Rights and Wrongs

This book seeks to explain why the concept of justice is critical to the study of criminal justice. Heffernan makes such a case by treating state-sponsored punishment as the defining feature of criminal justice. In particular, this work accounts for the state's role as a surrogate for victims of wrongdoing-and so makes it possible to integrate victimology scholarship into its justice-based framework. In arguing that punishment may be imposed only for wrongdoing, the book proposes a criterion for repudiating the legal paternalism that informs drug-possession laws.

Rethinking the Foundations of Criminal Justice outlines steps for taming the state's power to punish offenders; in particular, it draws on restorative justice research to outline possibilities for a penology that emphasizes offenders' humanity. Through its examination of equality issues, the book integrates recent work on the social justice/criminal justice connection into the scholarly literature on punishment, and so will particularly appeal to those interested in criminal justice theory.

Autorentext
William Heffernan is Professor of Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He is an editor of Criminal Justice Ethics, a publication of John Jay's Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics. His books include Privacy And The American Constitution: New Rights Through Interpretation Of An Old Text (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and his articles on constitutional privacy protection have appeared in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Georgetown Law Journal, Wisconsin Law Review, and Notre Dame Law Review.

Inhalt

Introduction

1.Thinking about Justice

An Evaluative Concept

Identifying Rights A Question of Motivation

2.Thinking about Criminal Justice

The Lex Talionis Framework of Negative Reciprocity

The Possibility of Dispensing Entirely with Negative Reciprocity

Negative Reciprocity Once Again: Impartial Administration of Punishment for Malicious Violations of the Fair Terms of Cooperation

Criminal Justice: The State as a Permanent Enforcement Agency

3.Redressing Grievances: The Retaliation Model

The Pure Retaliation Model

Moving away from the Pure Retaliation Model: The Medieval State as a Weak Enforcement Agency

4.Redressing Grievances: The Criminal Justice Model

Moving towards the Criminal Justice Model: The Rise of the Modern State

The Possibility of Taming State Power

Taming the Power of the State

5.Decriminalization

The Eligibility Principle and Decriminalization

The Eligibility Principle's Ramifications

6.Policing the Police

Stop and Frisk

Systematic Surveillance of Behavior in Public Places

7.State-Imposed Punishment

Whether, What Kind, and How Much Questions Bearing on Punishment

Prison Conditions: The State's Carceral Responsibility for Inmates

8.Equality: Racial and Class Disparities in the Context of State-Imposed Punishment

Retail vs. Wholesale Approaches to Criminal Justice

The Possibility of Achieving Equal Justice on a Case by Case Basis

Afterword