Criminology, the discipline that informs our understanding of crime and justice, is facing an identity crisis. Long dominated by sociology’s view of crime and its causes, criminology has recently witnessed the rise of a new cadre of academics who feel free to explore other explanations. Fairness and Crime: A Theory offers a comprehensive new perspective on criminal behavior that will reinvigorate the field and help us understand why we consider some acts criminal as well as why and how society should respond to those acts. In this book, Mark S. Davis connects the challenges of understanding crime and administering justice to common norms that guide behavior in everyday life. He contends that the exchanges society defines as criminal work basically the way all other exchanges, and when offenders rob banks, bilk investors, or fabricate scientific data, they engage in a violation of fairness norms. Davis offers a theory that is informed by insights from game theory research, anthropology, law, industrial/organizational psychology, personality/social psychology, and sociology. He utilizes examples drawn from everyday life to illustrate the theory’s concepts in detail. Fairness and Crime: A Theory provides a platform from which to explore the purposes of the criminal justice system. What are we trying to accomplish when we prosecute criminal suspects? While one answer is that we are trying to vindicate the moral order and deter future offending, another is that we are attempting to restore equity for victims caused by offenders’ exploitative or retaliatory behavior. Davis contends that addressing unfairness is what the criminal justice system should be about. In rehabilitation, we should be trying to inculcate fairness norms where they are absent or where they have been compromised.

Because police are the most visible face of government power for most citizens, they are expected to deal effectively with crime and disorder and to be impartial. Producing justice through the fair, and restrained use of their authority. The standards by which the public judges police success have become more exacting and challenging. Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing explores police work in the new century. It replaces myths with research findings and provides recommendations for updated policy and practices to guide it. The book provides answers to the most basic questions: What do police do? It reviews how police work is organized, explores the expanding responsibilities of police, examines the increasing diversity among police employees, and discusses the complex interactions between officers and citizens. It also addresses such topics as community policing, use of force, racial profiling, and evaluates the success of common police techniques, such as focusing on crime "hot spots." It goes on to look at the issue of legitimacyâ€"how the public gets information about police work, and how police are viewed by different groups, and how police can gain community trust. Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing will be important to anyone concerned about police work: policy makers, administrators, educators, police supervisors and officers, journalists, and interested citizens.

Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.

A legal scholar exposes the psychological forces that undermine the American criminal justice system, arguing that unless hidden biases are addressed, social inequality will widen, and proposes reforms to prevent injustice and help achieve true equality before the law.

Machine learning and nonparametric function estimation procedures can be effectively used in forecasting. One important and current application is used to make forecasts of “future dangerousness" to inform criminal justice decision. Examples include the decision to release an individual on parole, determination of the parole conditions, bail recommendations, and sentencing. Since the 1920s, "risk assessments" of various kinds have been used in parole hearings, but the current availability of large administrative data bases, inexpensive computing power, and developments in statistics and computer science have increased their accuracy and applicability. In this book, these developments are considered with particular emphasis on the statistical and computer science tools, under the rubric of supervised learning, that can dramatically improve these kinds of forecasts in criminal justice settings. The intended audience is researchers in the social sciences and data analysts in criminal justice agencies.

First published a decade ago, No Equal Justice is the seminal work on race- and class-based double standards in criminal justice. Hailed as a ''shocking and necessary book'' by The Economist, it has become the standard reference point for anyone trying to understand the fundamental inequalities in the American legal system. The book, written by constitutional law scholar and civil liberties advocate David Cole, was named the best nonfiction book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review and the best book on an issue of national policy by the American Political Science Association. No Equal Justice examines subjects ranging from police behavior and jury selection to sentencing, and argues that our system does not merely fail to live up to the promise of equality, but actively requires double standards to operate. Such disparities, Cole argues, allow the privileged to enjoy constitutional protections from police power without paying the costs associated with extending those protections across the board to minorities and the poor. For this new, tenth-anniversary paperback edition, Cole has completely updated and revised the book, reflecting the substantial changes and developments that have occurred since first publication.

Superman, Batman, Daredevil, and Wonder Woman are iconic cultural figures that embody values of order, fairness, justice, and retribution. Comic Book Crime digs deep into these and other celebrated characters, providing a comprehensive understanding of crime and justice in contemporary American comic books. This is a world where justice is delivered, where heroes save ordinary citizens from certain doom, where evil is easily identified and thwarted by powers far greater than mere mortals could possess. Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl explore these representations and show that comic books, as a historically important American cultural medium, participate in both reflecting and shaping an American ideological identity that is often focused on ideas of the apocalypse, utopia, retribution, and nationalism. Through an analysis of approximately 200 comic books sold from 2002 to 2010, as well as several years of immersion in comic book fan culture, Phillips and Strobl reveal the kinds of themes and plots popular comics feature in a post-9/11 context. They discuss heroes’ calculations of “deathworthiness,” or who should be killed in meting out justice, and how these judgments have as much to do with the hero’s character as they do with the actions of the villains. This fascinating volume also analyzes how class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation are used to construct difference for both the heroes and the villains in ways that are both conservative and progressive. Engaging, sharp, and insightful, Comic Book Crime is a fresh take on the very meaning of truth, justice, and the American way.

How the attorney-client relationship favors the privileged in criminal court—and denies justice to the poor and to working-class people of color The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. Privilege and Punishment examines how racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client relationship, providing a devastating portrait of inequality and injustice within and beyond the criminal courts. Matthew Clair conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending criminal hearings and interviewing defendants, lawyers, judges, police officers, and probation officers. In this eye-opening book, he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court interactions. When disadvantaged defendants try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves, lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish them. Privileged defendants, who are more likely to trust their defense attorneys, delegate authority to their lawyers, defer to judges, and are rewarded for their compliance. Clair shows how attempts to exercise legal rights often backfire on the poor and on working-class people of color, and how effective legal representation alone is no guarantee of justice. Superbly written and powerfully argued, Privilege and Punishment draws needed attention to the injustices that are perpetuated by the attorney-client relationship in today’s criminal courts, and describes the reforms needed to correct them.

This book provides an accessible and systematic restatement of the desert model for criminal sentencing by one of its leading academic exponents. The desert model emphasises the degree of seriousness of the offender's crime in deciding the severity of his punishment, and has become increasingly influential in recent penal practice and scholarly debate. It explains why sentences should be based principally on crime-seriousness, and addresses, among other topics, how a desert-based penalty scheme can be constructed; how to gauge punishments' seriousness and penalties' severity; what weight should be given to an offender's previous convictions; how non-custodial sentences should be scaled; and what leeway there might be for taking other factors into account, such as an offender's need for treatment. The volume will be of interest to all those working in penal theory and practice, criminal sentencing and the criminal law more generally.