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Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. The author underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.--

Failure to cost programme -- The organisational model for the new system is untried, over-complex and highly risky -- Uncertainty and risk about PBR -- Doubts about competence -- Dealing with failure -- Approach to risk -- Comparison with competition in prisons -- First inspection reports -- Conclusion -- 15. Has competition worked? -- Has competition been worthwhile? -- How well has government managed competition? -- Mistakes, mis-steps and missed opportunities -- 16. Has competition a future? -- The end of competition? -- No difference between sectors? -- The new contractual model -- Competition can be reintroduced at any time to deal with any failing public sector prison -- Why competition matters -- Conclusion -- Wider reflections -- Appendix: Prescription of operating procedures in prison contracts -- Bibliography -- Index.

This article shows how the social sciences, particularly human geography, rejected hard determinism by the mid-twentieth century partly on the deontological basis that it is irreconcilable with social justice, yet this rejection came just before a burst of creative development in consequentialist theories of social justice that problematize a facile rejection of determinism on moral grounds, a development that has seldom been recognized in the social sciences. Thus many current social science and human geography views on determinism and social justice are antiquated, ignoring numerous common and well-respected arguments within philosophy that hard determinism can be reconciled with a just society. We support this argument by briefly tracing the parallel development of stances on determinism in the social sciences and the deontological-consequentialist debate in philosophy. The purpose of the article is to resituate social science and human geography debates on determinism and social justice within a modern ethical framework.

pt. 1. Taking stock of human rights within criminology -- pt. 2. Law, regulation and governance through a human rights lens -- pt. 3. Human rights in the promotion of peace, community safety and social justice -- pt. 4. Policing and human rights -- pt. 5. Human rights and the justice process -- pt. 6. Human rights and penality

Producing scientific knowledge that can inform solutions and guide policy-making is one of the most important functions of social science. Nonetheless, if social science is to become more relevant and influential so as to impact on the drawing and execution of policy, certain measures need to be taken to narrow its distance from the policy sphere. This decision is less obvious than it seems. Both research and experience have proved that policy-making is a complex, often sub-rational, interactive process that involves a wide range of actors such as decision makers, bureaucrats, researchers, organised interests, citizen and civil society representatives and research brokers. In addition, social science often needs to defend both its relevance to policy and its own scientific status. Moving away from instrumental visions of the link between social research and policy, this collective volume aims to highlight the more constructed nature of the use of social knowledge. Hence, it addresses issues pertaining to the epistemology of social scientific research, the role of social interaction and power in the production of knowledge and the institutional links that bridge research and policy. The authors' contributions promote a lively, scholarly discussion on democracy and participation as well as on values and capacities in the scientific making of policy that will enlighten the interested reader and enrich the academic and policy debates, while suggesting concrete proposals for capacity-building.