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This essay engages the work of sociologist George Herbert Mead and political theorist William E. Connolly, applying a reading of their understanding of the criminal other to the development of Illinois’ and South Carolina's penal systems at the turn of the nineteenth century. Despite an influx of European immigrants, Illinois politicians and prison officials fashioned an approach to corrections that relied on rehabilitation through assimilation as the core component of disciplining its convict population. In contrast to this approach, South Carolina fashioned a penology based upon the principle of exclusion, one that enshrined retribution over rehabilitation in the paradigm of punishment. The essay concludes by comparing the importance of racial and ethno-cultural politics in shaping regional and national debates over correctional policy and by examining the primary function race plays in explaining the current backlash against the rehabilitative ideal informing so much of contemporary penology.

Prior researchers have documented significant effects of family violence on adult children’s own risk for intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet, few studies have examined whether exposure to family violence while growing up as well as emerging adults’ reports of their current peers’ behaviors and attitudes influenced self-reports of intimate partner violence perpetration. The current study based on interviews with a large, heterogeneous sample of men and women assessed the degree to which current peers’ attitudes and behaviors contributed to risk of intimate partner violence perpetration, net of family violence.

Using data from the Toledo Adolescent Relationships Study (TARS) (n = 928), we examined associations between family violence indicators, peers’ behaviors and attitudes, and self-reports of intimate violence perpetration among adults ages 22–29. We used ordinary least squares regression and controlled for other known correlates of IPV.

For men and women, we found a significant relationship between witnessing parental violence during adolescence and IPV perpetration in emerging adulthood, and a positive relationship between current peers’ IPV experiences and attitudes and respondents’ perpetration. We also found that for respondents who reported higher, compared with lower, peer involvement in partner violence, the effects of parental violence were stronger.

We provided a more comprehensive assessment of peers’ IPV to this body of research, which tends to focus on family violence. Studies have examined peers’ attitudes and behavior during adolescence, but we extended this work by examining both peer and familial influences into emerging adulthood.

The number of reported cases for Japanese Penal Code offenses amounted to 2.5 million in 1997 and increased every year, reaching 3.6 million in 2002 and 2003. However, the number decreased from 2004 to 2008 to 2.5 million. Almost throughout the same period, the number of cases and persons cleared remained comparatively steady between 1.3 and 1.5 million and 1 and 1.2 million respectively, but the latter finally fell below one million in 2011. In this chapter I describe such a rise and fall as a “Mt. Fuji-line” that appears as a mountain-shaped curve on a graph.

The Japanese government reacted to the increase of crimes, which was seen as a reflection of a weakened or broken security and safety. The most effective policy, it was thought therefore, was to increase the number of policemen. This policy followed the strategy of New York City, made famous by its then Mayor Giuliani, who declared “A War on Crimes” and increased the number of police officers by ten thousand to revive New York from “A Crime City.” As criminologists have experienced so-called “labeling shocks” and learned from the approach of symbolic interactionism, criminologists can no longer simply accept that statistical data reflect weakened or broken security issues. Agencies of criminal justice, especially police officers, use such data as statistical evidence to show that the crime situation got worse.

I argue that the rise and fall of crimes, especially the increasing and decreasing number of reported cases, reflects changes of crime control policies. I analyze the Mt. Fuji-line from 1998 to 2011. The increase of crimes as well as the weakened or broken security and safety functioned as evidence that justified the reinforcement of police power and a new criminal justice shift for a lay judge system in the rising phase (1998–2003). Since the concept of a bigger justice system needs, however, lots of personnel and material sources, the Japanese government eventually gave up sustaining it. Agencies used their discretion to skip petty crimes and divert suspects because of a reduction of excessive burdens and inappropriate prison population, but they stepped into a new stage to adjust their burdens, keeping their own empowered framework of criminal justice system. These changing policies resulted in the reduction of crime in a falling phase (2004–2011).

These phenomena are explained from the viewpoint of Jürgen Habermas’ crisis theory. I conclude that the framework and capacity of the Japanese criminal justice system grew far bigger and that original functions of crime control through criminal procedure became weaker by being outsourced to other peripheral social systems and agencies. Thus the crime control system has been successful in bringing about a net-widening effect.

Notions of justice and punishment seem inextricably entwined in the oldest conceptual traditions of the West. Changing notions of just state responses to citizen crime can tell us much about the culture and the politics of a given society. Yet, often those notions are radically contradictory, mutually exclusive, and/or counterproductive of the goals they seek, together, to achieve in the society.This paper traces a genealogy of punishment rituals practiced in the United States and maps the relationship of reigning ideas of just recompense onto transforming political and cultural realities. This paper highlights the multiple paradoxes that have arisen in the U.S. in the attempt to visualize and realize appropriate and just punishment practices in the state.

This study reveals that despite the negative effects of migration, the Tanzanian government has not done enough to address migration-related health issues. This is owing to inadequate data or information about effects of migration in the country. Dodoma region, the focus of this study, is selected for its migration-inducing factors as they relate to the declining health status of its inhabitants. Harsh climatic conditions causing irregular and inadequate rainfall and prolonged drought have led to a severe decline of the health of the poor. The region is entirely dependent on subsistence agriculture and livestock production. The small-scale production is locally practiced at household level. Extreme poverty motivates rural people to migrate to cities with the main migrant groups being middle school (about 13 to 15 years old) and high school dropouts (15 to 18 years old), and youth including young parents (18 to 35 years old). The rural-urban migration conjoined with harsh climatic conditions significantly downsizes local population, available agricultural labor force, and further endangers food security. More importantly, however, due to exposure to HIV in the cities, most migrants who are unable to find city jobs return home terminally ill with HIV/AIDS, which further adds to impoverishment of rural families and to downsizing of rural population.

The Russian Federation has taken a harsh, punitive approach towards drug policy. There are limited health and social services available to people who use drugs and widespread, documented discrimination within the criminal justice system. Amongst those who use drugs, the proportion of women who use injection drugs is estimated to be approximately 30 per cent. While a minority, women who use drugs are often disproportionately impacted by drug policy enforcement and remain underrepresented within research. Moreover, women who use drugs experience specific gender-based forms of discrimination within social, health and criminal justice systems, which result in particular vulnerabilities. This chapter examines policing and sentencing practices within the Russian criminal justice system and their gendered impacts, especially concerning women who use drugs. Human rights reports and court cases as well as interviews from civil society organisation (CSO) workers are analysed in order to understand how gender roles, gender-based discrimination and gender-based violence shape these interactions and result in disproportionate negative impacts on the lives of women who use drugs. This analysis also highlights key areas that need greater involvement and attention from researchers, policymakers and advocates.