DEVELOPMENT AND FRACTURE OF A DISCIPLINE: LEGACIES OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY AT BERKELEY

In the early twentieth century, the University of California—Berkeley opened its doors to police professionals for instruction in “police science.” This program ultimately developed into the full‐fledged School of Criminology, whose graduates helped shape American criminology and criminal justice until well into the 1970s. Scholarship at the School of Criminology eventually fractured into three distinct traditions: “Administrative criminology” applied scientific methods in pursuit of refining law enforcement practices, “law and society” coupled legal scholarship with social scientific methods, and “radical criminology” combined Marxist critiques of the state with community activism. Those scientific traditions relied on competing epistemic premises and normative aspirations, and they drew legitimacy from different sources. Drawing on oral histories and archival data permits a neo‐institutional analysis of how each of these criminological traditions emerged, acquired stability, and subsided. The Berkeley School of Criminology provides fertile ground to examine trends in the development of criminal justice as a profession, criminology as a discipline and its place in elite universities, the uncoupling of criminology from law and society scholarship, and criminal justice policy's disenchantment with the academy. These legacies highlight how the development of modern criminology and the professionalization of American law enforcement find precedent in events that originate at Berkeley.     

About the authors

We have reached what may be an important turning point in the development of criminological thought and of social policy toward crime. The “conservative revolution” in criminology has lost considerable credibility, along with the entire set of minimalist strategies toward the disadvantaged that dominated social policy throughout much of the recent past. A space has opened for the development of a “social environmental” or “human-ecological” approach to crime, which combines a variety of interventions on the individual and family level with an array of broader policies aimed at controlling the social and economic forces that place individuals, families, and communities at risk in the first place.     

Social support as an organizing concept for criminology: Presidential address to the academy of criminal justice sciences

Although “social support” is present as a theme in many criminological writings, it has not been identified explicitly as a concept capable of organizing theory and research in criminology. Drawing on existing criminological and related writings, this address derives a series of propositions that form the foundation, in a preliminary way, for the “social support paradigm” of the study of crime and control. The overriding contention is that whether social support is delivered through government social programs, communities, social networks, families, interpersonal relations, or agents of the criminal justice system, it reduces criminal involvement. Further, I contend that insofar as the social support paradigm proves to be “Good Criminology”—establishing that nonsupportive policies and conditions are criminogenic—it can provide grounds for creating a more supportive, “Good Society.”     

It Takes a Coalition: The Community Impacts of Collaboration

Members of Congress frequently collaborate on policy initiatives, reaching out to colleagues in both parties to find common ground on solutions for the problems faced by their constituents. Using a novel dataset of over 30,000 “Dear Colleague” letters sent by members of the 111th Congress, I use the collaborative relationships that exist in the earliest stages of the policy process to measure the social influence of legislators. I demonstrate that districts represented by members of Congress who are better connected to their colleagues receive a greater share of federal grant money. I argue that this is because collaborative legislators are well‐positioned to be influential allies to strategic bureaucrats who want to maintain a broad base of support for their programs in Congress. Thus, devoting resources to building relationships with their colleagues is one way members of Congress can more effectively support the communities they represent.     

The politics of race and juvenile justice: The “due process revolution” and the conservative reaction

Through the prism of race, this article analyzes the social structural and political context of juvenile justice law reforms over the past half century. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court imposed national legal and equality norms on recalcitrant southern states that still adhered to a segregated Jim Crow legal regime, and these norms provided the impetus for the Supreme Court's juvenile court “due process” decisions in the 1960s. The article then analyzes sociological, criminological, racial factors, media coverage, and political dynamics of the 1970s and 1980s that contributed to the “get tough” legislative reformulation of juvenile justice policies in the 1990s. During this period, conservative Republican politicians pursued a “southern strategy,” used crime as a code word for race for electoral advantage, and advocated “get tough” policies, which led to punitive changes in juvenile justice laws and practices and have had a disproportionate impact on racial minorities.     

Chutzpah even before the heavenly court

This article discusses how classic and contemporary films can be used to examine justice and peacemaking themes in personal, social, and criminal justice contexts. Thematic topics include poverty, homelessness, the Holocaust, racial prejudice, prison violence, and religious intolerance. The author attempts to illustrate how transformative justice can occur through individual acts of compassion and courage in difficult circumstances.     

Wild Justice Redux: What We Know About Social Justice in Animals and Why It Matters

Social justice in animals is beginning to attract interest in a broad range of academic disciplines. Justice is an important area of study because it may help explain social dynamics among individuals living in tightly-knit groups, as well as social interactions among individuals who only occasionally meet. In this paper, we provide an overview of what is currently known about social justice in animals and offer an agenda for further research. We provide working definitions of key terms, outline some central research questions, and explore some of the challenges of studying social justice in animals, as well as the promise of the work we're proposing. Finally, we suggest why continued research into animal cognition and social behavior has significant ethical implications for our treatment of nonhuman animals.     

Introduction

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ belief that the Constitution calls for the principle of free thought—“not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate”—was severely tested when the father of a fallen Marine sued members of the Westboro Baptist Church who picketed near his son's funeral service. Consistent with its traditions and precedents, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 8-1 that the First Amendment protected church members’ offensive speech from tort liability. In ruling as it did, the Court properly chose to consider only the case elements it was presented, refused to create a new category of unprotected speech, and in turn eroded the reach of intentional infliction of emotional distress in speech-related cases.

“The Court is out of the business of creating new categories of unprotected speech. Get over it.” ¹ Kathleen Sullivan, attorney and former dean, Stanford University Law School, remarks at Communication Law in the Digital Age conference of the Practising Law Institute, New York (Nov. 10, 2011).      

Transforming Fair Use Online: The Ninth Circuit's Productive-Use Analysis of Visual Search Engines

Courts have increasingly looked to the concept of “transformative use” to determine whether the use of a copyrighted work is protected under the fair use doctrine. Judge Pierre Leval's definition of transformative use, adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States in its 1994 opinion in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., requires that a transformative use must (1) be socially beneficial, (2) be used in a different way or purpose from the original, and (3) add value to the original by using it as raw material to create something new. This article examines the fair use analysis undertaken by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in two recent cases involving visual search engines and concludes that the court's test of transformative use ignored the language and the meaning of the Campbell definition and instead equated a finding of a different purpose with a finding of a transformative use. This departure from traditional transformative use analysis, if generally adopted by the court, would represent a significant and potentially troubling doctrinal shift in fair use analysis.     

Environmental Justice as Scalar Parity: Lessons From Nuclear Waste Management

The development of major infrastructure projects, such as power stations, waste facilities or transport networks, commonly raises concerns of how to ensure environmental justice within policy and planning. Environmental justice has been divergently theorised, though procedural/participative, distributive and recognition-related elements are commonly cited. With growing inter-disciplinarity between normative ethics and the geographic social sciences, there is a renewed interest in the scalar aspects of environmental justice (particularly in relation to infrastructure projects)—how the framing of environmental decisions at multiple and conflicting scales results in disparities between locally affected communities, and regional and national decision-making authorities. In analysing this problem, the paper has three principal aims. The first is to outline the problem of scalar environmental justice. The second is to explore a practical case of scalar environmental justice, by examining the decision-making processes surrounding radioactive waste management in the UK. The third is to outline a new concept of “scalar parity” derived from the radioactive waste policy process, whereby local communities and regional and national political stakeholders are charged with balancing their competing interests through the “fulcrum” of a partnership organisation, to fairly resolve environmental justice disputes. This scalar parity model is used as an exemplar of good practice in environmental justice resolution that could be applied to other major infrastructure projects.     

Focally Concerned About Focal Concerns: A Conceptual and Methodological Critique of Sentencing Disparities Research

Abstract

“Focal concerns” is the predominant theoretical framework in criminology for explaining disparities in sentencing outcomes. While the framework has generated a large body of empirical scholarship, its postulates remain inadequately tested in the criminological literature. In this paper, I offer a conceptual and methodological critique of focal concerns as it is being deployed in a large body of sentencing research. I first trace the genealogy of the “focal concerns” concept and detail its current articulation. I then describe the body of work that has reduced “focal concerns” to a commonsense psychological construct, and illustrate the fallacies of logic and paucity of direct theory development and testing that weaken the explanatory value of the framework. I conclude by building on Ulmer’s recent call to treat criminal courts as “inhabited institutions” to assess approaches that are more social scientifically robust and empirically testable for understanding how sentencing disparity is produced.     

The Evolution of Balanced and Restorative Justice

Maloney, Armstrong, and Romig presented a portrait of “Joey,” who was the exemplar of what was wrong with the juvenile justice system, in 1988 when they published The Balanced Approach in this Journal. In response, they reimagined a juvenile justice system predicated on balancing three fundamental goals—protection of community, accountability to victims, and development of competencies to prepare juvenile court‐involved youth for productive roles in their communities. The authors examine the evolution of balanced and restorative justice and re‐imagine how Joey's life may have been different at critical junctures of his juvenile court involvement.     

环境正义:环境法学的范式转移

正义是弥久常新的议题,随着"环境时代"的到来,正义也被赋予新的含义,环境正义成为环境时代的正义范式。环境是社会建构的,环境问题的真正根源是社会关系和社会结构的非正义性。环境正义主张所有地区与人群包括弱势群体有免于遭受环境损害的自由,有对干净的土地、空气、水和其他自然环境平等享用的权利,经由社会资源的公平分配达致可持续发展以提升民众的福祉。因此,环境法学研究应当走出"全称命题"与"重自然轻人类"的传统路径,其范式应当转移到环境正义议题。     

PROMOTING THE PROCEDURAL JUSTICE IN CHINA

Maintaining social justice is the fundamental goal of legal systems. In Chinese, the compositions of characters have symbolic meanings, and the word “law” has the meaning of “as even as water” and “getting rid of unevenness.” It is true that people have different understandings as to the meaning of justice under different social conditions and at different times in history. However, regardless of time and place, justice has been the goal that is pursued in judicial activities.     

Promoting a culture of fairness: police training,procedural justice,and compliance

Objectives

Academics and practitioners alike are concerned about the potential “double-edged sword” of procedural justice. In the organizational context, procedural justice is expected to increase compliance with supervisors. However, blind, unthinking, or “hard” compliance with supervisors, may lead to anti-organizational behavior and misconduct. The present study examines the moderating effect of a police recruit cultural training program on the relationship between procedural justice and compliance with police supervisors. We expect that providing cultural training will moderate the relationship between procedural justice and “hard” compliance.

Methods

Participants were police recruits at the Queensland Police Academy who were randomly assigned to an experimental (Voice 4 Values) or control condition (business-as-usual training) upon entry into the academy. Recruits in both groups were surveyed pre- and post- training to capture perceptions of procedural justice and compliance with supervisors.

Results

Results suggest that procedural justice mattered less for predicting “hard” or unthinking compliance among the recruits who received the Voice 4 Values cultural training package, compared to those who did not receive the training.

Conclusions

We conclude that while procedural justice may be of interest to policing organizations, it is important that it is not used as a tool to encourage unthinking compliance. We find cultural training reduces the effect of procedural justice on unthinking or “hard” compliance.

     

Spatial justice and criminal victimization

Spatial variation in crime rates generally has been attributed to differences in culture, economic status, and the social organization of communities. Rarely have policies and practices of criminal justice professionals been examined as causes of this variation. If these policies and practices do place citizens at a higher risk of victimization, a sense of fairness requires that all communities in a region share equally in this increase. This article examines the spatial justice resulting from sentencing practices in Pennsylvania. It demonstrates that certain locations in Philadelphia bear an unequal burden because of these practices. The relatively high crime rates of these areas are due partly to decisions made by criminal justice professionals.     

One blood

This article demonstrates the connectedness of members of the human family with each other and all of creation; discusses the nature of injury, sin, and woundedness; and offers examples of how cultivating countercultural appreciation for silence and self-knowledge is the basis for reconciliation and justice. the article also draws significantly on a number of spiritual traditions and contemporary psychology to flesh out the teachings of jesus, "love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for those who persecute you." although many traditions are cited, the primary lens used for viewing this teaching is midrash, or reflection, on the aramaic language and culture--the language and culture of jesus. with these various spiritual and psychological perspectives, connections are drawn between our community of inner voices, our exterior community, whether family, intentional, activist, or faith community, and the global/cosmic community.     

Social Justice and Individual Ethics*

Abstract. If one is committed to a “Rawlsian” conception of justice, is one not also necessarily committed to a “Christian” personal ethics? MOE explicitly, if one believes that social justice requires the maximinning of material conditions, should one not use one's time and resources as well as one can in order to assist the poorest? The paper offers a very partial answer to these questions by arguing for the following two claims: (1) Contrary to what is implied by some egalitarian critics of Rawls, the idea of a well-ordered society does not require maximin-guided choices at the individual level, and hence leaves room for legitimate incentive payments. (2) Despite Rawls's own neglect of this fact, a limited form of patriotism does constitute an individual “natural duty” following from a commitment to maximin social justice.     

What's “New” About the Balanced Approach?

Over the past decade, many juvenile justice professionals became familiar with the “Balanced Approach as a new mission for juvenile probation. In recent months, a number of jurisdictions have adopted the Balanced Approach, by statute or policy, as the mission for their juvenile courts and juvenile justice systems. However, a great deal of misunderstanding persists about the meaning and practical differences between the Balanced Approach and other intervention models. While both quality and consistency of implementation of “balanced” policy and practice vary widely, some juvenile justice managers are using this new mission as a tool or “roadmap” for comprehensive re-structuring of juvenile justice systems and agencies. This paper argues that when viewed as a guide to systemic, rather than programmatic, reform, the Balanced Approach can be clearly distinguished from both the traditional individual treatment and the new retributive/punitive juvenile justice missions. Six critical differences between the Balanced Approach and these missions are described.