RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2020
higher per capita than any other nation, including China and Russia. The dramatic expansion of th... more higher per capita than any other nation, including China and Russia. The dramatic expansion of the criminal justice system, with its attendant collateral consequences, has left no major institution untouched. Perhaps nowhere, however, have ef ects of the system's growing reach been studied more than in the labor market. As is by now well known, contact with the criminal justice system is associated with significantly poorer employment outcomes. Arrest, conviction, and incarceration reduce the odds of searching for work (Sugie 2018; Smith and Broege 2019), and, contingent on a search, of getting a job (Apel and Sweeten 2010). When employed, individuals who have had criminal justice contact struggle with job stability, annually working many fewer weeks and earning significantly lower wages (
In the winter of 2004-2005, as Arnold Schwarzenegger took over as governor of California followin... more In the winter of 2004-2005, as Arnold Schwarzenegger took over as governor of California following the recall of the previous governor, he pronounced the state's mammoth, litigation-strapped, and catastrophically overcrowded prison system to be in a state of crisis, denounced its penal philosophy of "warehousing" inmates, and declared the parole system that had long returned the vast majority of its charges to prison "broken. " By the time you read these words, such statements may not seem unusual; indeed, they may be on their way to becoming a new "common sense" of high crime societies (Garland 2001a ). But in California, they were words that had not been spoken by anyone in leadership for more than a quarter century. Like other states, California participated in a remarkable expansion of imprisonment by the states and federal government, resulting in current populations on average more than four times the relative portion of the population imprisoned at the end of the 1970s. Sustained by periodic upswings in reported crime, and by non-stop media and political attention to the threat posed by criminals, America became the global leader of what has come to be called (primarily by its critics) "mass incarceration. " By calling the system "broken" and by admitting that warehousing felons could not OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF PETERSILIA-Chapter 01-PageProof 25 October 25, 2011 5:55 PM documented, these prisons were designed without providing even minimally adequate space for the delivery of medical care. Th is shocking record of failing to imagine the prison as anything but a site of punitive segregation has produced an equally alarming projected cost of $7 billion to bring prison health care facilities up to a minimal constitutional standard (Rothfeld 2008 ). It is this fi scal pressure that is bringing mass incarceration to a day of reckoning in California. While California's prisons remain unsustainably overcrowded, and the legal machinery that has kept fi lling prisons remains largely intact, no California governor aft er Schwarzenegger will be able to treat building and fi lling prisons as a generic and promising solution to the ubiquitous social problems facing California communities (from urban blight to teen pregnancy). Instead, in a surprising but now undeniable way, mass incarceration has become itself, like crime a generation ago, a serious social problem. Th ere are a number of signs indicating that the impending end of the era of mass incarceration is a broader phenomenon, extending well beyond the State of California: 1. Aft er decades of being an issue largely invisible outside criminological circles, mass incarceration and its consequences (especially racial disproportionate incarceration rates) have begun to be identifi ed as a major problem that needs solving by a growing number of foundations (see, e.g., Pew 2008 ), civil society organizations, and even some members of the United States Congress. In 2009, Senator Jim Webb, a former Republican turned independent minded Democrat, representing Virginia, one of the most punitive states in the nation, started a subcommittee on the disproportionate impact of incarceration (Webb 2007 ). 2. Th e Great Recession that began in 2008 has seen state legislatures across the country considering ways to responsibly trim correctional budgets and lessen the impact of future sentencing on state budgets (PEW 2009 ). 3. Aft er a period of relative neglect, the number of academic and trade books devoted to over-incarceration has soared. 4. State prison populations have begun to decline for the fi rst time since 1972 (PEW 2010 ). Th e closing of the era of mass incarceration does not necessarily suggest a rapid reduction in state or federal prison populations. While the political expectations necessary to continue expanding incarceration seem to be weakening, the forms of identity and routine action that have been framed around the problem of violent crime during the ramping-up period of mass incarceration are likely to be with us for some time, easily mobilized to check eff orts at reform in the name of protecting potential victims. It does, however, provide an appropriate vantage point to begin looking back and taking stock of just what mass incarceration was, what produced it, and what it means to us going forward. Scholars have debated whether mass incarceration was more of a policy (Blumstein 2000), or more a kind of politics, albeit democratic or pathological (Zimring
Vinculado ao campo de estudo da punição e sociedade, este artigo apresenta alguns dos métodos ana... more Vinculado ao campo de estudo da punição e sociedade, este artigo apresenta alguns dos métodos analíticos dos livros Vigiar e Punir, de Michel Foucault, e Cárcere e Fábrica, de Melossi e Pavarini-sobre a relação entre as tecnologias de poder sobre o corpo humano e as reformas da prática penal-, e sugere como esses métodos têm sido e podem ser aplicados a outras fases da evolução penal, sendo úteis para além dos específicos termos históricos delimitados em seus livros. São também examinados os trabalhos de autores subsequentes que têm seguido esse tipo de análise, revisitando a história da prisão e avançando na história por dois outros períodos de mudança profunda na punição, em muitas sociedades industriais e pós-industriais: a socialização da punição no welfare state e a gestão de riscos no neoliberalismo.
It seems to me important, very important, to the record that we face the fact that this man was n... more It seems to me important, very important, to the record that we face the fact that this man was not only human but a rather ordinary one in many respects, and who appeared ordinary. If we think that this was a man such as we might never meet, a great aberration from the ...
Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons. Respect for that dignity a... more Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons. Respect for that dignity animates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.. . A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society. 1
Introduction: Punishment and Society: The Emergence of an Academic Field - Jonathan Simon and Ric... more Introduction: Punishment and Society: The Emergence of an Academic Field - Jonathan Simon and Richard Sparks PART ONE: PUNISHMENT AND SOCIAL THEORY Punishment and Social Solidarity - David Garland Punishment and Political Economy - Alessandro de Giorgi Punishment and the Political Technologies of the Body - Jonathan Simon Punishment and 'The Civilizing Process' - John Pratt Punishment and Meaning: The Cultural Sociological Approach - Philip Smith Risk and Punishment - Kelly Hannah-Moffat Punishment and the Penal Field - Joshua Page PART TWO: MASS IMPRISONMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCE Punishment and Inequality - Christopher Muller and Christopher Wildeman Gender and Punishment - Mary Bosworth and Emma Kaufman The Carceral State and the Politics of Punishment - Marie Gottschalk The Social Psychology of Mass Imprisonment - Mona Lynch Punishment, (Neo)Liberalism and Social Democracy - Nicola Lacey PART THREE: MODES OF PUNISHMENT Prisons Beyond the New Penology: The Shifting Moral Foundations of Prison Management - Alison Liebling and Ben Crewe Capital Punishment in the USA: Prospects and Possibilities - Austin Sarat Punishment in Society: The Improbable Persistence of Probation and Other Community Sanctions and Measures - Gwen Robinson, Fergus McNeil, and Shadd Maruna Youth Justice: In a Child's Best Interests? - John Muncie and Barry Goldson The Punishment Debate in Restorative Justice - Kathleen Daly Monetized Justice: Money and Punishment in Consumer Societies - Pat O'Malley PART FOUR: NEW CONTEXTS Punishment and Human Rights - Dirk van Zyl Smit Punishment and Migration Between Europe and the USA: A Transnational 'Less Eligibility'? - Dario Melossi Amnesties, Transnational Justice and Governing Through Mercy - Kieran McEvoy and Louise Mallinder Control without Punishment: Understanding Coercion - Liora Lazarus , Benjamin Goold and Caitlin Goss
When we think about the relationship between crime and the economy, the nexus most likely to come... more When we think about the relationship between crime and the economy, the nexus most likely to come to mind is employment.1 In this Article I propose a very different framework for thinking about the economic context of crime-one based on housing. Like the employment-crime nexus, the relationship between housing and crime can point to a multitude of different dynamics, concerning the incentives to commit crimes and the incentives of the public to react to fear of crime. Here, I focus on just one dynamic: many Americans switched from renting to owning their homes during the second half of the 20th century, and this shift, I will argue, made the public more fearful of crime and thus more inclined to support aggressive law-and-order policies. Alongside the well-documented rise in violent crime (homicide in particular) in the early 1960s,2 the post-WWII trend of
Criminal Justice, Risk and the Revolt against Uncertainty
Predictions by some in the early 1990s that United States criminal justice was dominated by a “ne... more Predictions by some in the early 1990s that United States criminal justice was dominated by a “new penology” of rational risk management (Feeley and Simon, Criminology 30.4: 449–474, 1992; The Futures of Criminology 173: 174, 1994) proved at best premature, as the nation adopted extreme penal policies and aggressive policing tactics with no particular basis in scientific evidence and rejected proposals to moderate penal severity by risk. Since the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, signs abound that the risk paradigm is gaining ground in the name of “criminal justice reform” (Kohlher et al. 2018). While reservations about risk remain significant, many of them express concern about racial justice consequences of risk management instruments that will carry over the criminalization patterns of recent decades into the future. This chapter argues that the delayed arrival of risk rationality reflects the initial stages of a slow but inexorable shift in generational political criminology as the influence of “Baby Boomers” (Boomers), born between 1946 and 1964, crests and that of “Millennials,” born between 1981 and 1996, rises (PEW, Defining Generations: Where Millennials End and Generation Z Begins, 2019). I offer a historical-cultural hypothesis for why Baby Boomers rejected rational risk logics when it came to crime and why Millennials are more open to it. Looking at “period effects” on generational imaginaries points to striking differences in the political landscape in which crime was experienced by these distinct cohorts as they entered young adulthood, a phase that sociologists have long viewed as having enduring influence across the life course (Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1927). Specifically, I argue that Boomers and Millennials have been influenced by “signal crimes” (Innes, Signal Crimes: Social Reactions to Crime, Disorder and Control, Oxford University Press, 2014) that point in very different directions, with very different implications about both behavior and the meaning of crime for social organization. This is especially clear when we consider these highly publicized crimes against two contexts that have long been drivers of punitive turns in crime policy in America: Black communities and central cities. Boomer signal crimes, experienced against a background of racialized violence and urban crisis, made Boomers receptive to penal populism (Pratt, Penal Populism, Routledge, 2007). I offer the hypothesis that Millennial signal crimes, decoupled largely from Black communities and decentered from urban landscapes, have laid the groundwork for a generation more receptive to rational risk logics about crime. Baby Boomers came to think about crime through a broader “culture of fear” that led to an angry, hot, penal populism. Millennials are not immune to crime fear, but are much more exposed to sources of anxiety or dread like climate change and economic inequality, against which crime is perceived as one more problem to manage.
International journal of prisoner health, Mar 13, 2017
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the policy Implications of aging prison populatio... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the policy Implications of aging prison populations. Design/methodology/approach An examination of the worldwide aging trend in prison and its implications for correctional policy, including an examination of population aging in California prisons as a case example of needed reform. Findings Prison populations worldwide are aging at an unprecedented rate, and age-related medical costs have had serious consequences for jurisdictions struggling to respond to the changes. These trends are accompanied by a growing body of evidence that old age is strongly correlated with desistance from criminal behavior, suggesting an opportunity to at least partially address the challenges of an aging prison population through early release from prison for appropriate persons. Originality/value Some policies do exist that aim to reduce the number of older, chronically ill or disabled and dying people in prison, but they have not achieved that goal on a s...
Bringing together leading scholars in the fields of criminology, international law, philosophy an... more Bringing together leading scholars in the fields of criminology, international law, philosophy and architectural history and theory, this book examines the interrelationships between architecture and justice, highlighting the provocative and curiously ambiguous juncture between the two. Illustrated by a range of disparate and diverse case studies, it draws out the formal language of justice, and extends the effects that architecture has on both the place of, and the individuals subject to, justice. With its multi-disciplinary perspective, the study serves as a platform on which to debate the relationships between the ceremonial, legalistic, administrative and penal aspects of justice, and the spaces that constitute their settings
Robert Cover, who died in 1986, did not live to see the concept of mass imprisonment become centr... more Robert Cover, who died in 1986, did not live to see the concept of mass imprisonment become central to American law and society, but in his article, Violence and the Word, published the same year he died, he seemed to grasp the growing darkness gathering at the heart of American legality.! Speaking to other legal scholars and judges, audiences used to thinking of law as a fabric of principles and rules, a realm of logic and reasoning, Cover insisted that law is irretrievably linked to the organized violence of the State and that those who think of themselves as working to rationalize law must work to rationalize law's violence.2 Intuiting that the fate of America's judiciary was increasingly tied up with the business of sending young Americans to prison, Cover's article was laden with funereal, even alarming images. ''Legal interpretation," he famously began the article, "takes place in a field of pain and death."3 As a scholar of judges, not of punishment, and of civil procedure, not of criminal procedure, Cover may never have recognized the unprecedented nature of the carceral surge then gripping the nation, nor the politicized and racialized nature of law's violence in the United States.4 Reading the growing tension in the judicial apparatus over punishment as permanent, Cover's critical
Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, 2013
abandoning him to a known and horrific fate unrelated in any way to the magnitude of his crime, o... more abandoning him to a known and horrific fate unrelated in any way to the magnitude of his crime, or, if not yet convicted, whether he was even guilty of it. Moreover, by linking this humanitarian anxiety about the state's treatment of prisoners to the health of the general public, the publicity surrounding "jail fever" helped upend the prevailing penal system and led directly to the birth of the modern penitentiary-style prison at the turn of the nineteenth century. 4 From then until the 1980s, the American prisonand the correctional enterprise more broadlywas repeatedly reshaped by moments of heightened concern about disease, prisons, and the general health of the public. During these periodic transformations, contemporaneous medical ideas and procedures have been extended to correctional philosophy and ultimately constitutional understandings of the prison. This Article identifies three distinct "medical models" 5 that followed from the irruption of medicine into the penal field with John Howard's account of jail fever (see Table 1). 6 Model 1 emerged in response to the problem of jail fever. The basic form of the penitentiary-style prison that 4 In Howard's day, there was little distinction between jails and prisons. See O. F. LEWIS, THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN PRISONS AND PRISON CUSTOMS, 1776-1845 16 (1922). Influenced in part by Howard and other reformers, both the United States and England created specialized prisons for long-term convicted prisoners. Id. at 11-15; HENRY MAYHEW & JOHN BINNY, THE CRIMINAL PRISONS OF LONDON, AND SCENES OF PRISON LIFE 80-82 (1862). In the United States, this became institutionalized in most states by the end of the nineteenth century, with jails holding a combination of pretrial inmates and prisoners convicted of offenses and punished by a term in the jail (typically of less than a year).
... 7. HUGH D. BARLOW, INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINOLOGY 25-58 (2d ed. 1981). ... 297, 310 (1974) (ment... more ... 7. HUGH D. BARLOW, INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINOLOGY 25-58 (2d ed. 1981). ... 297, 310 (1974) (mentioning Lombroso's comment that America "gave a warm and sympathetic reception" to his work); Cara W. Robertson, Representing "Miss Lizzie ": Cultural Convictions in the ...
RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2020
higher per capita than any other nation, including China and Russia. The dramatic expansion of th... more higher per capita than any other nation, including China and Russia. The dramatic expansion of the criminal justice system, with its attendant collateral consequences, has left no major institution untouched. Perhaps nowhere, however, have ef ects of the system's growing reach been studied more than in the labor market. As is by now well known, contact with the criminal justice system is associated with significantly poorer employment outcomes. Arrest, conviction, and incarceration reduce the odds of searching for work (Sugie 2018; Smith and Broege 2019), and, contingent on a search, of getting a job (Apel and Sweeten 2010). When employed, individuals who have had criminal justice contact struggle with job stability, annually working many fewer weeks and earning significantly lower wages (
In the winter of 2004-2005, as Arnold Schwarzenegger took over as governor of California followin... more In the winter of 2004-2005, as Arnold Schwarzenegger took over as governor of California following the recall of the previous governor, he pronounced the state's mammoth, litigation-strapped, and catastrophically overcrowded prison system to be in a state of crisis, denounced its penal philosophy of "warehousing" inmates, and declared the parole system that had long returned the vast majority of its charges to prison "broken. " By the time you read these words, such statements may not seem unusual; indeed, they may be on their way to becoming a new "common sense" of high crime societies (Garland 2001a ). But in California, they were words that had not been spoken by anyone in leadership for more than a quarter century. Like other states, California participated in a remarkable expansion of imprisonment by the states and federal government, resulting in current populations on average more than four times the relative portion of the population imprisoned at the end of the 1970s. Sustained by periodic upswings in reported crime, and by non-stop media and political attention to the threat posed by criminals, America became the global leader of what has come to be called (primarily by its critics) "mass incarceration. " By calling the system "broken" and by admitting that warehousing felons could not OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF PETERSILIA-Chapter 01-PageProof 25 October 25, 2011 5:55 PM documented, these prisons were designed without providing even minimally adequate space for the delivery of medical care. Th is shocking record of failing to imagine the prison as anything but a site of punitive segregation has produced an equally alarming projected cost of $7 billion to bring prison health care facilities up to a minimal constitutional standard (Rothfeld 2008 ). It is this fi scal pressure that is bringing mass incarceration to a day of reckoning in California. While California's prisons remain unsustainably overcrowded, and the legal machinery that has kept fi lling prisons remains largely intact, no California governor aft er Schwarzenegger will be able to treat building and fi lling prisons as a generic and promising solution to the ubiquitous social problems facing California communities (from urban blight to teen pregnancy). Instead, in a surprising but now undeniable way, mass incarceration has become itself, like crime a generation ago, a serious social problem. Th ere are a number of signs indicating that the impending end of the era of mass incarceration is a broader phenomenon, extending well beyond the State of California: 1. Aft er decades of being an issue largely invisible outside criminological circles, mass incarceration and its consequences (especially racial disproportionate incarceration rates) have begun to be identifi ed as a major problem that needs solving by a growing number of foundations (see, e.g., Pew 2008 ), civil society organizations, and even some members of the United States Congress. In 2009, Senator Jim Webb, a former Republican turned independent minded Democrat, representing Virginia, one of the most punitive states in the nation, started a subcommittee on the disproportionate impact of incarceration (Webb 2007 ). 2. Th e Great Recession that began in 2008 has seen state legislatures across the country considering ways to responsibly trim correctional budgets and lessen the impact of future sentencing on state budgets (PEW 2009 ). 3. Aft er a period of relative neglect, the number of academic and trade books devoted to over-incarceration has soared. 4. State prison populations have begun to decline for the fi rst time since 1972 (PEW 2010 ). Th e closing of the era of mass incarceration does not necessarily suggest a rapid reduction in state or federal prison populations. While the political expectations necessary to continue expanding incarceration seem to be weakening, the forms of identity and routine action that have been framed around the problem of violent crime during the ramping-up period of mass incarceration are likely to be with us for some time, easily mobilized to check eff orts at reform in the name of protecting potential victims. It does, however, provide an appropriate vantage point to begin looking back and taking stock of just what mass incarceration was, what produced it, and what it means to us going forward. Scholars have debated whether mass incarceration was more of a policy (Blumstein 2000), or more a kind of politics, albeit democratic or pathological (Zimring
Vinculado ao campo de estudo da punição e sociedade, este artigo apresenta alguns dos métodos ana... more Vinculado ao campo de estudo da punição e sociedade, este artigo apresenta alguns dos métodos analíticos dos livros Vigiar e Punir, de Michel Foucault, e Cárcere e Fábrica, de Melossi e Pavarini-sobre a relação entre as tecnologias de poder sobre o corpo humano e as reformas da prática penal-, e sugere como esses métodos têm sido e podem ser aplicados a outras fases da evolução penal, sendo úteis para além dos específicos termos históricos delimitados em seus livros. São também examinados os trabalhos de autores subsequentes que têm seguido esse tipo de análise, revisitando a história da prisão e avançando na história por dois outros períodos de mudança profunda na punição, em muitas sociedades industriais e pós-industriais: a socialização da punição no welfare state e a gestão de riscos no neoliberalismo.
It seems to me important, very important, to the record that we face the fact that this man was n... more It seems to me important, very important, to the record that we face the fact that this man was not only human but a rather ordinary one in many respects, and who appeared ordinary. If we think that this was a man such as we might never meet, a great aberration from the ...
Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons. Respect for that dignity a... more Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons. Respect for that dignity animates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.. . A prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society. 1
Introduction: Punishment and Society: The Emergence of an Academic Field - Jonathan Simon and Ric... more Introduction: Punishment and Society: The Emergence of an Academic Field - Jonathan Simon and Richard Sparks PART ONE: PUNISHMENT AND SOCIAL THEORY Punishment and Social Solidarity - David Garland Punishment and Political Economy - Alessandro de Giorgi Punishment and the Political Technologies of the Body - Jonathan Simon Punishment and 'The Civilizing Process' - John Pratt Punishment and Meaning: The Cultural Sociological Approach - Philip Smith Risk and Punishment - Kelly Hannah-Moffat Punishment and the Penal Field - Joshua Page PART TWO: MASS IMPRISONMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCE Punishment and Inequality - Christopher Muller and Christopher Wildeman Gender and Punishment - Mary Bosworth and Emma Kaufman The Carceral State and the Politics of Punishment - Marie Gottschalk The Social Psychology of Mass Imprisonment - Mona Lynch Punishment, (Neo)Liberalism and Social Democracy - Nicola Lacey PART THREE: MODES OF PUNISHMENT Prisons Beyond the New Penology: The Shifting Moral Foundations of Prison Management - Alison Liebling and Ben Crewe Capital Punishment in the USA: Prospects and Possibilities - Austin Sarat Punishment in Society: The Improbable Persistence of Probation and Other Community Sanctions and Measures - Gwen Robinson, Fergus McNeil, and Shadd Maruna Youth Justice: In a Child's Best Interests? - John Muncie and Barry Goldson The Punishment Debate in Restorative Justice - Kathleen Daly Monetized Justice: Money and Punishment in Consumer Societies - Pat O'Malley PART FOUR: NEW CONTEXTS Punishment and Human Rights - Dirk van Zyl Smit Punishment and Migration Between Europe and the USA: A Transnational 'Less Eligibility'? - Dario Melossi Amnesties, Transnational Justice and Governing Through Mercy - Kieran McEvoy and Louise Mallinder Control without Punishment: Understanding Coercion - Liora Lazarus , Benjamin Goold and Caitlin Goss
When we think about the relationship between crime and the economy, the nexus most likely to come... more When we think about the relationship between crime and the economy, the nexus most likely to come to mind is employment.1 In this Article I propose a very different framework for thinking about the economic context of crime-one based on housing. Like the employment-crime nexus, the relationship between housing and crime can point to a multitude of different dynamics, concerning the incentives to commit crimes and the incentives of the public to react to fear of crime. Here, I focus on just one dynamic: many Americans switched from renting to owning their homes during the second half of the 20th century, and this shift, I will argue, made the public more fearful of crime and thus more inclined to support aggressive law-and-order policies. Alongside the well-documented rise in violent crime (homicide in particular) in the early 1960s,2 the post-WWII trend of
Criminal Justice, Risk and the Revolt against Uncertainty
Predictions by some in the early 1990s that United States criminal justice was dominated by a “ne... more Predictions by some in the early 1990s that United States criminal justice was dominated by a “new penology” of rational risk management (Feeley and Simon, Criminology 30.4: 449–474, 1992; The Futures of Criminology 173: 174, 1994) proved at best premature, as the nation adopted extreme penal policies and aggressive policing tactics with no particular basis in scientific evidence and rejected proposals to moderate penal severity by risk. Since the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, signs abound that the risk paradigm is gaining ground in the name of “criminal justice reform” (Kohlher et al. 2018). While reservations about risk remain significant, many of them express concern about racial justice consequences of risk management instruments that will carry over the criminalization patterns of recent decades into the future. This chapter argues that the delayed arrival of risk rationality reflects the initial stages of a slow but inexorable shift in generational political criminology as the influence of “Baby Boomers” (Boomers), born between 1946 and 1964, crests and that of “Millennials,” born between 1981 and 1996, rises (PEW, Defining Generations: Where Millennials End and Generation Z Begins, 2019). I offer a historical-cultural hypothesis for why Baby Boomers rejected rational risk logics when it came to crime and why Millennials are more open to it. Looking at “period effects” on generational imaginaries points to striking differences in the political landscape in which crime was experienced by these distinct cohorts as they entered young adulthood, a phase that sociologists have long viewed as having enduring influence across the life course (Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1927). Specifically, I argue that Boomers and Millennials have been influenced by “signal crimes” (Innes, Signal Crimes: Social Reactions to Crime, Disorder and Control, Oxford University Press, 2014) that point in very different directions, with very different implications about both behavior and the meaning of crime for social organization. This is especially clear when we consider these highly publicized crimes against two contexts that have long been drivers of punitive turns in crime policy in America: Black communities and central cities. Boomer signal crimes, experienced against a background of racialized violence and urban crisis, made Boomers receptive to penal populism (Pratt, Penal Populism, Routledge, 2007). I offer the hypothesis that Millennial signal crimes, decoupled largely from Black communities and decentered from urban landscapes, have laid the groundwork for a generation more receptive to rational risk logics about crime. Baby Boomers came to think about crime through a broader “culture of fear” that led to an angry, hot, penal populism. Millennials are not immune to crime fear, but are much more exposed to sources of anxiety or dread like climate change and economic inequality, against which crime is perceived as one more problem to manage.
International journal of prisoner health, Mar 13, 2017
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the policy Implications of aging prison populatio... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the policy Implications of aging prison populations. Design/methodology/approach An examination of the worldwide aging trend in prison and its implications for correctional policy, including an examination of population aging in California prisons as a case example of needed reform. Findings Prison populations worldwide are aging at an unprecedented rate, and age-related medical costs have had serious consequences for jurisdictions struggling to respond to the changes. These trends are accompanied by a growing body of evidence that old age is strongly correlated with desistance from criminal behavior, suggesting an opportunity to at least partially address the challenges of an aging prison population through early release from prison for appropriate persons. Originality/value Some policies do exist that aim to reduce the number of older, chronically ill or disabled and dying people in prison, but they have not achieved that goal on a s...
Bringing together leading scholars in the fields of criminology, international law, philosophy an... more Bringing together leading scholars in the fields of criminology, international law, philosophy and architectural history and theory, this book examines the interrelationships between architecture and justice, highlighting the provocative and curiously ambiguous juncture between the two. Illustrated by a range of disparate and diverse case studies, it draws out the formal language of justice, and extends the effects that architecture has on both the place of, and the individuals subject to, justice. With its multi-disciplinary perspective, the study serves as a platform on which to debate the relationships between the ceremonial, legalistic, administrative and penal aspects of justice, and the spaces that constitute their settings
Robert Cover, who died in 1986, did not live to see the concept of mass imprisonment become centr... more Robert Cover, who died in 1986, did not live to see the concept of mass imprisonment become central to American law and society, but in his article, Violence and the Word, published the same year he died, he seemed to grasp the growing darkness gathering at the heart of American legality.! Speaking to other legal scholars and judges, audiences used to thinking of law as a fabric of principles and rules, a realm of logic and reasoning, Cover insisted that law is irretrievably linked to the organized violence of the State and that those who think of themselves as working to rationalize law must work to rationalize law's violence.2 Intuiting that the fate of America's judiciary was increasingly tied up with the business of sending young Americans to prison, Cover's article was laden with funereal, even alarming images. ''Legal interpretation," he famously began the article, "takes place in a field of pain and death."3 As a scholar of judges, not of punishment, and of civil procedure, not of criminal procedure, Cover may never have recognized the unprecedented nature of the carceral surge then gripping the nation, nor the politicized and racialized nature of law's violence in the United States.4 Reading the growing tension in the judicial apparatus over punishment as permanent, Cover's critical
Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, 2013
abandoning him to a known and horrific fate unrelated in any way to the magnitude of his crime, o... more abandoning him to a known and horrific fate unrelated in any way to the magnitude of his crime, or, if not yet convicted, whether he was even guilty of it. Moreover, by linking this humanitarian anxiety about the state's treatment of prisoners to the health of the general public, the publicity surrounding "jail fever" helped upend the prevailing penal system and led directly to the birth of the modern penitentiary-style prison at the turn of the nineteenth century. 4 From then until the 1980s, the American prisonand the correctional enterprise more broadlywas repeatedly reshaped by moments of heightened concern about disease, prisons, and the general health of the public. During these periodic transformations, contemporaneous medical ideas and procedures have been extended to correctional philosophy and ultimately constitutional understandings of the prison. This Article identifies three distinct "medical models" 5 that followed from the irruption of medicine into the penal field with John Howard's account of jail fever (see Table 1). 6 Model 1 emerged in response to the problem of jail fever. The basic form of the penitentiary-style prison that 4 In Howard's day, there was little distinction between jails and prisons. See O. F. LEWIS, THE DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN PRISONS AND PRISON CUSTOMS, 1776-1845 16 (1922). Influenced in part by Howard and other reformers, both the United States and England created specialized prisons for long-term convicted prisoners. Id. at 11-15; HENRY MAYHEW & JOHN BINNY, THE CRIMINAL PRISONS OF LONDON, AND SCENES OF PRISON LIFE 80-82 (1862). In the United States, this became institutionalized in most states by the end of the nineteenth century, with jails holding a combination of pretrial inmates and prisoners convicted of offenses and punished by a term in the jail (typically of less than a year).
... 7. HUGH D. BARLOW, INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINOLOGY 25-58 (2d ed. 1981). ... 297, 310 (1974) (ment... more ... 7. HUGH D. BARLOW, INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINOLOGY 25-58 (2d ed. 1981). ... 297, 310 (1974) (mentioning Lombroso's comment that America "gave a warm and sympathetic reception" to his work); Cara W. Robertson, Representing "Miss Lizzie ": Cultural Convictions in the ...
Uploads
Papers by Jonathan Simon