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Across the Americas, public discussions of crime and penal practices have become increasingly punitive even as political struggles have resulted in a broad shift toward Constitutional democracy. In this chapter, we suggest that the spread of tough anti-crime talk and practice is, paradoxically, a response to efforts to expand and deepen democracy. Punitive crime talk is useful to political actors seeking to limit formal and social citizenship rights for several reasons. First, it ostensibly targets problematic behavior rather than particular social groups, and thus appears to be consistent with democratic norms. At the same time, crime talk often acquires coded meanings that enable those who mobilize it to tap into inter-group hostility, anxieties, and fear. In addition, the emphasis on the threat of crime and disorder offers those seeking to limit democratic expansion a way to legitimate truncated visions of the rights and entitlements of citizenship. Tough anti-crime rhetoric often resonates with those who have experienced or fear the loss of symbolic and/or material benefits as a result of democratic reform. In short, the broad shift toward hyper-penality is, at least in part, a consequence of struggles over political democracy, citizenship and governance across the Americas.

In Seattle and other cities, recent expansions of trespass law make the regulation of public space easier and more extensive. A range of new tools allow police officials to clear spaces of those deemed undesirable; they define zones of exclusion and increase the police's power to make arrests. The use of these tools extends contemporary practices of using criminal law to address instances of urban “disorder.” We draw on data from Seattle to catalog some of these new tools, the capabilities they create, and the implications they generate. One important such implication is that they work to push undesirables so far to the margins – spatially, socially, politically, legally – as to render them far outside the body politic. The use of these techniques thus raises important questions about the advisability of addressing social problems by increasing the power of the criminal law.

This chapter brings together the insights of Stuart Scheingold's work on political criminology and urban social control with subsequent work on the politics of affect or “public feelings.” I argue that Scheingold prefigured the turn to affect in his study of crime politics and that his attention to the way affect-driven politicization plays out differently at different political levels (local, national) usefully complicates the current focus on national politics.

The current neo-liberal trend in the United States insists that citizens must be self-supporting and are free to choose how they will involve themselves in the labor market. However, with the hardening of poverty in the inner cities, it is difficult to maintain the idea that everyone can choose to work. The collision between neo-liberal ideologies and economic crisis is evidenced by contemporary prison labor. The incarceration boom and use of prison labor suggests that work and unemployment is a matter of character, thus helping to maintain the idealization of labor as a marker of rationality, disciplined free will, and hence citizenship.

This chapter evaluates the allure and the danger of attributing race-laden crime politics to displaced anxiety. Stuart Scheingold's “myth of crime and punishment” was a path-setting theory of redirected fear, arguing that socioeconomic “fear of falling” is displaced onto street crime, where the simple morality tale of lawbreaker-versus-state offers the illusion of control. The danger of this theory, I argue, is that it purports to analyze post-1960s’ structural inequality, but it replicates the post-civil rights logic and language of racism as nonstructural – an irrationality, a misplaced emotion, a mere epiphenomenon of class. As a theory that hinges on the malfunction of redirecting structural anxieties onto symbols and scapegoats, the vocabulary of displaced anxieties links punitive (white) subjects to punished (black and Latino) objects through a diagnosis that is, by definition, beyond rationality. The vocabulary of displaced anxiety categorizes the racial politics of law and order as an emotional misfire, thereby occluding the ways in which racial interests are at stake in crime policy and carceral state development.

This paper aims to explore the appropriate role and approach of mediators and investigate whether mediator neutrality and party autonomy should prevail over mediators’ obligations to remain neutral where non-intervention would result in unfair settlements.

The paper arises from polarising and paradoxical opinions of the legitimacy of mediator intervention. This paper relies upon theories proposed in peer-reviewed journals, together with secondary data.

Mediator neutrality has no consistent or comprehensible meaning and is not capable of coherent application. Requirements for mediator neutrality encourage covert influencing tactics by mediators which itself threatens party autonomy. Mediator intervention ensures ethical and moral implementation of justice, removal of epistemological implications of subjective fairness and compensation for lack of pure procedural justice in the mediation process. Party autonomy requires mediators to intervene ensuring parties adequately informed of the law and equal balance of power.

Peer-reviewed journals and secondary data give meaningful insight into perceptions, opinions and beliefs concerning mediator neutrality, party autonomy and fair outcomes. These data comprised unstructured-interviews and questionnaires containing “open-ended” questions.

Mediator neutrality and party autonomy are less important than fair settlements.

Mediator neutrality should be given a contextual meaning; mediation should be more transparent affording the parties opportunity to select a particular type of mediator; transformative and narrative approaches to mediation should be further developed.

This paper exposes the myth of mediator neutrality – a popular concept demanded by and anticipated by the parties but which is practically impossible to deliver. It also shows the need for mediator intervention to ensure a fair outcome.

Whereas a number of standardised psychological measures exist for the assessment of sex offenders (eg Beckett, 1994), very few such measures are appropriate for use with those with learning disabilities. Measures often use complicated language and concepts, fail to include people with learning disabilities in their standardisation samples and use notions of sex and sexuality that, in many cases, are of little relevance to the lives of people with learning disabilities. In order to help in the psychological formulation of Paul (a sex offender with learning disabilities), a Kelly Repertory Grid (Kelly, 1955) was used. The analysis of the grid provided important information about Paul's sense of self, his attitude towards women and his attitude towards relationships in general. This allowed for a systematic approach to assessment and formulation that might not otherwise have been available. It is proposed as a novel starting point in the process of assessment and formulation in this client group, which fits in well with existing cognitive‐behavioural (CBT) approaches to treatment.