The politics of imprisonment [electronic resource] : how the democratic process shapes the way America punishes offenders / Vanessa Barker.
- 作者： Barker, Vanessa.
- 其他題名：
- Studies in crime and public policy.
- 出版： New York ;Oxford : Oxford University Press c2009.
- 叢書名： Oxford Scholarship Online , Studies in crime and public policy
- 主題： Criminal justice, Administration of--States.--United States , Criminals--States.--United States , Discrimination in criminal justice administration--United States--States. , Equality--States.--United States , Imprisonment--States.--United States
- ISBN： 9780195370027
- URL：
電子書
- 一般註：Electronic reproduction. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2009.
- 書目註：Includes bibliographical references and index.
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讀者標籤：
- 系統號： 005157176 | 機讀編目格式
館藏資訊
The attention devoted to the unprecedented levels of imprisonment in the United States obscure an obvious but understudied aspect of criminal justice: there is no consistent punishment policy across the U.S. It is up to individual states to administer their criminal justice systems, and the differences among them are vast. For example, while some states enforce mandatory minimum sentencing, some even implementing harsh and degrading practices, others rely on community sanctions. What accounts for these differences?The Politics of Imprisonment seeks to document and explain variation in American penal sanctioning, drawing out the larger lessons for America's overreliance on imprisonment. Grounding her study in a comparison of how California, Washington, and New York each developed distinctive penal regimes in the late 1960s and early 1970s--a critical period in the history of crime control policy and a time of unsettling social change--Vanessa Barker concretely demonstrates that subtle but crucial differences in political institutions, democratic traditions, and social trust shape the way American states punish offenders. Barker argues that the apparent link between public participation, punitiveness, and harsh justice is not universal but dependent upon the varying institutional contexts and patterns of civic engagement within the U.S. and across liberal democracies.A bracing examination of the relationship between punishment and democracy, The Politics of Imprisonment not only suggests that increased public participation in the political process can support and sustain less coercive penal regimes, but also warns that it is precisely a lack of civic engagement that may underpin mass incarceration in the United States.
摘要註
'The Politics of Imprisonment' examines how the democratic process and social trust shape penal sanctioning in the United States. Drawing on a range of archival sources, Barker shows that higher levels of civic engagement tend to support milder punishments whereas lower levels tend to support more coercive criminal justice policies.