Harsh JusticeCriminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe

Thinking about Punishment across Space and Time

“…They were prevalent in South Africa during Apartheid and in the Soviet Union, and continue to cast long shadows in both. They were predominant in the Western countries before the nineteenth century as is demonstrated by Foucault's (1977) accounts of punishment under the ancien regime and historians' accounts of the use of capital punishment in England (e.g., Thompson 1975;Hay et al 1976) and imprisonment throughout Europe and Britain in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries (Whitman 2003).…”

Punishment, participatory democracy and the jury

“…Her work explains the significant difference between the high incarceration rates in California, driven by voters and politicians, and the lower rates in Washington, driven by deliberative assemblies and engaged citizens. In other words, countering Whitman's (2003) thesis that our criminal justice system suffers from too much democracy, Barker and Dzur suggest that it suffers from too thin a version of democratic engagement. Dzur's democratic theory of the 'load-bearing' jury counters the endgame invited by Whitman's thesis of more reliance on professionalism and bureaucracy as buffers between the public and the accused/condemned.…”

Colombian prisons as a core institution of authoritarian liberalism

“…This combination of factors, especially during the past three decades, has given rise to a Culture of Control [20: 175] which affects the lives of every citizen and which inspires governmental policy at the global level in a wide diversity of countries, in the Global North as well as in the Global South. It may be inaccurate to state that international homogeneity exists for punishment; in fact, a wide variety of tendencies can be found worldwide-as authors such as Lacey [40,41], Whitman [64], Lappi-Seppälä [42], Melossi et al [43], Nelken [45,46] and Sozzo [59] have pointed out. There is, however, in many countries both of the Global North and South a trend towards penal convergence [5: 438, 441], as witnessed by the overall growth of the inmate population brought about by increasingly harsh penal laws.…”