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Inequality, Crime and Public Policy (Routledge Revivals)

Author: John Braithwaite
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135094438
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
First published in 1979, Inequality, Crime, and Public Policy integrates and interprets the vast corpus of existing research on social class, slums, and crime, and presents its own findings on these matters. It explores two major questions. First, do policies designed to redistribute wealth and power within capitalist societies have effects upon crime? Second, do policies created to overcome the residential segregation of social classes have effects on crime? The book provides a brilliantly comprehensive and systematic review of the empirical evidence to support or refute the classic theories of Engles, Bonger, Merton, Cloward and Ohlin, Cohen, Miller, Shaw and McKay, amongst many others. Braithwaite confronts these theories with evidence of the extent and nature of white collar crime, and a consideration of the way law enhancement and law enforcement might serve class interest.

Crime, Inequality and Power

Author: Eileen B. Leonard
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317590201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Book Description
Crime, Inequality and Power challenges the dominant definitions of crime and the criminal through its uniquely comparative approach. In this book Eileen Leonard analyzes multiple forms of criminal behavior in the United States, including violence, sexual assault, theft, and drug law violations, whilst also asking readers to consider the parallels between crimes that are rarely thought comparable. Leonard’s juxtaposition of familiar street crimes, such as car theft, alongside large-scale corporate theft, vividly exposes profound inequalities in the way crime is defined, and the treatment it receives within the criminal justice system. Leonard’s analysis also reveals the underlying inequalities of race, class, and gender which enable the perpetuation of such crimes, as well as calling into question the reality of fundamental American ideals of fairness and equal justice. Moreover, the book questions whether current policies that punish street crime excessively while minimizing the crimes of the powerful, fail to keep the public safe. A broader consideration of crime, and the inequalities that underlie it, offers a fresh opportunity to rethink public policies and enduring issues of crime and criminal justice. Challenging the many persistent inequalities in the perception of and response to crime, this critique of American crime and punishment will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as scholars, in the fields of criminology, sociology and law.

Children of the Prison Boom

Author: Sara Wakefield
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199989222
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
Children of the Prison Boom describes the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration for a generation of vulnerable children. Wakefield and Wildeman find that parental imprisonment leads to increased mental health and behavioral problems, infant mortality, and child homelessness which translate into large-scale increases in racial inequality.

Tracing the Relationship Between Inequality, Crime and Punishment

Author: Nicola Lacey
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780197266922
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
The question of inequality has moved decisively to the top of the contemporary intellectual agenda. Going beyond Thomas Piketty's focus on wealth, increasing inequalities of various kinds, and their impact on social, political and economic life, now present themselves among the most urgent issues facing scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Key among these is the relationship between inequality, crime and punishment. The propositions that social inequality shapes crime and punishment, and that crime and punishment themselves cause or exacerbate inequality, are conventional wisdom. Yet, paradoxically, they are also controversial. In this volume, historians, criminologists, lawyers, sociologists and political scientists come together to try to solve this paradox by unpacking these relationships in different contexts. The causal mechanisms underlying these correlations call for investigation by means of a sustained programme of research bringing different disciplines to bear on the problem. This volume develops an interdisciplinary approach which builds on but goes beyond recent comparative and historical research on the institutional, cultural and political-economic factors shaping crime and punishment so as better to understand whether, and if so how and why, social and economic inequality influences levels and types of crime and punishment, and conversely whether crime and punishment shape inequalities.

The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Public Policy

Author: Michael H. Tonry
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
ISBN: 0195336178
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 655

Book Description
This handbook offers a comprehensive examination of crimes as public policy subjects to provide an authoritative overview of current knowledge about the nature, scale, and effects of diverse forms of criminal behaviour and of efforts to prevent and control them.

Not a Crime to Be Poor

Author: Peter Edelman
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 162097553X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
Awarded "Special Recognition" by the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Book & Journalism Awards Finalist for the American Bar Association's 2018 Silver Gavel Book Award Named one of the "10 books to read after you've read Evicted" by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the demands of social justice in America."—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy Winner of a special Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the book that Evicted author Matthew Desmond calls "a powerful investigation into the ways the United States has addressed poverty . . . lucid and troubling" In one of the richest countries on Earth it has effectively become a crime to be poor. For example, in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Department of Justice didn't just expose racially biased policing; it also exposed exorbitant fines and fees for minor crimes that mainly hit the city's poor, African American population, resulting in jail by the thousands. As Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, in fact Ferguson is everywhere: the debtors' prisons of the twenty-first century. The anti-tax revolution that began with the Reagan era led state and local governments, starved for revenues, to squeeze ordinary people, collect fines and fees to the tune of 10 million people who now owe $50 billion. Nor is the criminalization of poverty confined to money. Schoolchildren are sent to court for playground skirmishes that previously sent them to the principal's office. Women are evicted from their homes for calling the police too often to ask for protection from domestic violence. The homeless are arrested for sleeping in the park or urinating in public. A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy and senior official in the Clinton administration, Peter Edelman has devoted his life to understanding the causes of poverty. As Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy has said, "No one has been more committed to struggles against impoverishment and its cruel consequences than Peter Edelman." And former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes, "If there is one essential book on the great tragedy of poverty and inequality in America, this is it."

Punishment and Inequality in America

Author: Bruce Western
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610445554
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought. Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting "tough on crime" with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime. The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.

Governing Through Crime

Author: Jonathan Simon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198040024
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Book Description
Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and prospective employees subjected to background checks. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal? In this startlingly original work, Jonathan Simon traces this pattern back to the collapse of the New Deal approach to governing during the 1960s when declining confidence in expert-guided government policies sent political leaders searching for new models of governance. The War on Crime offered a ready solution to their problem: politicians set agendas by drawing analogies to crime and redefined the ideal citizen as a crime victim, one whose vulnerabilities opened the door to overweening government intervention. By the 1980s, this transformation of the core powers of government had spilled over into the institutions that govern daily life. Soon our schools, our families, our workplaces, and our residential communities were being governed through crime. This powerful work concludes with a call for passive citizens to become engaged partners in the management of risk and the treatment of social ills. Only by coming together to produce security, can we free ourselves from a logic of domination by others, and from the fear that currently rules our everyday life.

Inequality in America

Author: Stephen M. Caliendo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429975171
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
Why does inequality have such a hold on American society and public policy? And what can we, as citizens, do about it? Inequality in America takes an in-depth look at race, class and gender-based inequality, across a wide range of issues from housing and education to crime, employment and health. Caliendo explores how individual attitudes can affect public opinion and lawmakers' policy solutions. He also illustrates how these policies result in systemic barriers to advancement that often then contribute to individual perceptions. This cycle of disadvantage and advantage can be difficult-though not impossible-to break. "Representing" and "What Can I Do?" feature boxes throughout the book highlight key public figures who have worked to combat inequality and encourage students to take action to do the same. The second edition has been thoroughly revised to include the most current data and to cover recent issues and events like the 2016 elections and the Black Lives Matter movement. It now also includes a brand-new chapter on crime and criminal justice and an expanded discussion of immigration. Concise and accessible, Inequality in America paves the way for students to think critically about the attitudes, behaviors and structures of inequality.

Hate Crimes

Author: James B. Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190286318
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
In the early 1980s, a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to concerted advocacy-group lobbying, Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of "hate crime" laws requiring the collection of statistics on, and enhancing the punishment for, crimes motivated by certain prejudices. This book places the evolution of the hate crime concept in socio-legal perspective. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter adopt a skeptical if not critical stance, maintaining that legal definitions of hate crime are riddled with ambiguity and subjectivity. No matter how hate crime is defined, and despite an apparent media consensus to the contrary, the authors find no evidence to support the claim that the United States is experiencing a hate crime epidemic--instead, they cast doubt on whether the number of hate crimes is even increasing. The authors further assert that, while the federal effort to establish a reliable hate crime accounting system has failed, data collected for this purpose have led to widespread misinterpretation of the state of intergroup relations in this country. The book contends that hate crime as a socio-legal category represents the elaboration of an identity politics now manifesting itself in many areas of the law. But the attempt to apply the anti-discrimination paradigm to criminal law generates problems and anomalies. For one thing, members of minority groups are frequently hate crime perpetrators. Moreover, the underlying conduct prohibited by hate crime law is already subject to criminal punishment. Jacobs and Potter question whether hate crimes are worse or more serious than similar crimes attributable to other anti-social motivations. They also argue that the effort to single out hate crime for greater punishment is, in effect, an effort to punish some offenders more seriously simply because of their beliefs, opinions, or values, thus implicating the First Amendment. Advancing a provocative argument in clear and persuasive terms, Jacobs and Potter show how the recriminalization of hate crime has little (if any) value with respect to law enforcement or criminal justice. Indeed, enforcement of such laws may exacerbate intergroup tensions rather than eradicate prejudice.