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Theorists have placed considerable emphasis on the role that political factors play in shaping jurisdictional use of the death penalty. However, scholars have yet to empirically examine whether these political explanations account for reliance on this punishment across counties in the United States. Furthermore, empirical research that has examined the political factors associated with the dramatic decline in the use of the death penalty in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been limited. In order to address these gaps in the literature, this study examines whether the variables derived from three political perspectives are associated with use of death sentences across 2,572 counties in the United States from 1990 to 2010. The results from this study indicate support for the key propositions within the partisan politics, religious fundamentalist sentiment, and economic threat hypotheses. However, in contrast to the results from prior studies, no support was shown for the direct relationship between the size of African American populations and local reliance on the death penalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines insights from historical research and quantitative analyses that have attempted to explain changes in incarceration rates in the United States. We use state-level decennial data from 1970 to 2010 ( N = 250) to test whether recent theoretical models derived from historical research that emphasize the importance of specific historical periods in shaping the relative importance of certain social and political factors explain imprisonment. Also drawing on historical work, we examine how these key determinants differed in Sunbelt states, that is, the states stretching across the nation's South from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, from the rest of the nation. Our findings suggest that the relative contributions of violent crime, minority composition, political ideology, and partisanship to imprisonment vary over time. We also extend our analysis beyond mass incarceration's rise to analyze how factors associated with prison expansion can explain its stabilization and contraction in the early twenty-first century. Our findings suggest that most of the factors that best explained state incarceration rates in the prison boom era lost power once imprisonment stabilized and declined. We find considerable support for the importance of historical contingencies in shaping state-level imprisonment trends, and our findings highlight the enduring importance of race in explaining incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth in US incarcerated populations has produced unintended negative consequences for other justice system agencies. The community corrections field is faced with two related problems stemming from prison growth: (1) significant growth in populations under supervision and (2) populations with higher needs for service. I apply a theoretical framework adapted from organizational sociological research to address change and stasis as isomorphic processes. Criminologists rarely situate the community corrections field within broader theoretical perspectives. Instead, correctional researchers have studied the emergence, adjustment, and use of prisons in modern society, with community supervision considered a part of institutional corrections. I argue that contemporary explanations for correction policies need to be refined to account for specific trends within the community corrections field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A federal judicial panel has recently ordered the state of California to reduce its landmark prison population by 40,000 inmates over two years, from 170,000 to around 130,000. Besides addressing worrisome fiscal problems, just how California and other states deal with penal downsizing is important, both for the present needs of public safety and for future justice planning. This paper addresses what appears to be the next phase in our national experiment in mass incarceration: penal downsizing. I argue for the adoption of a restorative \"human security\" policy orientation. The human security framework was developed by the United Nations and has been described as \"freedom from want and freedom from fear.\" Attending to the human security needs of individuals, families, and communities, can reorient justice systems away from largely discredited punitive justice models and provide direction for the difficult public policy choices that lay ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the reforms made to the Virginian penal policy against the slave population from 1800-1860. It compares the theoretical severity of the penal code with its reality, which was often resulted in more lenient penalties. The author studies the commuting of death penalties to deportation sentences for slaves, concluding that death was only reserved for the most serious crimes. This leniency, which, according to the author, was practiced by the slave-owning class as a method of legitimizing their social system of slavery and reducing criticisms from Northerners and abolitionists, is also explored.

The publication of The Violence of Incarceration, a collection of essays on imprisonment and state violence in the US, UK and Australia, edited by Phil Scraton and Jude McCulloch, provides an opportunity to reflect on the steady convergence of mainland Europe's penal policies with those of the US. This convergence undermines any notion of a European moral high ground in relation to incarceration and reflects a general trend among western states of increasing acceptability of violence, war and even torture as solutions to social and political problems. From this perspective, the cruelties at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib are not isolated examples of excess but, rather, have much in common with everyday practices in domestic US and European prisons; the focus of this article is this wider structural shift in incarceration practices, linked to, but going far beyond, the 'war on terror'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, the United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. The emergence and consolidation of the US carceral state are a major milestone in American political development. The explosive growth of the prison population and the retributive turn in US penal policy are well documented. But the political causes and consequences of this massive expansion are not well understood. This is starting to change. During the past decade or so, scholars in criminology, sociology, and law, recently joined by a few political scientists, have produced outstanding works on the connection between politics and the origins of the carceral state. Recently, the wider political consequences and analytical implications of the carceral state are a new and expanding area of interest. The carceral state has grown so huge that it has begun to transform fundamental democratic institutions, from free and fair elections to an accurate and representative census. The findings of scholars of the carceral state prompt us to rethink claims about issues in the study of American politics that may seem far afield from criminal justice, including voter turnout and the "vanishing voter," the achievements of the US model of neoliberal economic development in the 1990s, and the triumph of the modern Republican Party in national politics. Scholarship on the carceral state also raises other important issues about power and resistance for marginalized and stigmatized groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out to unravel the overall picture of the dominant social models in the Western world - that of the European Union and that of the United States. The American model, or "American (social) dream," is put into direct comparison with its European counterpart, the "European social dream," using the method of juxtaposition to analyze, in a strictly normative (i.e. evaluative) manner, the current status, trends, and future applicability of each model under scrutiny. The authors conclude that the costs for non-social policy are staggering. That is, the implementation of a comprehensive and, more importantly, effective welfare state system is essential for the survival of societies and the continuation of their particular path of social development. The absence thereof leads to more costly side-effects. The juxtaposition of both the American and the European social dreams leads to the conclusion that the former is built on unsustainable notions of penal policy, while the latter offers a real win-win solution, in terms of investment in sustainable, and hence efficient and effective, social welfare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term Zero Tolerance has become a familiar feature of the crime control landscape. In recent times it has been deployed regularly by politicians, police managers, policy-makers and the media. Though it has been used in connection with a number of different policy initiatives, Zero Tolerance is most closely associated with policing and, in particular, with a set of policing strategies adopted by the New York Police Department in the 1990s. This article explores the origins of this most potent of crime control symbols, and examines how it has subsequently been developed, deployed and disseminated. It concludes with an examination of how and why policy actors deploy symbolically powerful terms in the context of contemporary crime politics in the USA and UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leading contemporary branches of punishment theory stemming from the traditional schools of consequentialism and retributivism support a role for public deliberation to secure core values communicated through punishment and to encourage greater accountability for punishment practices. Drawing on Habermas's democratic theory to develop the ideal of public deliberation, this article explores how punishment policies might be subjected to public rational-critical debate. Two contrasting cases exemplify the importance of the deliberative standards stressed by Habermas. Neglecting standards of rational-critical debate results in mere opinion rather than public opinion, the shortcomings of which are illustrated by three strikes legislation where punishment policy emerged from the public but in an unreflective way. In contrast, recent innovations in the imposition of punishment represented by problem-solving courts, like the drug, domestic violence, mental health and community courts developing in jurisdictions around the United States, show how rational-critical public debate can flourish. Habermas's procedural theory does not advocate particular principles, but shows how civic accountability for punishment reflecting multiple values can gain deeper roots in public culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has not led, and is unlikely to lead, to a global homogenization of penal policy and practices. Drawing on a study of penal systems in 12 contemporary capitalist countries (the United States of America, England and Wales, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Sweden, Finland and Japan), this article demonstrates that the political economies of such countries can be broadly categorized as neo-liberal, conservative corporatist, social democratic or oriental corporatist. This categorization is strongly related to the punitiveness of the penal culture and the rates of imprisonment to be found in each country. The reasons for this association are discussed. One crucial factor may be the degree to which societies with different types of political economy are 'inclusive' rather than 'exclusive' towards deviant individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the evolution of penal policy in Canada in recent years. In many respects, Canada occupies a unique position with respect to criminal justice. The principal influence on penal policy development has been the United States, .yet at the same time developments in the United Kingdom have also been important. One result is that policy development in recent years has tended to follow a middle path between the more extreme and radical American route (that has given rise to policies suck as "three strikes" legislation) and the more conservative European reforms. Canada's policies with respect to punishment have been affected by a number of influences, including: the presence (advocacy groups; the reporting by the news media of high-profile tragedies such as the Montreal massacre of fourteen young women; the restrictions of budgetary constraints; and the intervention of several federal elections in which crime became an important electoral issue. In this respect, penal policy development in Canada echoes trends in other jurisdictions. The ,federal government, which is responsible ,for policy development (but not the administration of those policies) has attempted to pursue a dual-track policy. One branch of this policy has sought to reduce the use of imprisonment and thereby cut criminal justice expenditures. The other track has sought to placate public" and political pressure on the government by introducing more repressive penal policies, including severe minimum penalties and higher maximum penalties for young offenders. This paper reviews recent developments in the critical areas of sentencing and parole, and draws some general conclusions about criminal justice policy development in this country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]