Free Market Criminal Justice: How Democracy and Laissez Faire Undermine the Rule of Law

Brown, Darryl K.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2735097

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…It is common to find the explanation in burgeoning caseloads and the rise of plea bargaining: As systems of criminal adjudication have become increasingly burdened, they have substituted consensual case dispositions for trials, and as plea bargaining rises, so does prosecutorial power (Luna & Wade 2012). Plea bargaining has in fact increased, both in the United States and abroad, but it is unclear whether rising caseloads have driven that phenomenon, or whether plea bargaining has instead inflated caseloads by expanding the system's capacity, the way that widening a highway can bring more traffic (Brown 2016). Nor is it clear whether prosecutorial power has been boosted by the rise of plea bargaining, or for that matter by swelling caseloads, as opposed to vice versa.…”

Section: Wwwannualreviewsorg • the Problems With Prosecutorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Problems With Prosecutors

Sklansky

2018

Annu. Rev. Criminol.

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Most scholarship on prosecutors in the United States is diagnostic, prescriptive, or both; the motivating questions are, What is the problem with prosecutors, and how do we fix it? Answering those questions has been difficult, in part because there are at least seven different problems with American prosecutors. Six of those problems are relatively familiar: the power of prosecutors, the discretion they exercise, the illegality in which they too often are found to have engaged, the punitive ideology that shapes many of their practices, their often-frustrating unaccountability, and organizational inertia within prosecutors' offices. These problems intersect, so they are difficult to address separately. The seventh problem is discussed less often but may be the most basic: the ambiguity of the prosecutor's role. That problem needs to be understood as well if progress is to be made addressing the other six.

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Section: Wwwannualreviewsorg • the Problems With Prosecutorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Problems With Prosecutors

Sklansky

2018

Annu. Rev. Criminol.

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“…Recent research in a number of disciplines has contributed to an accumulating evidential and theoretical base for our thesis. The tendency of American political fragmentation to unleash 'centrifugal', polarising forces has been identified by historians and political scientists (Gerstle 2015: 154-5;King 2000;King & Smith 2005;Miller 2016); and the key impact of local democracy and locally based criminal justice institutions on the development of criminal justice policy has been confirmed in a range of broadly criminological work (Appleman 2017;Brown 2016;Campbell 2014;Verma 2016). More specifically, many recent studies have confirmed the decisive impact of electoral cycles on both judicial and prosecutorial decision-making (Berdejó & Chen 2017;Nadel et al 2017;Park 2017).…”

Section: International Inequalities Institutementioning

confidence: 98%

“…Equally significantly, the creation of vigilance committees, which asserted to themselves the right of 'law' enforcement in many areas of the country, and which persisted throughout the 19th and into the 20th century (Friedman 1993: Chapter 8;Walker 1998: Chapter 2) betoken a lack not merely of centralisation but of standardisation and of institutionalisation of the rule of law which finds no parallel in the UK or North European countries. Echoing Gerstle's ( 2015) and Brown's (2016) diagnosis of a system which relies on privatisation to deliver governmental functions, the criminal justice 'systems' of late 19th century America amounted to a public/private systema hotch potch of public yet politicised, professional yet not centralised, private and uncoordinated, or hybrid organisations, implying radical local variation in both institutional structure and outcome.…”

Section: Lay Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

American Exceptionalism in Inequality and Poverty: A (Tentative) Historical Explanation

Lacey¹,

Soskice²

2021

Tracing the Relationship Between Inequality, Crime and Punishment

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The United States is a fascinating case study in the complex links between crime, punishment and inequality, standing out as it does in terms of inequality as measured by a number of economic standards; levels of serious violent crime; and rates of imprisonment, penal surveillance and post-conviction disqualifications. This chapter builds on the authors’ previous work arguing that the exceptional rise in violent crime and punishment in the US from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s can be explained by the interaction of four political and economic variables: ‘technological regime change’; ‘varieties of capitalism’ and ‘varieties of welfare state’; types of ‘political system’; and – critically and specifically – the US as a radical outlier in the degree of local democracy. Three further questions implied by the authors’ previous work are asked. First, why did such distinctive patterns of local democracy arise in America? And how is this political structure tied up with the history and politics of race? Second, what did the distinctive historical development of the US political economy in the 19th century imply for the structure of its criminal justice institutions? And third, why did the burden of crime and punishment come to fall so disproportionately on African Americans?

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“…I also described how the two modules fostered criticality as a central part of their pedagogies and noted how other, counter-hegemonic, discourses circulated too. Indeed, as Brown (2015b) describes, there are other rationalities and discourses rubbing up against neoliberalism, particularly from students disillusioned with their identities as only human capital. Moreover, in writing this I am painfully aware that, despite my own theoretical commitment to re-thinking criticality, I equally cite instrumental narratives, as well as more 'rebellious' ones in my own classroom.…”

Section: Critical Thinking and The Optics Of Possibility Within Neoli...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Individualised and instrumentalised? Critical thinking, students and the optics of possibility within neoliberal higher education

Danvers

2023

Contemporary Dynamics of Student Experience and Belonging in Higher Education

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This paper explores the state of critical thinking in higher education's everyday pedagogical encounters, against the backdrop of an increasingly commodified and marketised academy in the UK. Illustrated by observation, focus group and interview data from 15 firstyear undergraduate social-science students at a UK research-intensive university, I explore how neoliberal modes of governmentality create, reproduce and legitimate specific forms of critical thinking and critical thinkers. First, I describe how dominant discourses of critical thinking as a commodified 'technology' for assessment rub up against understandings of critical thinking as socio-political protest -using data from students and those teaching them. I then explore the positioning of critical thinking as emotional self-surveillance and unpack the consequences of this politics of reflection over resistance. Using Barad's notion of the 'apparatus' as a contextualising optic of possibility, I argue that while multiple formations of critical thinking exist within the multifarious possibilities constituting the 'neoliberal' academy, instrumentalised and individualised practices come to matter and are valorised, with pedagogic and political consequences for thinking critically in and about higher education.

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Free Market Criminal Justice: How Democracy and Laissez Faire Undermine the Rule of Law

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

The Problems With Prosecutors

The Problems With Prosecutors

American Exceptionalism in Inequality and Poverty: A (Tentative) Historical Explanation

Individualised and instrumentalised? Critical thinking, students and the optics of possibility within neoliberal higher education

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