Search results

In this chapter I discuss judicial contributions to Italian penality. I look at the penal incentives produced by interactions between judicial and political classes, and ask whether judges and prosecutors have been forces for punitiveness or moderation. I discuss the relevance of the Italian case for broader analyses of Western penality.

My chapter offers a political-sociological account of judicial contributions to punishment. I analyse the penal incentives created by different national institutional set-ups, specifically addressing judicial contributions to penality using a framework developed by Joachim Savelsberg and Nicola Lacey. The framework examines judicial structure in the institutional context looking at the penal implications of bureaucratisation of the judiciary and the capacity for co-ordination between judges and politicians. I include judicial legitimacy as an additional dimension in this framework.

I conclude that the Italian judiciary have been forces for punitiveness and moderation. Their contributions can be systematised by looking at the waxing and waning of judicial legitimacy, and the consequent expansion and contraction of judicial powers. I claim that judicial legitimacy is also relevant to other (‘non-Italian’) analyses of judicial contributions to contemporary Western penality.

By adding legitimacy to investigations of judicial contributions to penality I provide an organising principle with which to analyse the penal role of Italian judicial actors. I thus allow Italy to be kept in conversation with existing comparative models, without assuming that it either conforms to the models entirely, or that the models should otherwise be eschewed. I use the Italian case to demonstrate the relevance of legitimacy when analysing judicial contributions to Western penality, arguing that changing legitimacy affects the terms and effect of interaction between judicial and political classes.

The focus of this study is to examine Indian police officers' punitiveness toward violators of criminal sanctions attached to COVID-19 mitigation laws enacted by the Indian Penal Code. The authors draw from the conceptual frameworks and correlates typically employed in traditional crime and justice research and adapt them to the context of the pandemic. Additionally, the authors examine whether officers' punitive attitudes are related to their belief in self-legitimacy and their job assignment (civilian vs. armed personnel) in a country with inherited colonial policing legacies.

Data for the study came from 1,323 police officers in a northern state of India.

Findings suggest that officers with vicarious fear of COVID-19 infections (e.g. infection of family members) find the sanctions associated with the new laws harsh. Additionally, officers who subscribe to the classical attributions of offenders feel that the laws are not punitive enough. In contrast, those with deterministic views perceive the sanctions as excessively harsh. Findings also suggest that officers' self-legitimacy, and belief in the authority and responsibility vested in them, is a key predictor of their punitive attitudes. Finally, officers assigned to police lines are more punitive than those designated to patrol/traffic work.

Data or prior research on officers' punitive attitudes toward other violations (non-COVID-19 violations) is unavailable for comparison with this study’s findings.

No prior research has examined the relationship between police officers' perceptions of self-legitimacy, their belief in the authority vested in them by the state, their belief in their role as police officers and their relationship to their punitive attitudes.

The purpose of this paper is to use exchange rate theory to compare how white-collar offenders and property offenders rank the severity of various correctional sanctions.

The authors use survey data from 160 inmates incarcerated for white-collar and property crimes in a Midwestern state to compare how white-collar inmates differed from property inmates in ranking the goals of prison and the punitiveness of prison as compared to other alternatives.

White-collar offenders were no different than property offenders in terms of their assessment of the punitiveness of prison compared to the punitiveness of the four sanctions under consideration here. White-collar offenders were significantly more likely than property offenders to believe that the goal of prison is to rehabilitate rather than deter individuals from further crime.

Because the authors defined white-collar offenders by their crime of incarceration, they may have captured offenders who are not truly white-collar offenders. Focusing on offenders who were in prison did not allow them to fully examine whether similarities between white-collar and property offenders can be attributed to adjustment to prison or some other variable.

Alternative sanctions may be useful in punishing white-collar offenders in a less expensive manner than prison. Results suggest white-collar offenders may be more amenable to rehabilitation than property offenders and may not experience prison much differently than other types of offenders.

This research is important because it is the first of its kind to compare white-collar offenders’ views about the punitiveness of prison and the goals of incarceration with those of property offenders.

The purpose of this paper is to report results from a rape trial reconstruction in Ireland.

A studio audience of 100 members of the Irish public were selected to attend a TV programme by the Republic of Ireland’s national broadcasting organisation. This involved the examination of the sentencing of a rape case. The audience’s sentencing preferences were measured at the outset, when they had been given only summary information about the case, and later, when full details had been disclosed.

Previous research examining changes in public attitudes to crime and punishment has shown that deliberation, including the provision of new information and discussion with others and experts, tends to decrease public punitiveness and increase public leniency towards sentencing. An experiment in Ireland, however, showed that providing information does not invariably and necessarily moderate punitive attitudes. This paper presents the results, and offers some explanations for the anomalous outcome.

The pre/post design, in which the audience served as their own controls, is a weak one, and participants may have responded to what they took to be the agenda of the producers. Due to the quality of the sample, the results may not be generalisable to the broader Irish population.

Policy makers should recognise that the public is not uniformly punitive for all crimes. There is good research evidence to show that the apparent public appetite for tough punishment is illusory, and is a function of the way that polls measure public attitudes to punishment. Sentencers and those responsible for sentencing policy would benefit from a fuller understanding of the sorts of cases which illicit strong punitive responses from the public, and the reasons for this response. However any such understanding should not simply translate into responsiveness to the public’s punitive sentiments – where these exist. Innovative survey methods – like this experiment – which attempt to look beyond the top-of-the-head opinions by providing information and opportunities for deliberation should be welcomed and used more widely.

There have been limited research studies which reports factors which may increase punitiveness through the provision of information and deliberation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a criminal offender’s dual social identity affects judgments. Drawing from similarity-leniency and black sheep theories, the authors tested and discuss whether these effects could be explained by legal decision makers’ perceptions of hypocrisy or shared identity with the defendant.

The authors recruited 256 Christian and non-Christian adults to read a vignette about a juvenile sex offender who was either Christian or non-Christian, and heterosexual or gay. The authors measured participants’ punitiveness toward the offender.

Results revealed that legal decision makers were more punitive when they were Christian compared to non-Christian, and the defendant was gay compared to heterosexual. Further, legal decision makers perceived themselves as more similar to the defendant when they were non-Christian compared to Christian, and the defendant was heterosexual compared to gay. Finally, only when the defendant was Christian, legal decision makers perceived him as more hypocritical when he was gay compared to heterosexual.

This is the first study to investigate whether gay defendants might be particularly discriminated against if they are also Christian. It is also the first to test the black sheep and similarity-leniency theories in the legal context of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and Christian defendants.

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.

Using administrative, longitudinal data on felony arrests in Florida, we exploit the discontinuous increase in the punitiveness of criminal sanctions at 18 to estimate the deterrence effect of incarceration. Our analysis suggests a 2% decline in the log-odds of offending at 18, with standard errors ruling out declines of 11% or more. We interpret these magnitudes using a stochastic dynamic extension of Becker’s (1968) model of criminal behavior. Calibrating the model to match key empirical moments, we conclude that deterrence elasticities with respect to sentence lengths are no more negative than − 0 . 13 for young offenders.

Most criminal justice scholars agree that the past three decades have witnessed a punitive shift in criminal justice policy, public opinion, and political rhetoric. Have these political trends also left their mark on policy approaches to due process rights? The provision of counsel to indigent defendants is a signature issue in debates over due process rights. The Supreme Court expanded dramatically the circumstances under which states were required to provide counsel in the 1960s and 1970s, though decisions about the implementation of this mandate were left to individual states. We examine the evolution of indigent defense policy, at the state and local level, over the past three decades, and ask two questions: First, did policies evolve in the directions expected by reform advocates? Second, to the extent that policies developed differently across states, how can we account for those differences? We find that refomers' optimistic projections about structure and funding have not been realized, and that adoption of progressive policies has been uneven across states. Most importantly, we find evidence that the politics of ideology and racial conflict have played a significant role in states' indigent defense policy over the past three decades.