justice

The concept of critical criminology – that crime and the present day processes of criminalization are rooted in the core structures of society – is of more relevance today than it has been at any other time.

Written by an internationally renowned scholar, Contemporary Critical Criminology introduces the most up-to-date empirical, theoretical, and political contributions made by critical criminologists around the world. In its exploration of this material, the book also challenges the erroneous but widely held notion that the critical criminological project is restricted to mechanically applying theories to substantive topics, or to simple calling for radical political, economic, cultural, and social transformations.

This book is an essential source of reference for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of Criminology, Criminal Theory, Social Policy, Research Methodology, and Penology.

Contemporary Critical Criminology (Paperback) – Routledge.

The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.

Saying the US criminal system is racist may be politically controversial in some circles. But the facts are overwhelming. No real debate about that. Below I set out numerous examples of these facts.

The question is – are these facts the mistakes of an otherwise good system, or are they evidence that the racist criminal justice system is working exactly as intended? Is the US criminal justice system operated to marginalize and control millions of African Americans?

via 14 Shocking Facts That Prove the Criminal Justice System Is Racist | Civil Liberties | AlterNet.

via Nieman Watchdog > Ask This > The BP disaster underscores government as the problem, not the solution.

FBI agents for years sought sensitive records from telephone companies through e-mails, sticky notes, sneak peeks and other “startling” methods that violated electronic privacy law and federal policy, according to a Justice Department inspector general report released Wednesday.

The study details how the FBI between 2002 and 2006 sent more than 700 demands for telephone toll information by citing often nonexistent emergencies and using sometimes misleading language. The practice of sending faulty “exigent” letters to three telecommunications providers became so commonplace that one FBI agent described it to investigators as “like having an ATM in your living room.”

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said the findings were “troubling” and urged the FBI and the Justice Department to “take additional corrective action” in response to the 289-page report. Information on more than 3,500 phone numbers may have been gathered improperly, but investigators said they could not glean a full understanding because of sketchy record-keeping by the FBI.

via Inspector general cites ‘egregious breakdown’ in FBI oversight – washingtonpost.com.

It’s an outrage that the United States locks up citizens for so long with such uncertain effect; but it’s also self-defeating, because long sentences give rise to a crisis of legitimacy that can lead to more crime, not less.

via Prisoners of Parole – NYTimes.com.

Mark Tushnet

This morning’s Washington Post has a story on proposed legal challenges to the individual mandate in the pending health care legislation. (In brief, conservatives are arguing that Congress lacks the power to require people to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty, under either the commerce clause and the power to tax and spend for the general welfare.) The story observes that liberal-leaning constitutional scholars think that, as Erwin Chemerinsky puts it, “There are many close constitutional questions. But this is not among them,” or, as Jack Balkin says, “All of these arguments don’t work, but they’re interesting to debate.”

I’m afraid that these reactions demonstrate that liberal-leaning constitutional law types haven’t absorbed the lessons of critical legal studies — or, indeed, the lesson Justice William Brennan taught his law clerks by holding up one hand with his fingers splayed: “With five votes you can do anything.” The CLS lesson was — and is — that where the stakes are high enough and the political energy is available (to lawyers and judges), at any time the body of legal materials contains enough stuff to support a professionally respectable argument for any legal proposition. So too with the constitutional arguments against the individual mandate.

I lack both the interest and the energy to work out the arguments in detail, but I’ve thought enough about the constitutional issues to be able to sketch out an argument, compatible with existing law, that the individual mandate (a) doesn’t fall within Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, (b) doesn’t fall within Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare, and (c) is (in its penalty aspect) a direct tax prohibited by the Constitution. I myself don’t find these arguments particularly strong, but that — on the CLS view — doesn’t mean anything about what constitutional law on this matter “really” is. If, as Holmes said and as CLS reiterated, what the law “is” is what the courts will do in fact, the thing to do is to figure out which side of the argument can count to five first.

Or, put another way, remember Bush v. Gore?

via Balkinization.

Move Your Money.

There were some real problems in the 1960s and 1970s, as there are now. Racism and oppression, economic insecurity and depression, for example. People wanted those problems solved. The state didn’t say “we’re going to solve this problem by giving income guarantees to everyone in low-income communities.” Instead, it said “we’re going to solve this problem by putting everyone in prison for part or all of their lives for doing things that we didn’t use to put people in prison for.” In the 1970s, the state started coming in an re-arranging social relations. Pretty quickly, it became normal that more and more people were taken away and punished. But people also started demanding those kinds of surveillance and control in their own neighborhoods. It’s kind of astonishing to imagine the huge shift that had taken place since the 1960s. There used to be a whole lot of suspicion about what cops and courts were up to – Jim Crow was dead in its grave, but not cold yet. By the early 1980s, community organizations were saying “we really want more police here.”

So during this time period society went from being suspicious of the police and the courts to placing all their trust in them. At the same time, the numbers of people in prison started going through the roof, and “crime” became a national concern. Before the 1970s, crime had been a local issue. “Crime” became a national obsession. Now, we’re at the point where it seems completely natural to have massive prisons and huge numbers of people in them. These ideas about “crime” and prisons that were very new in the 1970s have become common-sense. In only a few years, it has become very hard to imagine a society without mass-incarceration.

via Recording Carceral Landscapes.

Incarcerex : Prison Industrial Complex Video.

Here are some of the key numbers:

* 5,542 offenses were classified as crimes against persons. Intimidation accounted for 48.8 percent of those crimes, simple assaults for 32.1 percent, and aggravated assaults for 18.5 percent. Seven murders were reported as hate crimes.

* 3,608 offenses were classified as crimes against property. The majority (82.3 percent) were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism. The remaining 17.7 percent consisted mainly of robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

* Of the 6,927 known offenders, 61.1 percent were white, 20.2 percent were black, and 11.0 percent were of an unknown race.

* 31.9 percent of hate crimes took place in or near homes; while 17.4 percent took place on highways, roads, alleys, or streets; 11.7 percent in schools and colleges; 6.1 percent in parking lots and garages; and 4.2 percent in churches, synagogues, or temples.

via FBI — Hate Crimes – Press Room – Headline Archives 11-23-09.

In a rare display of agreement between advocates who have spent years in fierce opposition, the American Civil Liberties Union yesterday paid tribute to the Department of Justice for its decision to try five of the alleged planners of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in a civilian federal court.

In a teleconference for reporters, the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, said the decision to bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 plotters to federal court in New York City “is an enormous victory for the rule of law.” Mohammed, known as KSM, is the self-described mastermind of the terrorist attacks.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the decision at a news conference Friday at the Department of Justice in Washington. He said it was the most difficult decision he has had to make since becoming attorney general after the inauguration of President Barack Obama in January.

Holder also announced that the administration will use military commissions to prosecute other high-profile detainees now being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. These include Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of planning the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen.

via t r u t h o u t | Decision to Try 9/11 Suspects in US Court Hailed as “Victory for the Rule of Law”.

In Harris County, Texas, the death penalty is more likely to be imposed against black defendants than white defendants, and death is more likely to be imposed on behalf of white victims than black victims. These are the findings of Professor Scott Phillips, University of Denver. Phillips’s examination of these findings was distributed in his ACS Issue Brief “Racial Disparities in Capital Punishment: Blind Justice Requires a Blindfold,” just re-released in the latest edition of Advance: The Journal of the ACS Issue Groups.

Professor Phillips explains that his research indicates that the racial disparities arise in the District Attorney’s decision to seek the death penalty, rather than with the jury. He suggests that because the Supreme Court is unlikely to overrule McCleskey v. Kemp in the near future and find that capital punishment is unconstitutional based on statistical evidence of racial disparities, other means for reducing racial disparities in the death penalty should be implemented.

Phillips proposes that prosecutors’ offices that want to institute genuine race-blind processes for deciding whether to seek the death penalty should consider “desocializing” the decision to seek the death penalty. Concrete steps that District Attorney’s offices can take to reduce the social information available to judicial actors in the capital litigation process, he suggests, include eliminating information that might insinuate the race of the victim or defendant – “racial markers” – from all documents considered in the District Attorney’s decision whether to seek the death penalty.

via ACS Blog | Scott Phillips | American Constitution Society.

A five month CBS News Investigation has found a staggering number of rape kits — a collection of swabs and clothing that provide DNA evidence — have never been sent to crime labs for testing.

via Rape Kits Data, By the Numbers – CBS News.

When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.

A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.

But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”

via U.S. official resigns over Afghan war – washingtonpost.com.

According to the release, some of the key findings of the poll include:

* The death penalty was ranked last when the police chiefs were asked to name one area as “most important for reducing violent crime,” with only one percent listing it as the best way to reduce violence. The death penalty came in behind more police officers; reducing drug abuse; better economy and more jobs; longer prison sentences; and technological innovations such as improved laboratories and crime databases.

* The police chiefs ranked the death penalty as the least efficient use of taxpayers’ money. They rated expanded training and more equipment for police officers; hiring more police officers; community policing; more programs to control drug and alcohol abuse; and neighborhood watch programs as more efficient uses of taxpayers’ dollars.

* Almost 6 in 10 police chiefs (57%) agreed that the death penalty does little to prevent violent crimes because perpetrators rarely consider the consequences when engaged in violence. Although the police chiefs did not oppose the death penalty in principle, less than half (47%) would support it if a sentence of life without parole with mandatory restitution to the victim’s family were available.

via Poll of Police Chiefs Shows Death Penalty Ranked Least Among Crime-Fighting Priorities.