Search Results

This chapter proposes a way of dealing with concentrated incarceration, focusing on community justice. Given the difficulty of achieving meaningful sentencing reform in the current policy environment, this chapter offers a conceptualization of community justice as an alternative that promises a set of new values that might lead us to new ways of justice. This chapter explains that community justice initiatives could thrive under a regime of reduced imprisonment and they could also contribute to reductions in imprisonment. The elements of community justice include a focus on high-incarceration places, attention to norms and values in those places and attempts to improve schools, jobs, and housing as target.

Are closely comparable countries following England and Wales by moving towards the development of systematic sentencing guidelines by a Sentencing Council? And if they are not, how are these different paths explicable? This chapter examines the path being pursued in Scotland. It will be shown that, with only a brief interruption, Scottish governments have pursued a self-consciously permissive approach to sentencing reform, the judicial ‘ownership’ of sentencing policy and emphasised a voluntary approach to the use of non-custodial sentences. Yet while the approaches of both jurisdictions clearly differ and those differences are magnified in political discourse, they nonetheless present shared problems, not least achieving impact on sentencing practice.

This chapter examines how the 1994 legislation interacts with prior law to create a complicated and often inconsistent set of principles that guide the punishment of felons in California. It looks at the theory and practice of Three Strikes in the broader context of sentencing throughout the criminal justice system in California. It shows how the new law influenced the distribution of punishments among crimes and criminals, particularly the most serious punishments imposed. The first part of the chapter traces the modern history of sentencing reform in California. A second part profiles the mix of theories that now applies to different classes of felony offenders in the current statutory pattern. The third part uses data from the study to assess the impact of the new law on proportionality of punishment and on sentencing disparity.

By the end of the 1960s, anti-institutionalism had extended beyond mental health and bled into prison reform. This chapter tracks the rise and fall of efforts to find alternatives to prisons. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, changes in psychiatry, politics, and the law led to a deinstitutionalization in both mental health and corrections policy making. Not only did politicians and advocates look for alternatives to mental hospitals, they also sought alternatives to prisons. They expanded probation, parole, and furlough and created community corrections initiatives such as halfway houses and work-release programs. The number of people in prisons and jails fell, even during a time of increased policing. These reforms came under attack, however, as politicians depicted people in prison as dangerous criminals and ushered in harsh sentencing reforms. A law and order politics that relied on racial discrimination halted efforts to deinstitutionalize prisons. By the mid-1970s, after more than a decade of decline, new prison construction began and the number of imprisoned people nationwide rose. These changes had a devastating effect on individuals with mental health conditions. Many of them were caught in the web of this new era of mass incarceration.

This chapter explores how the 1980s hastened the shrinking of state mental health services and the rise of more punitive practices. President Ronald Reagan supported the continued downsizing of mental hospitals at both the state and federal levels. Homelessness and poverty became more immediate social concerns, since many states lacked adequate community-based mental health services. In Pennsylvania, Republican governor Dick Thornburgh closed mental hospitals and cut social welfare programs, strengthening neoliberalism in the state’s government. At the same time, he supported law and order policies and sentencing reforms, which targeted urban African American communities. The new prison construction siphoned money away from social welfare services. Many states even turned their abandoned mental institutions into prisons, and the chapter studies Farview State Hospital and the Retreat State Hospital as examples. In response, advocates at organizations such as the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania fought for the right to the least restrictive environment. They promoted adequate medical, mental health, and social services outside of institutions and worked in coalition with others to ethically close the Philadelphia State Hospital. This effort offered a model for alleviating the problems of deinstitutionalization.

This chapter considers the case for recasting the moral values that inform sentencing and the policy implications of such a fundamental change of approach. It suggests that prospects for promoting social justice through sentencing continue to be constrained by existing penal values, with procedural justice, communication systems, and decision-making evaluated against this governance framework. The chapter argues for new foundational principles and explores how such a moral transition might be effected through structural reforms to domestic sentencing. Emphasis is placed on the difficulties of recasting values and structures to reflect sentencing’s changed role as a tool for engaging with social justice issues. The chapter examines specific areas of policy change within England and Wales and the problem of moving from theory to practice through the analysis of recent government reforms, highlighting how sentencing policy and practice might respond more effectively to changes in social values and moral diversity.

The abolition of the prison system in the United States is not only a political and economic imperative for those concerned about the meaning of justice, it is also a spiritual necessity in a society that has turned the imprisonment of massive numbers of human beings, two-thirds of whom are people of color, into a brutal growth industry. The journey to abolition is intensely human; it is a volatile, complicated journey into the nature of relationships at the intersections of race, gender and gender identity, culture, class, and sexuality. It is a journey not only into the violence individuals do to one another but also into the systemic violence of the state. This chapter recounts a messy journey through fear, silence, and racism toward abolition while incarcerated in the Denver County Jail. The author worked for the reform of dehumanizing conditions and for law enforcement training that would reduce racism and misogyny. She also advocated for sentencing reform and for more educational and rehabilitation programs for women prisoners.

This chapter offers philosophical support for sentencing reform by defending the claim that the disproportionate application of punishment to disadvantaged social groups is unjust. After describing the noncomparativist challenge in more detail, it argues that Levinasian conceptions of desert and responsibility enable a theory of penal justice according to which comparative considerations have priority over noncomparative ones. In so doing, it shows that the noncomparativist challenge can be met. The chapter concludes by considering whether Levinasian conceptions of desert and responsibility show members of socially advantaged groups to be more blameworthy for their wrongdoing than members of disadvantaged groups. It argues that the advantaged are more blameworthy for committing crimes that are equal in severity to crimes committed by the disadvantaged.

This chapter deals with contesting the sentencing guidelines regime put in place decades earlier. The chapter begins with newly appointed Gregory Presnell’s questioning of the 1984 guidelines as established in 1984. The chapter analyses Presnell’s decisions while also examining the disparities of sentencing guideline for those convicted of possession of crack versus powder cocaine. The chapter then turns to the increasing unpopularity of the Patriot Act, and challenges of the act in the Middle District. U.S. Attorney Paul I. Perez’s defence of the act is discussed. The chapter then turns the prosecution of one of the the Middle District’s most controversial defendants: University of South Florida engineering professor Sami Al-Arian, who was accused of funding and supporting terrorist acts while a professor. Several cases are included. A number of prosecutions of persons employing immigrant laborers in inhumane conditions are included. The cases of other foreign nationals charged with doing illegal business in the district are covered. Among these are cases involving illegal arms sales, international drug smuggling, money laundering, illegal importation of exotic animals, the illegal entry of war criminals into the U.S., and disputes involving conflicting international claims of treasure salvors.

This chapter focuses on the nation’s War on Drugs and how this campaign affected the Middle District of Florida during the Reagan years. After a brief discussion of the advent of the Cali and Medellin cartels, the impact of illegal cocaine importation into the district is discussed. The chapter then turns Congress’s passage of numerous federal crime statues written combat the drug war. The proliferation of federal statutes to combat crime placed added strain on the judiciary to keep pace with the growing flood of criminal cases in their courts. Several high profile drug prosecutions in the Middle District are addressed, including drug king pin, Carlos Lehder Rivas. Other major prosecutions are chronicled: Ronnie Lee Tape, Jeffrey Matthews, Denny McLain, and others. The chapter discusses the expanded federal law enforcement presence in Fort Myers, in an effort to combat the drug trade, as well as the coordination of county, state, and federal agencies in prosecuting drug cases. Finally, the chapter concludes with extensive coverage of the prosecution of conspirators associated with the Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI), the first successful prosecution of global money laundering in American history.