Social welfarism: Rehab era:

1) power is with the clinicians, claim that we can treat people, moving toward locating injustice in psychiatric clinics to offenders.

2) Indeterminate sentencing by judges and injustices there…

This leads to:

Just Deserts:

actuarial paradigm: taking statistical correlations to make predictions about crime

elasticity in offending: when targeting specific groups with the goal of reducing crime (which actually has stayed the same) has the unintentional consequence of increasing offending in other groups

Ratchet effect: target more groups and they will continue to be part of the problem, creating a self-perpetuating group

Substitution effect: when a profiled group recruits non-profiled individuals to commit their crimes

Harcourt’s solution to the problems of actualization: randomization – pick people at random for checks

Move towards actuarial justice explained by:

- Late modernity

- Study of oppression

- Crime control/due process

penal welfarism: a focus in individual justice and reintegration that dominated crime control from 1890 to 1970

pre-modern “social welfare era” of the 1950s and 1960s

The New Penology of late modernity: stressed actuarial methods that have resulted in mass incarceration and biased profiling techniques that have had far-reaching consequences for race, class, gender

(rapid) Growth: a forced reaction that encouraged moral panics over the last 30 years

 theory of late modernity through which contemporary CJ policies and practices can be understood.

Bloodsworth

On July 25, 1984, nine-year-old Dawn Hamilton was raped and killed in a Baltimore suburb.

A 20-something ex-Marine, Kirk Bloodsworth, was charged with the crime, despite knowing nothing about it.

Based on questionable evidence, he was sentenced to die in Maryland’s gas chamber.

While imprisoned, he read everything he could about murder trials—including Joseph Wambaugh’s The Blooding, an account of the use of DNA fingerprinting in England.

Surviving on inner strength, he found a willing lawyer, and, nine years after the crime, became the first person in the U.S. to be exonerated by DNA evidence.

In May 2004, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the

Innocence Protection Act, which includes the

Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Program

to help defray the costs of post-conviction DNA testing.

offers analysis of the changing conceptions of the child molester in America in the late 19th - 21st century -  a case study in moral panic theory and historical analysis of a contemporary issue in criminal justice.

Moral panic:

1) A wave of irrational public fear that exists when the official reaction to a person, group, or series of events that is out of proportion to the actual threat and when experts speak with one voice about the problem that has suddenly become a dramatic social threat.

2) a central feature of crime control – the means by which societal responses to criminal and deviant behavior are shaped and formulated into law and official sanctions.

argues we have truly come full circle with a vengeance

“The sex psychopath laws, moreover, are based on the common American misconception that mere passage of a law will solve a social problem”

argues that laws named after avenging child victims (such as “Megan’s Law”) are difficult to vote against.

The paradox: outsiders such as pedophiles and psychopaths are blamed as “the problem” despite much evidence that most abuse occurs in domestic/neighborhood setting by family and neighbors.  Responses to these issues inevitably take the form of penal sanctions imposed by the criminal-justice system on these outsider figures

this conception allows lawmakers and the rest of us to locate/contain the problem of sexual violence against children in some “outsider predator” that symbolizes/embodies the deednpest of human evil

The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness

issue of the current mass levels of incarceration in the US

mass incarceration: the entire web of laws, rules, policies and customs that make up the criminal justice system and which serve as a gateway to permanent marginalization in the undercast.

(with 5% of the world's population, the U.S. incarcerates 25% of the world's prisons)

the majority of young black men in large American cities are "warehoused in prisons," their labor no longer needed in the globalized economy

black men who become "felons" become

trapped in a second-class status

that they find difficult to escape

 claims the U.S. criminal justice system uses the

“War on Drugs” as a primary tool for enforcing traditional, as well as new, modes of discrimination and repression

relegated to the status of a racial caste

We must mobilize the civil rights community to move the incarceration issue to the forefront of its agenda and to provide factual information, data, arguments and a point of reference

The Behavior of Law

law is a quantitative variable

Social life with no law is anarchy

"law in general": the amount of governmental social control in social life

Secondary to the behavior of law is the

"Style" of law a four-item typology: law is

penal,

compensatory,

therapeutic, or

conciliatory

The Behavior of social control varies by culture

social control in science: the more science, the more social control in science

predicts that if present trends continue, social life will become increasingly anarchic: with increasing equalization of wealth, classes, races, sexes, ages; increasing interdependence of roles; etc., law will decrease and perhaps disappear altogether

The Social Organization of Law

the law works to be ‘‘impartial and evenhanded’’ but also ‘‘sympathetic and responsive’’;

accessible and efficient but not overly so;

deterrent of socially unacceptable behaviors but also equitable toward the perpetrators of such conduct;

and, most significantly, controlling of violence and also of the sort of discretion thought necessary to control that violence

calls attention to how the structure of the law works to do violence, particularly in the contexts of policing and criminal punishment, when individuals are most directly subject to the control and discretion of the state