For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder. The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states, the history and philosophy professor exposes the perversity of justice: Inside prison, ironically, it's nobody's job to punish. Thus the worst criminals often live the best lives. The Death of Punishment challenges the reader to refine deeply held beliefs on life and death as punishment that flare up with every news story of a heinous crime. It argues that society must redesign life and death in prison to make the punishment more nearly fit the crime. It closes with the final irony: If we make prison the punishment it should be, we may well abolish the very death penalty justice now requires.

*A New York Times Bestseller* An important overview of the way our justice system works, and why the rule of law is essential to our survival as a society—from the one-time federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, and host of the Doing Justice podcast. Preet Bharara has spent much of his life examining our legal system, pushing to make it better, and prosecuting those looking to subvert it. Bharara believes in our system and knows it must be protected, but to do so, he argues, we must also acknowledge and allow for flaws both in our justice system and in human nature. Bharara uses the many illustrative anecdotes and case histories from his storied, formidable career—the successes as well as the failures—to shed light on the realities of the legal system and the consequences of taking action. Inspiring and inspiringly written, Doing Justice gives us hope that rational and objective fact-based thinking, combined with compassion, can help us achieve truth and justice in our daily lives. Sometimes poignant and sometimes controversial, Bharara's expose is a thought-provoking, entertaining book about the need to find the humanity in our legal system as well as in our society.

If the goal of our justice system is to reduce crime and create a safer society, then we must do better. According to conventional wisdom, severely punishing offenders reduces the likelihood that they’ll offend again. Why, then, do so many who go to prison continue to commit crimes after their release? What do we actually know about offenders and the reasons they break the law? In Crime & Punishment, Russell Marks argues that the lives of most criminal offenders – and indeed of many victims of crime – are marked by often staggering disadvantage. For many offenders, prison only increases their chances of committing further crimes. And despite what some media outlets and politicians want us to believe, harsher sentences do not help most victims to heal. Drawing on his experience as a lawyer, Marks eloquently makes the case for restorative justice and community correction, whereby offenders are obliged to engage with victims and make amends. Crime & Punishment is a provocative call for change to a justice system in desperate need of renewal.

This book examines the international political order in the post-Cold War era, arguing that this order has become progressively more punitive. This is seen as resulting from both a human-rights regime that emphasizes legal norms and the aggressive policies of the United States and its allies in the ‘War on Terror’. While punishment can play a key role in creating justice in a political system, serious flaws in the current global order militate against punishment-enforcing global norms. The book argues for the necessary presence of three key concepts - justice, authority and agency - if punishment is to function effectively, and explores four practices in the current international system: intervention, sanctions, counter- terrorism policy, and war crimes tribunals. It concludes by suggesting ways to revise the current global political structure in order to enable punitive practices to play a more central role in creating a just world order. This book will be of much interest to students of International Law, Political Science and International Relations.

This book aims to answer the question: 'why, and by what right do some people punish others?' The author argues that the justification of punishment must be embedded in a substantive political and moral theory. Matravers questions why it is that recent theories of distributive justice have had so little to say about the punishment and retributive justice. His answer is that contemporary theories of justice cannot explain the relationship of justice and morality more broadly conceived. As this is also the relationship that a theory of punishment needs to explain, it is in examining the problem of punishment that the limitations of contemporary theories of justice are most starkly exposed. Moreover, the limitations are such as to undermine these accounts of justice. The claim is that it is through the discussion of punishment that the inadequacies of contemporary theories of justice is demonstrated and it is therefore through the discussion of punishment that those inadequacies can be rectified. Matravers argues for a genuinely constructivist account of morality-constructivist in that it rejects any idea of objective, mind-independent moral values, and seeks instead to construct morality from non-moral human concerns and human wills, and genuinely constructivist in that, in contrast to the faux constructivisim of Rawls and cognate approaches, it does not take as a premise the equal moral worth of persons. He argues that a genuine constructivism will show the need for and justification of punishment as intrinsic to morality itself.

Criminal Punishment and Restorative Justice is an appraisal of the divide that exists between punitive and restorative methods. The book looks at events that serve to restrict a greater and more emphatic adoption of restorative justice and its huge potential in contemporary criminal justice developments. In an era of increasing and worldwide reliance on imprisonment and other punitive methods, the author argues that justice and communities would be far better served by a more enthusiastic and early shift to restorative methods. Criminal Punishment and Restorative Justice provides an international perspective on how restorative justice can bring about an altogether more enlightened approach to dealing with offenders and victims alike, against a backdrop of often spurious, traditional justifications for punishment. While acknowledging the need for a constructive use of custody and other corrections in response to serious crime, the author points out that the present over-reliance on custody can be reduced by challenging offenders to take responsibility for their offenses and to make practical reparation for their wrong-doing and repairing the harm that they have caused. The book also assesses the potential of restorative justice to make corrections more effective, civilized, humane, and pragmatic in terms of finding solutions to crime on the basis of sound principles and information, not political expediency.

Critics take the unclear status of restorative justice practices, along with their vagueness in meaning and purpose, as a clear invitation to a fundamental questioning of the legitimacy of these practices. Their supporters consider the experiment of restorative justice as a platform for reforming penal institutions and for rethinking the legitimacy of orthodox legal reasoning. Within the framework of a rechtsstaat, a democratic state governed by fundamental rights and by the rule of law, both issues of legitimacy lead not only to reflection on concepts such as restoration, punishment, or on such notions as harm and wrong. Questioning the legitimacy both of restorative justice practices and of the prevailing penal system also inevitably involves some reflection on, and articulation of, the underlying values and normative aspirations of such a democratic constitutional state. What are these values and how can they be given appropriate expression in the leading concepts and principles of the criminal law? To what extent are fundamental rights and principles of the rule of law sufficiently reflected in the practices of restorative justice? How are these practices to be related to the criminal justice system according to the normative aspirations of a democratic constitutional state? To what degree can current penal practices be made continuous with these aspirations? These fundamental questions formed the intellectual framework for the 10th Aquinas Conference on Restorative Justice, Punishment and the Morality of Law, at which conference the larger part of the papers published in this volume were presented. Consistent with the structure of the conference, this collection of essays is organised into three parts, each focussing on one central topic and containing a lead essay and corresponding replies. The first part offers critical scrutiny of one of the cornerstones of a criminal justice system governed by the rule of law, namely the principle of legality. Efforts are made to empower this principle through reflection on its underlying values and aspirations, and this in order to meet some of the legitimate ideals and concerns of restorative justice. These efforts are subsequently assessed from both sociological and philosophical perspectives. In the second part, attention is drawn to the legitimacy of restorative justice practices. Here, the normative intuitions of a democratic constitutional state serve either as a critical framework to assess these practices, or, more optimistically, as ideals to whose realisation restorative justice is supposed to make a valuable contribution. And, finally, in the third part, reflection on the value of restorative justice brings us to a fundamental questioning of the legitimacy of punishment and penal practices. Central to the discussion is whether it is possible to interpret and normatively reconstruct the idea and practice of punishment so as to make them compatible with, and even continuous with, the underlying values of a democratic constitutional state.

"Authoritative and comprehensive, this multivolume set includes hundreds of articles in the field of criminal justice. Impressive arrays of authors have contributed to this resource, addressing such diverse topics as racial profiling, money laundering, torture, prisoner literature, the KGB, and Sing Sing. Written in an accessible manner and attractively presented, the background discussions, definitions, and explanations of important issues and future trends are absorbing. Interesting sidebars and facts,reference lists, relevant court cases, tables, and black-and-white photographs supplement the entries. Appendixes cover careers in criminal justice, Web resources, and professional organizations. A lengthy bibliography lists relevant works."--"The Best of the Best Reference Sources," American Libraries, May 2003.