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Violent and property crime rates in all Western countries have been falling since the early and mid-1990s, after rising in the 1970s and 1980s. Few people have noticed the common patterns and fewer have attempted to understand or explain them. Yet the implications are essential for thinking about crime control and criminal justice policy more broadly. Crime rates in Canada and the United States, for example, have moved in parallel for 40 years, but Canada has neither increased its imprisonment rate nor adopted harsher criminal justice policies. The implication is that something other than mass imprisonment, zero-tolerance policing, and “three-strikes” laws explains why crime rates in our...
Introduction -- American exceptionalism : perspectives -- American exceptionalism in crime, punishment, and disadvantage : race, federalization, and politicization in the perspective of local autonomy / Nicola Lacey and David Soskice -- The concept of American exceptionalism and the case of capital punishment / David Garland -- Penal optimism : understanding American mass imprisonment from a Canadian perspective / Cheryl Marie Webster and Anthony N. Doob -- The complications of penal federalism : American exceptionalism or fifty different countries? / Franklin E. Zimring -- American exceptionalism in crime -- American exceptionalism in comparative perspective : explaining trends and variatio...
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice provides a systematic and comprehensive examination of recent developments across criminology and criminal justice. Chapters examine methodological and theoretical approaches to criminology, on-going debates and controversies, and contemporary issues such as drug trafficking, terrorism, and the intersections of gender, race, and class in the context of crime and punishment.
Volume 44 of Crime and Justice is essential reading for scholars, policy makers, and practitioners who need to know about the latest advances in knowledge concerning crime, its causes, and its control. Contents include Robert D. Crutchfield on the complex interactions among race, social class, and crime; Cassia Spohn on race, crime, and punishment in America; Marianne van Ooijen and Edward Kleemans on the “Dutch model” of drug policy; Beau Kilmer, Peter Reuter, and Luca Giommoni on cross-national and comparative knowledge about drug use and control drugs; Michael Tonry on federal sentencing policy since 1984; Kathryn Monahan, Laurence Steinberg, and Alex R. Piquero on the growing influen...
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. The extent of violence against women is currently hidden. How should violence be measured? How should research and new ways of thinking about violence improve its measurement? Could improved measurement change policy? The book is a guide to how the measurement of violence can be best achieved. It shows how to make femicide, rape, domestic violence, and FGM visible in official statistics. It offers practical guidance on definitions, indicators and coordination mechanisms. It reflects on theoretical debates on ‘what is gender’, ‘what is violence’, and ‘the concept of coercive control’. and introduces the concept of ‘gender saturated context’. Analysing the socially constructed nature of statistics and the links between knowledge and power, it sets new standards and guidelines to influence the measurement of violence in the coming decades.
This book compares two countries with striking parallels in economic and political outcomes, yet with some distinct features in terms of institutional structures, relative size, and culture. Therefore, this book forms a fruitful platform for the study of the similarities and differences in the economic and societal development of Japan and Finland. Despite their geographic distance from one another and the aforementioned differences, both countries experienced rather similar economic and societal development patterns after the Second World War. The study of these societies both individually and through commonalities will provide a unique perspective on the emergence of modern economies and i...
"The study presented in this book is a direct response to the needs for defining and registering criminal and judicial data on the European level. Based upon work done in creating the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics (ESB), the project results will improve and complement the standards developed so far for definitions and statistical registration in four fields (police, prosecution, courts, prison), in order to contribute to the picture of criminal justice in Europe. Possibilities to optimize the offence definitions used so far in the ESB context were explored. Also, further crime types, especially those subject to EU-harmonized definition, were tested and introduc...
Bringing together some of the world’s leading family law scholars, as well as bright and emerging minds in the field of global family law, this book explores the differences and commonalities in the conceptualization and legal treatment of families throughout different legal traditions. Each chapter delves into topics integral to family law jurisprudence and serves as a novel examination into a deep slice of family law. Together, the four parts and sixteen chapters create a melodious and intriguing examination of groundbreaking and cutting-edge areas of law in the realm of the family. The four parts primarily focus upon a major family law topic with the authors examining the laws across jurisdictions, cross-nationally, or in some cases intra-jurisdictionally. It is through this comparative lens that we see how family law concepts are woven into the fabric of overall society around the globe. This book is of interest to family law, international law, sociology, and socio-legal scholars.
Suicide is a puzzling phenomenon. Not only is its demarcation problematic but it also eludes simple explanation. The cultures in which suicide mortality is high do not necessarily have much else in common, and neither is a single mental illness such as depression sufficient to lead a person to suicide. In a word, despite its statistical regularity, suicide is unpredictable on the individual level. The main argument emerging from this collection is that suicide should not be understood as a separate realm of pathological behavior but as a form of human action. As such it is always dependent on the decision that the individual makes in a cultural, ethical and socio-economic context, but the context never completely determines the decision. This book also argues that cultural narratives concerning suicide have a problematic double function: in addition to enabling the community to make sense of self-inflicted death, they also constitute a blueprint depicting suicide as a solution to common human problems.
Are the dynamics of contention changing? This is the question confronted by the contributors of this volume, among the most influential scholars in the field of social movements. The answers, arriving at a time of extraordinary worldwide turmoil, not only provide a wide-ranging and varied understanding of how social movements arise and persist, but also engender unanswered questions, pointing to new theoretical strands and fields of research. The Future of Social Movement Research asks: How are the dynamics of contention shaped by globalization? By societies that are becoming increasingly more individualized and diverse? By the spread of new communication technologies such as social media, c...