Can punishments ever meaningfully be proportioned in severity to the seriousness of the crimes for which they are imposed? A great deal of attention has been paid to the general justification of punishment, but the thorny practical questions have received significantly less. Serious analysis has seldom delved into what makes crimes more or less serious, what makes punishments more or less severe, and how links are to be made between them. In Of One-eyed and Toothless Miscreants, Michael Tonry has gathered together a distinguished cast of contributors to offer among the first sustained efforts to specify with precision how proportionality can be understood in relation to the implementation of punishment. Each chapter examines scholarly and lay thinking about punishment of people convicted of crimes with particular emphasis on "making the punishment fit the crime." The contributors challenge the most prevalent current theories and emphasize the need for a shift away from the politicized emotionalism of recent decades. They argue that theories that coincided with mass incarceration and rampant injustice to countless individuals are evolving in ways that better countenance moving toward more humane and thoughtful approaches. Written by many of the leading thinkers on punishment, this volume dissects previously undeveloped issues related to considerations of deserved punishment and provides new ways to understand both the severities of punishment and the seriousness of crime.

Punishment policies and practices in the United States today are unprincipled, chaotic, and much too often unjust. The financial costs are enormous. The moral cost is greater: countless individual injustices, mass incarceration, the world's highest imprisonment rate, extreme disparities, especially affecting members of racial and ethnic minority groups, high rates of wrongful conviction, assembly line case processing, and a general absence of respectful consideration of offenders' interests, circumstances, and needs. In Doing Justice, Preventing Crime, Michael Tonry lays normative and empirical foundations for building new, more just, and more effective systems of sentencing and punishment in the twenty-first century. The overriding goals are to treat people convicted of crimes justly, fairly, and even-handedly; to take sympathetic account of the circumstances of peoples' lives; and to punish no one more severely than he or she deserves. Drawing on philosophy and punishment theory, this book explains the structural changes needed to uphold the rule of law and its requirement that the human dignity of every person be respected. In clear and engaging prose, Michael Tonry surveys what is known about the deterrent, incapacitative, and rehabilitative effects of punishment, and explains what needs to be done to move from an ignoble present to a better future.

Since 1979 the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cures. In both the review and the thematic volumes, Crime and Justice offers an interdisciplinary approach to address core issues in criminology.

"In the 2020s, no informed person disagrees that punishment policies and practices in the United States are unprincipled, chaotic, and much too often unjust. The financial costs are enormous. The moral cost is greater: countless individual injustices; mass incarceration; the world's highest imprisonment rate; extreme disparities, especially affecting members of racial and ethnic minority groups; high rates of wrongful conviction; assembly line case processing; and a general absence of respectful consideration of offenders' interests, circumstances, and needs. The main ideas in this book about doing justice and preventing crime are simple: Treat people charged with and convicted of crimes justly, fairly, and even-handedly, as anyone would want done for themselves or their children. Take sympathetic account of the circumstances of peoples' lives. Punish no one more severely than he or she deserves. Those propositions are implicit in the Rule of Law and its requirement that the human dignity of every person be respected. Three major structural changes are needed. First, selection of judges and prosecutors, and their day-to-day work, must be insulated from political influence. Second, mandatory minimum sentence, three-strikes, life without parole, truth in sentencing, and similar laws must be repealed. Third, correctional and prosecution systems must be centralized in unified state agencies"--

Punishing Race addresses enduring paradoxes of racial disparities in America and the problems of race in the criminal justice system. The white majority, Tonry observes, has a remarkable capacity to endure the suffering of disadvantaged black and, increasingly, Hispanic men. The criminal justice system is the latest in a series of devices, including slavery, Jim Crow, and legally countenanced discrimination, that have maintained white dominance over black people. Setting out a new agenda, Tonry pushes for overdue - and realistic - changes in racial profiling and sentencing, and to the War on Drugs, to reduce their staggering human and social costs.

Most Americans are not aware that the US prison population has tripled over the past two decades, nor that the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the industrialized world. Despite these facts, politicians from across the ideological spectrum continue to campaign on "law and order" platforms and to propose "three strikes"--and even "two strikes"--sentencing laws. Why is this the case? How have crime, drugs, and delinquency come to be such salient political issues, and why have enhanced punishment and social control been defined as the most appropriate responses to these complex social problems? Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics provides original, fascinating, and persuasive answers to these questions. According to conventional wisdom, the worsening of the crime and drug problems has led the public to become more punitive, and "tough" anti-crime policies are politicians' collective response to this popular sentiment. Katherine Beckett challenges this interpretation, arguing instead that the origins of the punitive shift in crime control policy lie in the political rather than the penal realm--particularly in the tumultuous period of the 1960s.

This volume brings together a collection of articles on penal reform in the United States, Europe, Japan, and other English-speaking countries. Unique and wide-ranging, the volume provides material on penal policy development and research and presents an international, comparative focus. Written by leading national and international authorities, it offers some of the broadest efforts to characterize recent penal trends and to analyze their causes and consequences.

Nearly all research devoted to policing focuses on public uniformed police and their legal use of force. An overwhelming amount of this work draws on evidence from Anglo-American police forces. These twin emphases have led to a limited view. Agencies such as criminal investigation units, intelligence services, private security companies, and military policing organizations have almost entirely escaped scholarly attention. In The Policing Web, Jean-Paul Brodeur looks at policing as a whole. He illuminates its full diversity, showing how it extends far beyond the confines of public police working in uniform and visible to all. Brodeur considers military policing, both when it complements the values of democracy and when it does not. He also discusses criminal individuals acting as police informants, and criminal organizations enforcing their own rules in urban zones deserted by the police. Brodeur argues that the diverse strands of the policing web are united by a common definition that emphasizes the license granted to policing agencies-legally or with impunity- to use means otherwise forbidden to the rest of the population. Employing an international and comparative approach, Brodeur establishes a comprehensive model that links all the components of policing. The policing web, however, is not a neat and well-integrated structure. There is not just one policing web. There are several, depending on the country, police history and culture, and the various public images of policing. These often overlooked factors are essential components of the context of policing. Wide-ranging and authoritative, The Policing Web expands the very idea of what policing is and how it works, and presents a novel yet fundamental understanding of law enforcement.

From the two defining personalities of post-cyberpunk SF, a brilliant collaboration to rival 1987's The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling