Suchergebnisse

No abstract available.

ECA Estudios Centroamericanos, Vol. 41, No. 450, 1986: 328-330.

Most recent analyses of US penality describe and explain the exceptional harshening of punishment over the previous three decades. This article challenges and qualifies these accounts by identifying 10 cultural, moral, and practical drivers of a bipartisan reconsideration of the discourses and policies responsible for mass incarceration. These penal-reform catalysts and drivers include: (1) the crime decline; (2) the Great Recession; (3) the prisoner-reentry movement and attendant changes in the moral status of prisoners; (4) apparent shifts in public attitudes about punishment; (5) 'punitive saturation' and the cyclical nature of penal thinking and policy; (6) changing dominant conceptions of the criminal offender; (7) the return of human dignity to US jurisprudence; (8) the ideational influence of Christian reformers who assail the morality of excessive punishment; (9) the conservative 'Right on Crime' initiative that promotes a range of reforms formerly associated with the Left; and (10) the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose model legislation once drove mass incarceration but now aims to curtail it. The article also invites theoretical analysis of whether ongoing shifts represent a structural reordering of the penal field akin to the punitive turn or merely a set of benevolent tendencies within the same carceral paradigm.

DURING HIS EIGHT YEARS AS GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK, ALFRED E. SMITH SOUGHT TO IMPLEMENT A PRISON REFORM EMPHASIZING REHABILITATION THROUGH INDUSTRIAL WORK. HE FELT THAT BY PROVIDING PRISONERS WITH WORK, RECREATION, AND A MEASURE OF FREEDOM A GENUINE REHABILITATION COULD BE ACHIEVED. REGRETTABLY, FOR THE FUTURE OF PENOLOGY, THE LOGIC OF HIS POSITION HAS BEEN OVERLOOKED.