Flawed Criminal Justice Policies
Flawed Criminal Justice Policies

Author: Frances P. Reddington

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781594609367

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This textbook reader examines the concept of flawed policies in the criminal justice arena. The authors address the costs of bad criminal justice policy and offer suggestions for the creation of good, sound, evidence-based policy. Specific topics highlighted include: * The War on Drugs * Immigration Laws * The Patriot Act and Terrorist Laws * Sentencing Guidelines * Three Strikes Laws * Capital Punishment * Sex Offender Laws * "Get Tough" Juvenile Policy * Zero Tolerance in Schools * Policies for Mental Health Offenders * Policies with Pregnant Offenders Courses appropriate for this textbook reader include upper level undergraduate and graduate level criminal justice courses dealing at least in part with public policies, the media impact on law making, public fear of crime and the legislative response. Other disciplines will also find this book an excellent supplement to their courses in Psychology, Political Science, Public Administration and Policy. "As a policy-oriented coursebook in the social science arena, Flawed Criminal Justice Policies by Reddington and Bonham is unparalleled. The authors' proficiency in examining unsustainable criminal justice policies, the misguided public perception and the capricious nature of the media's portrayal of crime compels students to reexamine our nation's crime problem from a much more common sense approach. My students described the textbook as 'practical, real world and thought provoking'. I highly recommend this text and many of my colleagues have also adopted it. It will truly engage your students and elicit great debates and classroom discussion." -- Professor Joanne C. Metzger J.D, Temple University, Department of Criminal Justice The Teacher's Manual is available as a pdf via email or on a CD. Please contact Beth Hall at [email protected] to request a copy. PowerPoint slides are available upon adoption. Sample slides from the full, 153-slide presentation are available to view here. Email [email protected] for more information.

Out-of-Control Criminal Justice
Out-of-Control Criminal Justice

Author: Daniel P. Mears

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-09-28

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 110716169X

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This book shows how to reduce out-of-control criminal justice and create greater public safety, justice, and accountability at less cost.

The New Criminal Justice Thinking
The New Criminal Justice Thinking

Author: Sharon Dolovich

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2017-03-28

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1479831549

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A vital collection for reforming criminal justice After five decades of punitive expansion, the entire U.S. criminal justice system— mass incarceration, the War on Drugs, police practices, the treatment of juveniles and the mentally ill, glaring racial disparity, the death penalty and more — faces challenging questions. What exactly is criminal justice? How much of it is a system of law and how much is a collection of situational social practices? What roles do the Constitution and the Supreme Court play? How do race and gender shape outcomes? How does change happen, and what changes or adaptations should be pursued? The New Criminal Justice Thinking addresses the challenges of this historic moment by asking essential theoretical and practical questions about how the criminal system operates. In this thorough and thoughtful volume, scholars from across the disciplines of legal theory, sociology, criminology, Critical Race Theory, and organizational theory offer crucial insights into how the criminal system works in both theory and practice. By engaging both classic issues and new understandings, this volume offers a comprehensive framework for thinking about the modern justice system. For those interested in criminal law and justice, The New Criminal Justice Thinking offers a profound discussion of the complexities of our deeply flawed criminal justice system, complexities that neither legal theory nor social science can answer alone.

The Collapse of American Criminal Justice
The Collapse of American Criminal Justice

Author: William J. Stuntz

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-09-30

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0674051750

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Rule of law has vanished in America’s criminal justice system. Prosecutors decide whom to punish; most accused never face a jury; policing is inconsistent; plea bargaining is rampant; and draconian sentencing fills prisons with mostly minority defendants. A leading criminal law scholar looks to history for the roots of these problems—and solutions.

Illusion of Order
Illusion of Order

Author: Bernard E. Harcourt

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2005-02-15

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780674038318

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This is the first book to challenge the broken-windows theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanors, such as loitering and vagrancy, to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. The theory has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws. The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years, it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of law abiders and disorderly people and of order and disorder, which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that we implement in our society. How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? This book explores the reasons why. It also presents a new, more thoughtful vision of criminal justice.

Making Sense of Criminal Justice
Making Sense of Criminal Justice

Author: G. Larry Mays

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2018-06

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 9780190679279

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Rather than providing students with "the answers," Making Sense of Criminal Justice: Policies and Practices, Third Edition, challenges them to think critically about how the criminal justice system deals with challenging situations--like the use of force by the police--and offers a framework for lively classroom discussions and debates.

Who Are the Criminals?
Who Are the Criminals?

Author: John Hagan

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2010-10-04

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 140083631X

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How did the United States go from being a country that tries to rehabilitate street criminals and prevent white-collar crime to one that harshly punishes common lawbreakers while at the same time encouraging corporate crime through a massive deregulation of business? Why do street criminals get stiff prison sentences, a practice that has led to the disaster of mass incarceration, while white-collar criminals, who arguably harm more people, get slaps on the wrist--if they are prosecuted at all? In Who Are the Criminals?, one of America's leading criminologists provides new answers to these vitally important questions by telling how the politicization of crime in the twentieth century transformed and distorted crime policymaking and led Americans to fear street crime too much and corporate crime too little. John Hagan argues that the recent history of American criminal justice can be divided into two eras--the age of Roosevelt (roughly 1933 to 1973) and the age of Reagan (1974 to 2008). A focus on rehabilitation, corporate regulation, and the social roots of crime in the earlier period was dramatically reversed in the later era. In the age of Reagan, the focus shifted to the harsh treatment of street crimes, especially drug offenses, which disproportionately affected minorities and the poor and resulted in wholesale imprisonment. At the same time, a massive deregulation of business provided new opportunities, incentives, and even rationalizations for white-collar crime--and helped cause the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. The time for moving beyond Reagan-era crime policies is long overdue, Hagan argues. The understanding of crime must be reshaped and we must reconsider the relative harms and punishments of street and corporate crimes.

Better, Not Bitter
Better, Not Bitter

Author: Yusef Salaam

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1538704986

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Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR This inspirational memoir serves as a call to action from prison reform activist Yusef Salaam, of the Exonerated Five, that will inspire us all to turn our stories into tools for change in the pursuit of racial justice. They didn't know who they had. So begins Yusef Salaam telling his story. No one's life is the sum of the worst things that happened to them, and during Yusef Salaam's seven years of wrongful incarceration as one of the Central Park Five, he grew from child to man, and gained a spiritual perspective on life. Yusef learned that we're all "born on purpose, with a purpose." Despite having confronted the racist heart of America while being "run over by the spiked wheels of injustice," Yusef channeled his energy and pain into something positive, not just for himself but for other marginalized people and communities. Better Not Bitter is the first time that one of the now Exonerated Five is telling his individual story, in his own words. Yusef writes his narrative: growing up Black in central Harlem in the '80s, being raised by a strong, fierce mother and grandmother, his years of incarceration, his reentry, and exoneration. Yusef connects these stories to lessons and principles he learned that gave him the power to survive through the worst of life's experiences. He inspires readers to accept their own path, to understand their own sense of purpose. With his intimate personal insights, Yusef unpacks the systems built and designed for profit and the oppression of Black and Brown people. He inspires readers to channel their fury into action, and through the spiritual, to turn that anger and trauma into a constructive force that lives alongside accountability and mobilizes change. This memoir is an inspiring story that grew out of one of the gravest miscarriages of justice, one that not only speaks to a moment in time or the rage-filled present, but reflects a 400-year history of a nation's inability to be held accountable for its sins. Yusef Salaam's message is vital for our times, a motivating resource for enacting change. Better, Not Bitter has the power to soothe, inspire and transform. It is a galvanizing call to action.

Convicting the Innocent
Convicting the Innocent

Author: Brandon L. Garrett

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-08-04

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 0674060989

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On January 20, 1984, Earl Washington—defended for all of forty minutes by a lawyer who had never tried a death penalty case—was found guilty of rape and murder in the state of Virginia and sentenced to death. After nine years on death row, DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction and saved his life. However, he spent another eight years in prison before more sophisticated DNA technology proved his innocence and convicted the guilty man. DNA exonerations have shattered confidence in the criminal justice system by exposing how often we have convicted the innocent and let the guilty walk free. In this unsettling in-depth analysis, Brandon Garrett examines what went wrong in the cases of the first 250 wrongfully convicted people to be exonerated by DNA testing. Based on trial transcripts, Garrett’s investigation into the causes of wrongful convictions reveals larger patterns of incompetence, abuse, and error. Evidence corrupted by suggestive eyewitness procedures, coercive interrogations, unsound and unreliable forensics, shoddy investigative practices, cognitive bias, and poor lawyering illustrates the weaknesses built into our current criminal justice system. Garrett proposes practical reforms that rely more on documented, recorded, and audited evidence, and less on fallible human memory. Very few crimes committed in the United States involve biological evidence that can be tested using DNA. How many unjust convictions are there that we will never discover? Convicting the Innocent makes a powerful case for systemic reforms to improve the accuracy of all criminal cases.

The Feminist War on Crime
The Feminist War on Crime

Author: Aya Gruber

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2020-05-26

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0520973143

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Many feminists grapple with the problem of hyper-incarceration in the United States, and yet commentators on gender crime continue to assert that criminal law is not tough enough. This punitive impulse, prominent legal scholar Aya Gruber argues, is dangerous and counterproductive. In their quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, American feminists have become soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting the problem-solving power of incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities. Deploying vivid cases and unflinching analysis, The Feminist War on Crime documents the failure of the state to combat sexual and domestic violence through law and punishment. Zero-tolerance anti-violence law and policy tend to make women less safe and more fragile. Mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration embroil poor women of color in a criminal justice system that is historically hostile to them. This carceral approach exacerbates social inequalities by diverting more power and resources toward a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system, further harming victims, perpetrators, and communities alike. In order to reverse this troubling course, Gruber contends that we must abandon the conventional feminist wisdom, fight violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state, and use criminalization as a technique of last—not first—resort.