development of our discipline was based on particular historical conditions which are fast changing beyond recognition. Traditionally, criminology, echoing criminal law, presupposed a view of crime as • An exceptional event rather than a normally expected occurrence • A form of pathology, originating from and overwhelmingly located in, the marginalised periphery of society • An episodic, and frequently brutal, disruption of otherwise normal socioeconomic processes. • An object, or target, of governance. Criminality is a phenomena to be regulated and reduced to manageable proportions by the resources at the disposal of the modern state and other social institutions. The role of criminology is to assist in this process of management and control.
Crime and morality: the significance of criminal justice in post – 2 modern culture
International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 2002
Book reviews Crime and morality: the significance of criminal justice in post-2 modern culture Hans Boutellier; Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, xii+181 pp., $115 hardback This book confronts a topic that has taken on increasing significance in the last 10 years or so. The author seeks, as Michael Tonry states in the preface, to uncover why public anxiety about crime has not declined in conjunction with a drop in crime rates. According to the author, one reason why conventional criminology has been unable to explain this phenomenon is that the criminal event has been stripped of moral significance. Control-oriented criminology, which the author sees as deriving from Hirschi's work, and which would include most facets of situational crime prevention, views the moral significance of crime as consisting of a breach of the criminal law. The morality of crime is treated in a positivistic fashion, as it is assumed from the existing corpus of law rather than thematized. Critical criminology sees the moral significance of crime as residing within a set of social relationships beyond the connections between offender and victim. In Boutellier's pithy phrase, for the former, crime constitutes a technical problem and, for the latter, a political one. By contrast, Boutellier wishes to treat crime as a moral problem, an act that signifies something relevant about the morality of a society. Whilst official agencies may prefer to gloss over this position, the public are well aware of the moral resonance of crime, and it is this acknowledgement that provokes such strident responses. In his second chapter, Boutellier examines the practical consequences of putting the moral significance of crime is abeyance by recounting the progress of the debate on crime in the Netherlands. The work of the Roethof committee, reiterated in the government white paper in 1985, analysed petty crime as resulting from the 'depillarization' of Dutch society, the subsidence of general moral standards, particularly those derived from religion. External forms of control had not filled the space vacated by internalized control. Initially, crime prevention policy was reticent about 'moralizing' the problem of crime, but subsequently policy sought to 'confirm essential norms in society'. The problem is what, in an increasingly fractured society, can serve as the basis for these norms, administrative criminology sees it as axiomatic that the criminal law reflects morality and thus crime prevention policy is normatively sanctioned. But this complacency is attacked by critical criminologists who accuse the state of unjustified repression. As Boutellier says, 'the assumption that the population endorses the conventional order is too superficial'. Yet he does not align himself with critical criminology due to its allegedly blas! e
Theoretical Criminology, 2014
This article seeks to sketch out alternatives to neoliberal penality by seeking to undermine the four institutional logics of neoliberalism as identified by Loïc Wacquant (2009). It begins by critically analysing the potential value of public criminology as an exit strategy, suggesting that whilst this approach has much value, popular versions of it are in fact rather limited on account of their exclusion of offenders themselves from the debate and their optimism about the capacity of existing institutions to challenge the current punitive consensus. It suggests that a genuinely ‘public’ criminology should be informed by an abolitionist stance to both current penal policies and the neoliberal system as a whole. This may be the best means of truly democratizing penal politics