Criminal Justice Ethics articles from January 1997

Criminal Justice Ethics archives from January 1997

Informants, rats, and tattletales: loyalty, fear, and the Constitution.
January 1, 1997... Police officers and prosecutors do more than solve crime: they destroy loyalty. To obtain evidence, they pressure business partners, life-long friends, and even family members to "rat" on each other by betraying secrets. In doing so, they...

Dangerous games and the criminal law.
January 1, 1997... I Introduction This essay means to correct the ways in which the law of homicide deals with lucky winners or survivors of dangerous games that end in the deaths of unlucky (dead) "losers" or even unluckier non-participants. Drag racing...

Reciprocity as a justification for retributivism. (punishment and social contract theory)
January 1, 1997... Retributivism is regarded by many as an attractive theory of punishment.(1) Its primary assumption is that persons are morally responsible agents, and it demands that the social practices of punishment acknowledge that agency. But others have...

Thinking about private prisons.
January 1, 1997... At present, there are more than twenty companies in the United States, taking in more than $250 million in annual revenues, that operate private jails and prisons. These companies incarcerate about 50,000 inmates, a relatively small portion of...

Virtual Justice: The Flawed Prosecution of Crime in America.
January 1, 1997... Richard Uviller's latest book is ambitious in scope and style, but modest in its ostensible objective. The author surveys both the investigatory and the adjudicatory phases of the American criminal process in user-friendly prose based on...

Commonsense Justice: Jurors' Notions of the Law.
January 1, 1997... This engaging book about juries weaves and wanders through a course of diverse topics, but in the end it travels a straight path. Examining jury behavior in a wide range of issues including self-defense, insanity, crimes of passion, euthanasia...