The Limits of Criminological Positivism: The Movement for Criminal Law Reform in the West, 1870-1940 presents the first major study of the limits of criminological positivism in the West and establishes the subject as a field of interest. The volume will explore those limits and bring to life the resulting doctrinal, procedural, and institutional compromises of the early twentieth century that might be said to have defined modern criminal justice administration. The book examines the topic not only in North America and western Europe, with essays on Italy, Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Finland but also the reception and implementation of positivist ideas in Brazil. In doing so, it explores three comparative elements: (1) the differing national experiences within the civil law world; (2) differences and similarities between civil law and common law regimes; and (3) some differences between the two leading common-law countries. It interrogates many key aspects of current penal systems, such as the impact of extra-legal scientific knowledge on criminal law, preventive detention, the ‘dual-track’ system with both traditional punishment and novel measures of security, the assessment of offenders’ dangerousness, juvenile justice, and the indeterminate sentence. As a result, this study contributes to a critical understanding of some inherent contradictions characterizing criminal justice in contemporary western societies. Written in a straight-forward and direct manner, this volume will be of great interest to academics and students researching historical criminology, philosophy, political science, and legal history.

This book incorporates many of the exciting debates in the social sciences and philosophy of knowledge concerning the issues of modernity and post-modernism. It sets out a new project for criminology, a criminology of modernity, and offers a sustained critique of theorizing without a concern for social totalities. This book is designed to place criminological theory at the cutting edge of contemporary debates. Wayne Morrison reviews the history and present state of criminology and identifies a range of social problems and large scale social processes which must be addressed if the subject is to attain intellectual commitment. This book marks a new development in criminological texts and will serve a valuable function not only for students and academics but for all those interested in the project of understanding crime in contemporary conditions.

During the 1960s, traditional thinking about crime and its punishment, deviance and its control, came under radical attack. The discipline of criminology split into feuding factions, and various schools of thought emerged, each with quite different ideas about the nature of the crime problem and its solutions. These differences often took political form, with conservative, liberal, and radical supporters, and the resulting controversies continue to reverberate throughout the fields of criminology and sociology, as well as related areas such as social work, social policy, psychiatry, and law. Stanley Cohen has been at the center of these debates in Britain and the United States. This volume is a selection of his essays, written over the past fifteen years, which contribute to and comment upon the major theoretical conflicts in criminology during this period. Though associated with the "new" or radical criminology, Cohen has always been the first to point out its limitations particularly in translating its theoretical claims into real world applications. His essays cove a wide range of topics-political crime, the nature of individual responsibility, the implications of new theories for social work practice, models of crime used in the Third World, banditry and rebellion, and the decentralization of social control. Also included is a previously unpublished paper on how radical social movements such as feminism deal with criminal law. Many criminology textbooks present particular theories or research findings. This book uniquely reviews the main debates of the last two decades about just what the role and scope of the subject should be.

The period from 1870 to 1913 saw the emergence of modern mass politics. The extension of the franchise, the development of party structures and political cleavages and growing state intervention mark this period as one of substantial political change. This collection brings together a selection of the most important recent research in this field.

Volume 51 is a thematic volume on Prisons and Prisoners. Since 1979, the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cures. In both the review and the occasional thematic volumes, Crime and Justice offers an interdisciplinary approach to address core issues in criminology. Volume 51 of Crime and Justice is the first to reprise a predecessor, Prisons (Volume 26, 1999), edited by series editor Michael Tonry and the late Joan Petersilia. In Prisons and Prisoners, editors Michael Tonry and Sandra Bucerius revisit the subject for several reasons. In 1999, most scholarly research concerned developments in Britain and the United States and was published in English. Much of that was sociological, focused on inmate subcultures, or psychological, focused on how prisoners coped with and adapted to prison life. Some, principally by economists and statisticians, sought to measure the crime-preventive effects of imprisonment generally and the deterrent effects of punishments of greater and lesser severity. In 2022, serious scholarly research on prisoners, prisons, and the effects of imprisonment has been published and is underway in many countries. That greater cosmopolitanism is reflected in the pages of this volume. Several essays concern developments in places other than Britain and the United States. Several are primarily comparative and cover developments in many countries. Those primarily concerned with American research draw on work done elsewhere. The subjects of prison research have also changed. Work on inmate subcultures and coping and adaptation has largely fallen by the wayside. Little is being done on imprisonment’s crime-preventive effects, largely because they are at best modest and often perverse. An essay in Volume 50 of Crime and Justice, examining the 116 studies then published on the effects of imprisonment on subsequent offending, concluded that serving a prison term makes ex-prisoners on average more, not less, likely to reoffend. In 1999, little research had been done on the effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ families, children, or communities, or even—except for recidivism— on ex-prisoners’ later lives: family life, employment, housing, physical and mental health, or achievement of a conventional, law-abiding life. The first comprehensive survey of what was then known was published in the earlier Crime and Justice: Prisons volume. An enormous literature has since emerged, as essays in this volume demonstrate. Comparatively little work had been done by 1999 on the distinctive prison experiences of women and members of non-White minority groups. That too has changed, as several of the essays make clear. What is not clear is the future of imprisonment. Through more contemporary and global lenses, the essays featured in this volume not only reframe where we are in 2022 but offer informed insights into where we might be heading.

This book analyses a selection of leading works in the criminal law to ask questions about how the modern discipline of criminal law has developed, how it has been deployed in colonial and postcolonial contexts, and how criminal law scholarship has engaged with traditionally marginalised perspectives such as feminism, queer theory, and anti-carceral and abolitionist movements. The works analysed range from Macaulay’s Indian Penal Code (1837) to more recent textbooks and monographs on criminal law, and their jurisdictional reach extends to India, Canada, Australia, Malawi, the UK and the USA. The contributing authors include scholars, activists and legal practitioners, each of whom explores the intellectual development and geographical reach of Anglocriminal law via the work they analyse. Across the collection, the editors and contributors address the question of what it means to be a leading work in criminal law. The book will be a valuable resource for students, academics and researchers working in the area of criminal law.

"As the world becomes increasingly globalized, a shared understanding of the various aspects of criminal justice becomes imperative. Drawing from countries across Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere, this book is a go-to reference in comparative criminal justice studies"--