SELF-DEFENSE,CULPABILITY, AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

This paper has a threefold purpose: to question the adequacy of two familiar proposals for explaining the permissibility of harming others in self-defense, to suggest an alternative explanation, and to answer some objections to this latter explanation. By and large, discussions of the proposals whose adequacy I will question focus on what they imply about the permissibility of self-defense in controversial cases. I will argue here that the proposals themselves contain large and significant theoretical gaps. Accordingly, examining their implications for controversial cases is premature, since they don’t adequately explain permissible self-defense in even the clearest cases—that is, those in which people defend themselves against “culpable attackers”.     

FEMINIST THEORY,CRIME, AND JUSTICE*

Feminist research has expanded beyond its origins in Women's Studies to influence the more traditionally bounded academic disciplines. Criminology has not been immune to these excursions. This paper presents an overview of feminist theory/methods and its applications within select areas of crime and justice studies. Points of intra-theoretical divergence as well as directions for future feminist contributions are noted.     

CRIMINOLOGY, CRIMINAL JUSTICE, AND THE WAR ON CRIME

This detailed assessment reviews the nation's “war on crime” during the past ten years, examines what has heen accomplished in that period, and outlines the likely prospects for the future. Although important and tangible progress in improving criminal justice has been made. it has not produced relief from high crime rates. In fact, “things are worse than ever.” For the future, there will be both more advances and frustrations in the war on crime. It is emphasized that the progress achieved so far has been to create a more efficient and fairer rystem of justice and that we should take pride in this. If not eclipsed by the quarterly release of crime statistics, we can maintain our momentum and gain even more significant improvements in the next decade.     

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND FAMILY COURT REFORM

Creating a unified family court, or any type of family court reform, may have only a minimal impact if it simply changes the structure of how judges do business rather than addresses the structure of the child welfare system itself. The authors argue that family court reform must place social justice at its center. First, they discuss profound flaws in the child welfare system that make poor and minority families especially vulnerable to coercive state intervention. Second, they describe two approaches to child welfare cases–family systems theory and therapeutic justice–that can help to guide reform efforts directed at addressing these structural flaws. Finally, they suggest ways in which family law scholarship can assist in creating a social justice agenda for family court reform.     

THE PREAPPEAL CONFERENCE AND EFFECTIVE JUSTICE

Appellate courts—both state and federal—have experienced dramatic increases in court business since 1960. A popular policy to meet this demand has been to encourage litigants to end their appeals short of decision by the judges. Few of these programs have been evaluated; and of those few the evidence is either insufficient to support claims of effectiveness, or demonstrate that some preappeal procedures do not work.     

PRIVATE JUSTICE SYSTEMS AND CRIME REPORTING

The burgeoning need for private police to complement the activities of public police has added a new dimension to issues of reliability and validity of official statistics. For purposes of this study. shoplifting data generated by the private police sector were gathered from matched pairs of retail stores. The findings showed significant differences between stores by age and gender. Partitioning of contingency tables to localize the association to a particular category produced no systematic conclusions between the matched pairs of stores or among the full range of sampled stores. Differential law enforcement exercised by an untrained and unregulated private police force calls into question the concept of justice and the guarantees of due process.     

PROFILING AND POLICE LEGITIMACY: PROCEDURAL JUSTICE,ATTRIBUTIONS OF MOTIVE,AND ACCEPTANCE OF POLICE AUTHORITY*

This paper reports the results of four studies that investigate racial profiling as an attribution about police motives. Each study explores, first, the types of police behavior that heighten or lessen the occurrence of profiling attributions and, second, the consequences of such attributions. Results support prior studies in finding that judgments about whether the police are profiling are associated with the level of public support for the police. The studies then extend the analysis of subjective profiling judgments by examining their antecedents. The findings support the procedural justice hypothesis that the fairness with which the police exercise their authority influences whether members of the public view the police as profiling.     

INTERROGATING RACE,CRIME, AND JUSTICE IN A TIME OF UNEASE AND RACIAL TENSION

This address has a twofold purpose. First, as the first African American to serve as president of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), I celebrate the contributions of scholars of color to the study of crime and criminal justice and to the ASC. I do so by pointing out the accomplishments of several African American scholars whose contributions are numerous and exemplary. I also emphasize that African Americans are joined in their efforts by scholars of multiple other colors, including, Latinos/as, Native Americans, and Asians. Second, in view of responses to apparent unrest and racial tension in U.S. society that is signaled by lethal violence between police and U.S. residents of color, I offer four recommendations regarding how we might proceed with our research, and report our findings, in ways that improve the likelihood of helping to inform societal debates and policy developments around crime and justice issues. In my conclusion, I encourage the ASC to 1) continue to grow the diversity of its membership and to integrate the research and findings of scholars of color into the mainstream of criminology; and 2) take further steps to conduct research and share findings with diverse audiences to ensure that post‐truth does not become normative regarding crime and justice issues.