The Routledge Handbook of Criminal Justice Ethics

This book offers an introduction to the philosophical issues of criminal justice ethics in a way suitable for students of criminology and criminal justice. It links philosophical concepts with empirical research in criminology and provides readers with a single-volume treatment of key issues illustrating the main problems of criminal justice ethics in western jurisdictions, anchored in the fundamental features of political and legal order. Coverage includes:  A discussion concerning the relation between law and morality;  The aims and justification of punishment;

2008

Of all the features of social organization, criminal justice has proved the most resistant to the effect of reasoned deliberation and discussion about the nature of the good society and the good polity."

University of Toronto Law Journal, 2020

Anglo-American criminal law theory is undergoing a radical change in direction unlike anything we have seen for almost fifty years. Since the 1970s, moral theory has reshaped the field in a way that would have been unimaginable before. The nature of responsibility, fault, wrongdoing, justification, excuse, desert, and much more have been comprehensively rethought in light of insights drawn from contemporary moral philosophy. What has been lost, however, is attention to the nature and justification of criminal justice institutions as coercive political institutions. In recent years, a number of criminal law theorists have drawn attention to the role of criminal justice as a coercive political institution. From that viewpoint, the first and focal question of criminal law theory is the point of the institution and how it might form a legitimate part of a larger set of coercive institutions. From there, we are led quickly to a new set of questions: what is the relationship between criminal justice and the other coercive institutions of the modern state? Is it a free-standing institution, concerned with giving moral wrongdoers what they deserve, or is it tied more intimately to the state's most basic function of securing what is sometimes called 'the king's peace' or 'civil order'? This University of Toronto Law Journal (UTLJ) special issue brings together eight prominent legal theorists from across the English-speaking world to address the new turn in criminal law theory. Some, such as RA Duff, Lindsay Farmer, Alice Ristroph, and myself, work at the centre of criminal law theory in the Englishspeaking world. Others, such as Chad Flanders and Darryl Brown, are influential writers on criminal law and policy, engaging especially closely with the realities of criminal justice in the United States. Yet others, like Lorenzo Zucca and Corey Brettschneider, are political and legal theorists with a broader focus who have also dealt with questions of criminal justice. Together, they offer a roadmap to a new way of thinking about criminal justice institutions that takes seriously the questions of political legitimacy, sovereignty, and political justification. In his article, 'Criminal Law and the Constitution of Civil Order,' RA Duff adapts his longstanding account of criminal justice as a polity's response to public wrongs to a new set of problems. 1 He uses the idea of jurisdiction to determine what sorts of connections criminal justice bears to the polity's larger political claims. In particular, he asks, if criminal wrongs are moral wrongs, then why should they not be of just as much concern to all polities and not only the one that has territorial jurisdiction? In order to answer this question, Duff invokes the idea of civil order: each polity puts in place a particular conception of civil order. Crimes are those wrongs that offend against a particular polity's conception of civil order. Lorenzo Zucca's article, 'The Constitution of Criminal Law,' places the development of modern criminal law within a larger historical development of the

Dialogue, 2014

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

Philosophies, 2023

Incarceration remains the foremost form of sentence for serious crimes in Western democracies. At the same time, the management of prisons and of the prison population has become a major real-world challenge, with growing concerns about overcrowding, the offenders' well-being, and the failure of achieving the distal desideratum of reduced criminality, all of which have a moral dimension. In no small part motivated by these practical problems, the focus of the present article is on the ethical framework which we use in thinking about and administering criminal justice. I start with an analysis of imprisonment and its permissibility as a punitive tool of justice. In particular, I present a novel argument against punitive imprisonment, showing it to fall short in meeting two key criteria of just punishment, namely (i) that the appropriate individual is being punished, and (ii) that the punishment can be adequately moderated to reflect the seriousness of the crime. The principles I argue for and which the aforementioned analysis brings to the fore, rooted in the sentient experience, firstly of victims, and not only of victims but also of the offenders as well as the society at large, then lead me to elucidate the broader framework of jurisprudence which I then apply more widely. Hence, while rejecting punitive imprisonment, I use its identified shortcomings to argue for the reinstitution of forms of punishment which are, incongruently, presently not seen as permissible, such as corporal punishment and punishments dismissed on the basis of being seen as humiliating. I also present a novel view of capital punishment which, in contradiction to its name, I reject for punitive aims, but which I argue is permissible on compassionate grounds.

Journal of Moral Philosophy, 2017

This review article critically examines R. A. Duff and Stuart P. Green’s wide-ranging Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law. The book captures well a crucial debate at the heart of its topic: is morality a key for understanding criminal law? I first consider legal moralism arguments answering this question in the affirmative and argue they should be rejected. I next consider alternatives to argue that philosophers of criminal law should look beyond legal moralism for more compelling theories about criminal law.

Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2008

Recent years have seen mounting challenge to the model of the criminal trial on the grounds it is not cost-effective, not preventive, not necessary, not appropriate, or not effective. These challenges have led to changes in the scope of the criminal law, in criminal procedure, and in the nature and use of criminal trials. These changes include greater use of diversion, of fixed penalties, of summary trials, of hybrid civil-criminal processes, of strict liability, of incentives to plead guilty, and of preventive orders. The paper will assess the implications of these changes for the function of the criminal law, assessing the reasons behind them, and examining whether or not they are to be welcomed. Identifying the larger import of these changes draws attention to the changing relationship between state and citizen as well as changes in the nature of the state itself. These can in turn be attributed to a jostling among the different manifestations of the authoritarian state, the preventive state, and the regulatory state. These changes have profound normative implications for a liberal theory of the criminal law that require its re-articulation and its defence. A modest start may be to insist that where the conduct is criminal and the consequences are punitive the protections of criminal procedure and trial must be upheld.