American penology: Words, deeds, and consequences

A primary argument underlying this paper is that it is possible to capture a particular theory or conceptual rationale in the development of a penal program strategy. Further, it is possible to implement the program in a way that corresponds to both the program strategy and theory and then to evaluate the program to determine the adequacy of both the program strategy and the theory upon which it is based. The history of U.S. penal reform does not illustrate this potential, however. Rather, U.S. penal reforms have been implemented without evaluation and have resulted in a pattern of unintended consequences, most notably increased social control and an associated undermining of democratic rights and individual freedoms, without any corresponding decline in crime. These trends and outcomes are documented in order to draw penal program and evaluation policy implications for the U.S. and their ever expanding penal complex and the Czech Republic in their ongoing efforts to implement a penal system consistent with their newly emerging democratic society. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Gran Torino

Given the current constellation of fiscal, moral, and logistical problems facing its corrections industry, the USA is on the cusp of a widespread penal reform movement. For the past 200-plus years, each US penal reform that intended to diminish penal practices resulted in widening the reach and deepening the roots of the nation’s punishment system. The question asked here is: is the restorative justice movement in the USA headed the way of past benevolent penal reforms? A new type of social movement: the regressive social movement model is presented. Three past benevolent penal reforms – the penitentiary, the adult reformatory movement, and parole are dissected in order to formulate a regressive reform profile and tested against the restorative justice movement. Field research finds that a repeat performance of regressive reform is in progress. In each of the eight restorative justice movement, variables demonstrate characteristics evident in past benevolent penal campaigns, resulting in a redirection of the campaign’s course.     

The offender in the community: Implications of the experience in the United States for the new Czech Republic

This paper reviews America's community corrections history in order to draw relevant penal policy implications for the Czech Republic in their transition to democracy. The review reveals the implementation of numerous community-based correctional programs that have resulted in mixed results, at best. The paper concludes that if the Czech Republic is to advance a new and professional, effective penal system, they must address five critical areas: dealing with the Romany underclass, establishing intermediate sanctions, promoting a professional correctional work force, confronting the media coverage of crime, and managing the politics of crime policy. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

法律监督在适用社区矫正中的形式构造

在许多国家,适用社区矫正的人数大大超过监禁人数,并取得了良好的社会效益。社区矫正作为一种新型的行刑执行模式,对于维护社会秩序的稳定,改革我国的刑罚制度,降低刑罚执行成本,提高罪犯改造质量,都具有重要的价值。对于执行权的监督是宪法和法律赋予检察机关的一项重要职能。我国现有30个省（区、市）相继开展了社区矫正工作,但对于相关的社区矫正现存的一些适用条件,许多人并不很熟悉,尤其是对适用社区矫正如何进行法律监督,在社区矫正适用中则更为＂生疏＂。为减少在适用社区矫正的执行过程中发生适用不当,防止执行权滥用和异化、维护公平正义,应当强调在适用社区矫正中的法律监督作用,并设计一套科学的运作规范,以合理寻求在适用社区矫正合理性与合法性的合理平衡。     

Cents and sensibility: A case study of corrections reform in Kansas and Michigan

The analytical framework developed by the “new penology” describes the content of corrections reform as relatively homogenous, largely driven by forces internal to corrections departments. This article examines the ongoing process of penal reform in the correctional systems of Kansas and Michigan over the last decade and argues that the new penology's analytical framework has the potential to obscure the relationship between penal practices and their immediate institutional environment. Using case studies of corrections reform in Kansas and Michigan, this article shows that the nature and scope of reforms in both states were determined not just by internal considerations and adaptations, but by a number of forces operating outside the penal bureaucracy including the interests of external actors, economic crises, and high profile events. These external forces both constrained and encouraged correctional reforms and led to evolving reform rationales that often conflicted with the practices of the new penology.     

The historical criminal statistics of Finland 1842–2015 – a systematic comparison to Sweden

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the article is to provide an overview to the trends in crime and crime control in Finland and Sweden during the past 150 years, systematically comparing the two countries. The secondary objective of the study is to introduce a Nordic data collection project aiming to compile coherent comparative criminal justice time series from the early nineteenth century to the present, and to present the first collection of data, the Finnish justice statistics 1842–2015. The study examines the long-term development of homicide, assault, rape, defamation, prison population, and penal severity. Historical statistics provide opportunities to examine the crime trends and the society’s responses to them keeping in mind that the statistics do not necessarily reflect changes in total criminality. As such, the study does not provide conclusive explanations on the development of crime and punishment but rather opens new questions to be answered in future research.     

人文主义与中国古代刑制

中国古代刑制很早即表现出尊重生命的人文主义倾向.这种带有一定的人文主义倾向的有关规定,不仅有利于缓和当时的社会矛盾,减轻人们的痛苦,在一定程度上保护了社会生产力,而且促进了中国古代刑制的进步与发展.     

Differing Current Managerial Approaches in the Corrections of Four Selected New States of Africa

Like the other colonial powers, the British tended to apply the same management model in corrections to virtually all their colonies, protectorates, or possessions in Africa, as elsewhere in their empire. What differences lay between the management of corrections in various colonies, protectorates, or possessions tended to reflect the uniqueness of socio-cultural conditions. However, with the advent of independence there have been some isolated instances of a radical departure from the colonial model. It is this continuity and discontinuity, therefore, that this paper seeks to examine.     

Transportation versus Imprisonment in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain: Penal Power, Liberty, and the State

Existing explanations for historical changes in punishment in Britain have tended to examine the replacement of disorderly prisons and public executions with national penitentiaries from the late eighteenth to the mid‐nineteenth century. Despite their significant contributions to our understanding of how punishments operate in a broader social, political, and economic context, these scholarly accounts have narrowed debate on the mechanisms of penal change to the intentions of penal reformers. This analysis extends this time frame and uses historical data to compare the development of the penitentiary in Britain to its primary, yet less studied, penal substitute, the transportation of felons to America and Australia. In doing so, it provides an alternative explanation for the ascendancy of national penitentiaries. I argue that the development of these penal institutions in Britain was historically made possible by two interdependent sets of changes: (1) changes in the structure and administration of the state's penal apparatus (from decentralized to centralized and patrimonial to bureaucratic); and (2) transformations in popular understandings of the state's power to punish in correspondence with the expansion of a broader and more equal definition of citizenship (democratization). In conclusion, I argue for the value of perspectives on punishment that identify the explicit relationships between state organization and social relations in order to clarify how culture inheres in material conditions to influence specific penal outcomes.     

A Brief History of Doing Time: The California Institution for Women in the 1960s and the 1990s

Recent scholarship on penality describes profound changes in the ideology, discourses, and policies shaping criminal punishment in the late-twentieth-century United States. To assess the implications of these changes for those subject to criminal punishment, we examine the experiences of women in prison at two key points in the recent history of penality. We compare how imprisonment was practiced and responded to at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official penal discourse, and in the mid-1990s, near the height of the "get tough" era. We find that the ways in which women related and responded to other prisoners, to staff, and to the prison regime, while in some ways specific to one or the other penal era, did not fundamentally change. Thus, penal regimes ostensibly informed by profoundly different rationalities nevertheless structured the daily lives of prisoners through a very similar set of deprivations, restrictions, and assumptions.     

Penal harm medicine: state tort remedies for delaying and denying health care to prisoners

In prison and jail subcultures, custodial personnel are committed to the penal harm movement, which seeks to inflict pain on prisoners. Conversely, correctional medical personnel are sworn to the Hippocratic Oath and are committed to alleviating prisoners' suffering. The Hippocratic Oath is violated when correctional medical workers adopt penal harm mandates and inflict pain on prisoners. By analyzing lawsuits filed by prisoners under state tort law, this article shows how the penal harm movement co-opts some correctional medical employees into abandoning their treatment and healing mission, thus causing denial or delay of medical treatment to prisoners. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Punishment's Legal Templates: A Theory of Formal Penal Change

The well‐known gap between law on the books and law in action often casts doubt on the significance of changes to law on the books. For example, the rise and fall of penal technologies have long been considered significant indicators of penal change in socio‐historical analyses of punishment. Recent research, however, has challenged the significance of apparently large‐scale penal change of this kind. This article clarifies the significance of penal technologies' rise and fall by offering an alternative account of formal penal change, introducing the analytical concept of “legal templates,” structural models of legal activity (e.g., punishment) available for authorization and replication across multiple jurisdictions. Analyzing punishment's templates explains how new penal technologies can be important harbingers of change, even when they fail to revolutionize penal practice and are not caused by a widespread ideological shift. This article locates the significance of punishment's legal templates in their constitutive power—their ability, over the long term, to shape cognitive‐cultural expectations about what punishment is or should be. This power appears only when the template is widely adopted by a plurality of jurisdictions, thereby becoming institutionalized. Ultimately, these institutionalized templates define the scope of future punishment.     

Economics and the social reality of prisons

On both sides of the Atlantic penal history is the object of a resurgent and revisionist interest. American historical scholarship conceptualized the prison as a natural result of humanitarian reforms in a society characterized by social and political consensus. European scholars and the radical or new criminologists in America, however, challenged this traditional view by linking the prison to the clash between social and economic classes in a society characterized by conflict. In spite of the existence of some theoretical literature that emphasizes a general economic relationship to law creation and criminality, American penal historians have ignored the possible importance of this theoretical perspective to an explanation of the origin and development of prisons. This study is an attempt to evaluate the importance of economic forces to the creation and development of the prison in America.     

The Rise of a More Punitive State: On the Attenuation of Norwegian Penal Exceptionalism in an Era of Welfare State Transformation

While sociologists of punishment have been interested in the notion of Nordic penal exceptionalism, rapid changes are taking place in the penal policies of one of the members of the Nordic zone. Norway’s penal state is growing increasingly punitive, and penal exceptionalism appears to be on the wane, evidenced by a growing incarceration rate, increasingly punitive sentiments in the population, moral panics over street crime, raised sentencing levels, the forcible detention and extradition of asylum seekers, punitive drug policies, and the creation of segregated correctional facilities for stigmatized foreign offenders. Penal transformation should be understood as the outcome of symbolic contestation between politicians eager to present themselves as “tough on crime,” increasing differentiation of the social structure that has led to the declining fortunes of rehabilitationism, and a nascent neoliberalization of the welfare state. As a consequence, Europe’s penal landscape may be growing more homogeneous.     

No Evidence of Specific Deterrence under Penal Moderation: Imprisonment and Recidivism in Finland

International literature on prison effects on recidivism tends to find little evidence of specific deterrence. If anything, imprisonment seems more likely to increase than decrease rates of offending. The present study adds to this literature by examining imprisonment and recidivism in Finland, a nation characterized by an exceptionally moderate penal culture. It has been suggested that severe sanctions need to be imposed selectively in order for them to be effective. In this research, we estimated the impact of first imprisonment on recidivism in comparison with offenders sentenced to either suspended imprisonment or community service. Using data from government population registries, we controlled for a large number of legal and extra-legal confounding factors, including criminal history and socio-demographic characteristics. We found no evidence of reduced recidivism as a result of imprisonment. Instead, consistent with prior research, we find evidence of increased recidivism in certain offender categories. We conclude with a discussion of policy implications.     

When Law and Order Returned to Denmark

The international trend toward increased use of punishment has been visible in Denmark since the early 1990s and has accelerated in the first years of the new millennium. As in other countries the trend cannot be explained by changes in crime or a political turn to the right. The increased use of punishment in (post) modern societies undoubtedly has a very complex background. The primary explanation put forth in this article is that it is based on a radical change in the human conditions and in the way people relate to their world. It is an existential revolution and, as such, it has emerged ‘from the bottom’ of society. This suggestion is not offered as an alternative to existing explanations that have been mainly dealing with factors and matters ‘from the top’ of society, such as changes in and of the political system (e.g. populism), the mass media (e.g. alarmism), the social organization of society (e.g. bureaucratization and/or industrialization), and globalization (e.g. imitation and/or internationalization of penal law). Rather, the hypothesis should be viewed as an important supplement to these existing theories and explanations.     

Penal Coercion in Contexts of Social Injustice

This article addresses the theoretical difficulty of justifying the use of penal coercion in circumstances of marked, unjustified social inequality. The intuitive belief behind the text is that in such a context—that of an indecent State—justifying penal coercion becomes very problematic, particularly when directed against the most disfavored members of society.     

The stability of punishment: A follow-up of Blumstein's hypothesis

Because of the intrinsic relativity of social tolerance toward crime, the rate of punishment that a given society inflicts on its criminals is expected to remain relatively constant over the long term, in spite of social changes and increasing or decreasing crime rates. This paper reconstructs the penal behavior of Montreal's criminal justice from 1845 to 1913 and finds that the stability hypothesis, all things considered, works quite well and has much heuristic value. Three problems, somewhat bypassed in the existing literature, are dealt with here: the reliability of penal statistical time series, the direct empirical evidence of stabilization processes, and a rather crude way of measuring prison punishment. It is suggested, furthermore, that the stability hypothesis include in its future argument the impact of increasing policing and that it be confined tentatively to modern western societies.