Social Research articles from June 2007

Social Research archives from June 2007

Endangered scholars worldwide: introduction.
June 22, 2007... IN THIS ISSUE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH WE ARE INTRODUCING A NEW FEATURE that we hope will appear regularly in our pages. We resolve to dedicate a section of each future issue to a listing of endangered and imprisoned scholars worldwide. We will...

Endangered scholars worldwide.(Dr. Bernahu Nega and Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh)(Brief article)
June 22, 2007... DR. BERHANU NEGA, an economist and a leading member of Ethiopia's main opposition party, has taught at both Bucknell University and the University of Addis Ababa. In the spring of 2005 he was elected mayor of Addis Ababa. He was subsequently...

Concerned scholars and intellectuals protest the imprisonment of Kian Tajbakhsh.
June 22, 2007... WE AT SOCIAL RESEARCH: AN INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, based at the New School for Social Research, together with our readers and colleagues worldwide, are deeply distressed by the arrest and imprisonment of our highly...

Editor's introduction.
June 22, 2007... THIS ISSUE CONTAINS ALMOST ALL OF THE PAPERS FROM THE SIXTEENTH Social Research conference, Punishment: The US Record, which took place at The New School in the fall of 2006. The decision to organize a conference on who, what, why, and how we...

Why we punish: introduction.(I. Why We Punish: The Foundation of Our Concepts of Punishment)(Brief article)
June 22, 2007... THE PAPERS IN THE FIRST SECTION OF THIS ISSUE ARE CONCERNED WITH why we punish. They are focused on two sets of questions. First, do the traditional justifications for allowing the state to impose pain on individuals, for deterrence or...

What happened to Tocqueville's America?(I. Why We Punish: The Foundation of Our Concepts of Punishment)
June 22, 2007... THERE WAS A TIME WHEN AMERICAN CRIMINAL PUNISHMENT WAS A model for the civilized world. That time, which now seems very long ago, was the early nineteenth century. "The fame of the great advances that America had made with regard to prisons...

Punishment and the spirit of democracy.(I. Why We Punish: The Foundation of Our Concepts of Punishment)
June 22, 2007... PUNISHMENT THAT IS ADMINISTERED DIRECTLY BY THE STATE IS ONE of those subjects that are hard to pin down. There is no theoretical defense of the reasons for punishment that wins common assent. All the principal justifications for it have a long...

Post-modern meditations on punishment: on the limits of reason and the virtues of randomization (a polemic and manifesto for the twenty-first century).(I. Why We Punish: The Foundation of Our Concepts of Punishment)(Critical essay)
June 22, 2007... Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. --Immanuel Kant, "An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?'" (1784)...

Introduction: what and how we punish.(II. What and How We Punish: Law, Justice, and Punishment)
June 22, 2007... THE CURRENT INCARCERATION CRISIS IN THE UNITED STATES CAN BE profitably understood by examining what, how, and whom we punish and with what consequences. This section deals with "just" the what and how. There is much to be asked and much...

Looking back to see the future of punishment in America. (II. What and How We Punish: Law, Justice, and Punishment).
June 22, 2007... LOOKED AT FROM INSIDE THE UNITED STATES, IT IS DIFFICULT TO SEE how different the American system of punishment is from those in other Western countries. Most practitioners and informed scholars know that the United States has the highest...

Economic models of crime and punishment.(II. What and How We Punish: Law, Justice, and Punishment)
June 22, 2007... OVER THE LAST 45 YEARS, THREE MONUMENTAL STORIES HAVE dominated the national American crime scene. * The first was the run up in crime in the 1960s as a number of social forces converged into a perfect storm of increased criminal activity....

The "desert" model for sentencing: its influence, prospects, and alternatives.(II. What and How We Punish: Law, Justice, and Punishment)
June 22, 2007... INTRODUCTION THE DECLINE OF THE REHABILITATIVE ETHOS IN SENTENCING THEORY in the post-1960s is a story that has been told often (see, for example, Allen, 1981) and need not be rehearsed here. * Penal treatment programs, once tested for...

The peculiar forms of American capital punishment.(II. What and How We Punish: Law, Justice, and Punishment)(Law overview)
June 22, 2007... THERE ARE TWO PUZZLES THAT CONFRONT OBSERVERS OF AMERICAN capital punishment at the start of the twenty-first century. * One concerns the legal and administrative arrangements through which it is enacted, which strike many commentators as...

Introduction: who we punish: the carceral state.(III. Who We Punish: The Carceral State)
June 22, 2007... THE NEW SCHOOL CONFERENCE FROM WHICH THIS SPECIAL ISSUE derives charged some of the field's most thoughtful researchers and theorists with taking up the question of who we punish. A fundamental point cutting across the papers in this volume is...

Rise of the carceral state.(III. Who We Punish: The Carceral State)
June 22, 2007... NO PIECE OF THE PRESENT CONJUNCTURE IS AS STRIKING AS THE RAPID growth of the American prison population. At its recent low point in the early 1970s, nearly 90 Americans were in prison for every 100,000 free residents. This was on the low side...

Mass imprisonment and economic inequality.(III. Who We Punish: The Carceral State)
June 22, 2007... THE GROWTH OF PENAL POPULATION THROUGH THE LAST DECADES of the twentieth century reshaped the institutional landscape of American poverty and inequality. The effects of rising incarceration rates have been especially large for young minority...

Designed to punish: immigrant detention and deportation.(III. Who We Punish: The Carceral State)
June 22, 2007... IN A POEM CALLED "BOTPIPEL" (BOAT PEOPLE), HAITIAN FELIX MORRISEAU Leroy (1912-1998) writes: Nou tap kouri pou Fo Dimanch Nou vin echwe nan Kwom Avni. We were running from Ft. Dimanche We washed ashore on Krome Avenue....

Supermax as a technology of punishment.(III. Who We Punish: The Carceral State)
June 22, 2007... SUPERMAX PRISONS ARE OFTEN DESCRIBED AS "HIGH TECH." * OBSERVERS seem to mean two things by this. First that these "prisons within prisons" are a technology in themselves: hard-edged and brightly lit, the fortress-like supermax dearly signals...

Introduction: consequences of a carceral state.(IV. Consequences of the Carceral State)(Statistical data)
June 22, 2007... THE PHRASE "MASS INCARCERATION" IS NOW WIDELY USED TO DESCRIBE the current state of criminal justice in the United States. Over the past generation, our rate of incarceration has more than quadrupled, rising every year since 1972 so that it now...

Barriers to prisoners' reentry into the labor market and the social costs of recidivism.(IV. Consequences of the Carceral State)
June 22, 2007... ARE PRISONS CRIHINOGENIC? ALTHOUGH THE PRISON WAS ORIGINALLY CONCEIVED FOR THE NOBLE purpose of rehabilitating criminal offenders, critics from its very inception worried that the cure was worse than the disease (Rothman 2005 [1971];...

The impacts of incarceration on public safety.(IV. Consequences of the Carceral State)
June 22, 2007... IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW WE WILL TAKE A LOOK INSIDE THE BLACK box of the largest penal experiment in world history: the quintupling of the prison population in the United States between 1973 and 2006. A central question that emerges and that...

Back-end sentencing: a practice in search of a rationale.(IV. Consequences of the Carceral State)
June 22, 2007... THE PHENOMENON OF BACK-END SENTENCING--THE PRACTICE OF SENDING people back to prison for violations of the terms of their parole supervision--has grown significantly over recent years and now occupies a prominent role in the new realities of...

Introduction: defining decarceration.(V. Alternatives to the Carceral State: A Panel Discussion)
June 22, 2007... THE MANDATORY SENTENCING CRAZE THAT SWEPT THE UNITED STATES during the late twentieth century distorted the civic landscape in ways that will be difficult to undo. The prison population was driven up tenfold, creating a large and growing felon...

The expansion of punishment and the restriction of justice: loss of limits in the implementation of retributive policy.(V. Alternatives to the Carceral State: A Panel Discussion)(Law overview)
June 22, 2007... PRIOR TO THE 1980s, INTELLECTUALS AND PERHAPS A MAJORITY OF corrections professionals in the United States would likely have been ridiculed for arguing for punishment as a primary objective of criminal justice intervention. Rehabilitation...

Alternatives to the carceral state: the judge's role.(V. Alternatives to the Carceral State: A Panel Discussion)
June 22, 2007... THERE IS A DISCONNECT BETWEEN THE ACADEMY AND THE PUBLIC, THE Congress and the courts that the papers in this volume dramatize. The academy, or especially, the sponsor of the conference from which this volume derives, the New School-has...

Dollars, sense, and penal reform: social movements and the future of the carceral state.(V. Alternatives to the Carceral State: A Panel Discussion)
June 22, 2007... NEARLY ONE IN EVERY HUNDRED ADULTS IN THE UNITED STATES IS IN JAIL or prison today. In a period dominated by calls to roll back the government in all areas of social and economic policy, we have witnessed its massive expansion in the realm of...

Finding alternatives to the carceral state.(V. Alternatives to the Carceral State: A Panel Discussion)
June 22, 2007... MOST PRESENT-DAY SCHOLARSHIP ON THE CARCERAL STATE, AND nearly all the papers and discussion in this special issue, involve analysis of the massive increase in the prison population over the last 25 years. What accounts for this turn toward...

The hidden problem of time served in prison.(V. Alternatives to the Carceral State: A Panel Discussion)(Law overview)
June 22, 2007... ASSESSING THE POLITICAL AND CULTURAL FORCES BEHIND THE unprecedented increase in the use of incarceration in the United States in the late decades of the twentieth century is a complex undertaking. If we are to some day reverse these trends and...

Dirty bombs and garbage cases.(V. Alternatives to the Carceral State: A Panel Discussion)
June 22, 2007... AS AMERICA'S CORRECTIONAL POPULATIONS HAVE ROCKETED UPWARD since the 1970s, researchers have quite properly focused attention on prisons and prisoners. Yet examinations of the US punishment record must look beyond prison gates, as criminal...