First published in 1984, this book examines corporate crime in the pharmaceutical industry. Based on extensive research, including interviews with 131 senior executives of pharmaceutical companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Mexico and Guatemala, the book is a major study of white-collar crime. Written in the 1980s, it covers topics such as international bribery and corruption, fraud in the testing of drugs and criminal negligence in the unsafe manufacturing of drugs. The author considers the implications (...) of his findings for a range of strategies to control corporate crime, nationally and internationally. (shrink)

Terrorist organisations have increased and widened in Iraq in particular and the world in general in recent years. People have suffered a lot from these terrorist organisations due to their thirst for killing innocent civilians. The study aims to convey the suffering of innocent Iraqis caused by terrorist acts to the world. In order to achieve the aim, the research adopted Barthes’s framework to analyse the selected photographs. The researchers have selected iconic photographs for the analysis. The photographs are taken (...) from the main websites of the local, Arabic, and foreign media. The study found out that terrorism is the brutal enemy of all Iraqi societies including Sunnis, Shia, Kurds, Christians, and Yazidis. This research is a clear example that shows the world the extent of the suffering, pain, and fear Iraqi people are facing because of terrorism. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive overview of what the criminal law would look like if organised around the principle that those who deserve punishment should receive punishment commensurate with, but no greater than, that which they deserve. Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan argue that desert is a function of the actor's culpability, and that culpability is a function of the risks of harm to protected interests that the actor believes he is imposing and his reasons for acting in the (...) face of those risks. The authors deny that resultant harms, as well as unperceived risks, affect the actor's desert. They thus reject punishment for inadvertent negligence as well as for intentions or preparatory acts that are not risky. Alexander and Ferzan discuss the reasons for imposing risks that negate or mitigate culpability, the individuation of crimes, and omissions. (shrink)

Why do war crimes occur? Are perpetrators of war crimes always blameworthy? In an original and challenging thesis, this book argues that war crimes are often explained by perpetrators' beliefs, goals, and values, and in these cases perpetrators may be blameworthy even if they sincerely believed that they were doing the right thing.

Crimes of Reason brings together expanded and updated versions of some of Braude’s best previously published essays, along with new essays written specifically for this book.

War crimes are being committed in Ukraine today, but who should be held responsible? By looking at the literature on responsibility and violence by Philippa Foot and John Harris, this article argues that there are grounds for holding Vladimir Putin responsible for war crimes in Ukraine, even if he did not give the command for these crimes and other atrocities to be carried out.

Crime scene investigation is a form of Distributed Cognition. The principal concept we explore in this paper is that of `resource for action'. It is proposed that crime scene investigation employs four primary resources-for-action: the environment, or scene itself, which affords particular forms of search and object retrieval; the retrieved objects, which afford translation into evidence; the procedures that guide investigation, which both constrain the search activity and also provide opportunity for additional activity; the narratives that different agents (...) within the system produce to develop explanatory models and formal accounts of the crime. For each aspect of distributed cognition, we consider developments in technology that could support activity. (shrink)

Crime scene investigation is a form of Distributed Cognition. The principal concept we explore in this paper is that of `resource for action'. It is proposed that crime scene investigation employs four primary resources-for-action: the environment, or scene itself, which affords particular forms of search and object retrieval; the retrieved objects, which afford translation into evidence; the procedures that guide investigation, which both constrain the search activity and also provide opportunity for additional activity; the narratives that different agents (...) within the system produce to develop explanatory models and formal accounts of the crime. For each aspect of distributed cognition, we consider developments in technology that could support activity. (shrink)

Recent research in moral psychology has attempted to characterize patterns of moral judgments of actions in terms of the causal and intentional properties of those actions. The present study directly compares the roles of consequence, causation, belief and desire in determining moral judgments. Judgments of the wrongness or permissibility of action were found to rely principally on the mental states of an agent, while judgments of blame and punishment are found to rely jointly on mental states and the causal connection (...) of an agent to a harmful consequence. Also, selectively for judgments of punishment and blame, people who attempt but fail to cause harm more are judged more leniently if the harm occurs by independent means than if the harm does not occur at all. An account of these phenomena is proposed that distinguishes two processes of moral judgment: one which begins with harmful consequences and seeks a causally responsible agent, and the other which begins with an action and analyzes the mental states responsible for that action. Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Is it permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally? While this issue has recently been the subject of widespread public debate, it has received little attention in the philosophical literature. This paper will investigate this issue by examining the nature and ethics of fandom. I will argue that the crimes and misdemeanors of the object of fandom provide three kinds of moral reasons for fans to abandon their fandom. First, being a (...) fan of the immoral may provide support for their immoral behavior. Second, fandom alters our perception in ways that will often lead us to be fail to perceive our idol’s faults and even to adopting immoral points of view in order to be able to maintain the positive view we have of them. Third, fandom, like friendship, may lead us to engage in acts of loyalty to protect the interests of our idols. This gives fans of the immoral good reason to abandon their fandom. However, these reasons will not always be conclusive and, in some cases, it may be possible to instead adopt a critical form of fandom. (shrink)

This is a review essay of Lagasnerie, Judge and Punish and Fassin, The Will to Punish. It explores the way that these two books challenge conventional thinking about the relationship between crime and punishment.

In “Is Penalty Enhancement a Sound Idea?” Claudia Card calls into question hate crime legislation, querying whether hatred makes a crime worse, whether hatred of the sort pertinent to hate crimes is worse than a more personal hatred, and whether the message sent by hate crime legislation is the intended message. This essay questions her assumption that penalty enhancement for hate crimes is warranted only if the crimes are worse than otherwise similar crimes that do not count (...) as hate crimes. Instead, it may be the case that it is the proper business of the state to take a particular interest in such crimes, in part because they enact not just any hatred but civic hatred. And if hate crimes are understood as enacting civic hatred, hate crime legislation can indeed serve to counter a message that very much needs to be countered. (shrink)

This chapter describes Card's characterization as an idealization that captures why hate crime legislation seems (at least prima facie) to be a very good idea. The rationale for enhanced penalties is far more compelling if hate crimes are characterized as Card characterizes them. She focuses on hate crimes that are motivated by hatred. Hate crimes today should be viewed as part of an ongoing campaign of intimidation. Card is of course well aware of the position that the legal category (...) of hate crimes and enhanced penalties for hate crimes are called for to counter the message sent by hate crimes; in fact she notes that she was initially "attracted to the idea of penalty enhancement legislation for hate crimes as a way to send a strong social message against racism, sexism, anti‐Semitism, and homophobia". (shrink)

Preface: help! my brainchild's been kidnapped! -- Intellectual misconduct: backwards, forward, and sideways -- The world of scholarship: rituals and rewards, norms and departures -- Structural and organizational causes of scholarly misconduct -- Cultural causes of scholarly misconduct -- Individual and situational causes of scholarly misconduct -- Scholarly misconduct as crime -- Criminological theory and scholarly crime -- Implications for theory and research -- Preventing and controlling scholarly crime -- Afterword: against all odds, a code is born.

Crimes against humanity are supposed to have a collective dimension with respect both to their victims and their perpetrators. According to the orthodox view, these crimes can be committed by individuals against individuals, but only in the context of a widespread or systematic attack against the group to which the victims belong. In this paper I offer a new conception of crimes against humanity and a new justification for their international prosecution. This conception has important implications as to which crimes (...) can be justifiably prosecuted and punished by the international community. I contend that the scope of the area of international criminal justice that deals with basic human rights violations should be wider than is currently acknowledged, in that it should include some individual violations of human rights, rather than only violations that have a collective dimension. (shrink)

When should we make use of the criminal law? Suppose that a responsible legislature seeks to enact a morally justifiable range of criminal prohibitions. What criteria should it apply when deciding whether to proscribe conduct? Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs is a philosophical analysis of the nature, significance, and ethical limits of criminalisation. The authors explore the scope and moral boundaries of harm-based prohibitions, proscriptions of offensive behaviour, and 'paternalistic' prohibitions aimed at preventing self-harm. Their aim is to develop guiding principles (...) for these various grounds of state prohibition, including an analysis of the constraints and mediating factors that weigh for and against criminalisation. Both authors have written extensively in the field. In Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs they have reworked a number of well-known essays and added several important new essays to produce an integrated, accessible, philosophically-sophisticated account that will be of great interest to legal academics, philosophers, and advanced students alike"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Since 1900, debates about the justification of punishment have also been debates about the cause of crime. In the early twentieth century, the rehabilitative ideal of punishment viewed mental illness and dysfunction in individuals as the cause of crime. Starting in the 1970s, retributivism identified the immorality of human agents as the source of crime, which dovetailed well with the “tough-on-crime” political milieu of the 1980s and 1990s that produced mass incarceration. After surveying these historical trends, (...) Wirts argues for a social critical view that crime is best understood as a product of an unjust society, not faulty human beings. This view should take the lessons learned by the critiques of rehabilitation, however, and resist the tendency to reduce human beings to recipients of social services. (shrink)

O CRIME DE LAVAGEM DE DINHEIRO NAS ORGANIZAÇÕES RELIGIOSAS.

Two predictions concerning the perceived severity of crimes can be derived from evolutionary theory. The first, arising from the theory of inclusive fitness, is that crimes in general should be viewed as more serious to the degree that the victim is genetically related to the perpetrator. The second, arising from the deleterious effects of inbreeding depression, is that heterosexual sexual coercion should be perceived as more serious the closer the genetic relationship of victim and perpetrator, particularly when the victim is (...) a female of fertile age. Two hundred and thirty university students estimated the magnitude of the severity of brief crime descriptions in three separate studies. In the first two, the biological kinship of victim and perpetrator was varied, and in the third, the hypothetical genetic relatedness of the subject and the fictitious victim was varied. All three studies found the linear relationships between biological kinship and perceived crime severity predicted by theory. (shrink)

Includes a translator’s preface, note on the text, and suggestions for further reading.

Incarceration remains the foremost form of sentence for serious crimes in Western democracies. At the same time, the management of prisons and of the prison population has become a major real-world challenge, with growing concerns about overcrowding, the offenders’ well-being, and the failure of achieving the distal desideratum of reduced criminality, all of which have a moral dimension. In no small part motivated by these practical problems, the focus of the present article is on the ethical framework that we use (...) in thinking about and administering criminal justice. I start with an analysis of imprisonment and its permissibility as a punitive tool of justice. In particular, I present a novel argument against punitive imprisonment, showing it to fall short in meeting two key criteria of just punishment, namely (i) that the appropriate individual is being punished, and (ii) that the punishment can be adequately moderated to reflect the seriousness of the crime. The principles I argue for and that the aforementioned analysis brings to the fore, rooted in the sentient experience, firstly of victims, and not only of victims but also of the offenders as well as the society at large, then lead me to elucidate the broader framework of jurisprudence that I then apply more widely. Hence, while rejecting punitive imprisonment, I use its identified shortcomings to argue for the reinstitution of forms of punishment that are, incongruently, presently not seen as permissible, such as corporal punishment and punishments dismissed on the basis of being seen as humiliating. I also present a novel view of capital punishment, which, in contradiction to its name, I reject for punitive aims, but which I argue is permissible on compassionate grounds. (shrink)

When should someone who may have intentionally or knowingly committed criminal wrongdoing be excused? Excusing Crime examines what excusing conditions are, and why familiar excuses, such as duress, are thought to fulfil those conditions. Setting himself against the 'classical' view of excuses, which has a long heritage, and is enshrined in different forms in many of the world's criminal codes, both liberal and non-liberal; Jeremy Horder argues that it is now time to move forwards. He contends that a wider (...) range of excuses - 'diminished capacity', 'due diligence' and 'demands of conscience' - should be recognised in law. (shrink)

This chapter sets the scene for the subsequent philosophical discussions by surveying a number of biological interventions that have been used, or might in the future be used, for the purposes of crime prevention. These interventions are pharmaceutical interventions intended to suppress libido, treat substance abuse or attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or modulate serotonin activity; nutritional interventions; and electrical and magnetic brain stimulation. Where applicable, we briefly comment on the historical use of these interventions, and in each case we (...) discuss the evidence that they are effective, or might become so with further refinement. The chapter concludes with a comment on some potentially significant differences between the varieties of intervention that we canvass. (shrink)

Abstract – This study aimed primarily to determine the effectiveness of crime prevention strategies implemented by the Salug Valley Philippine National Police (PNP) in terms of Police Integrated Patrol System, Barangay Peacekeeping Operation, Anti-Criminality Operation, Integrated Area Community Public Safety services, Bantay Turista and School Safety Project as evaluated by 120 inhabitants and 138 PNP officers from four Municipalities of Salug Valley Zamboanga del Sur. Stratified random sampling was utilized in determining the respondents. Index crime rate were correlated (...) with the crime prevention strategies of the PNP in town of Salug Valley. A descriptive method of research was applied in this study utilizing self-made questionnaire. The data collected were analyzed using the main statistical tools like frequency count, percentage, mean computation, Kruskal Wallis Analysis of Variance and simple correlation. Findings of the study revealed that the crime prevention strategies in four (4) municipalities were “much effective” to include Integrated Patrol System, Barangay Peace Keeping Operations, Anti-Criminality Operations, Integrated Area Community Public Safety Services, Bantay Turista and School Safety Project in connection to the responses of 158 participants. There is a significant relationship between crime prevention strategies employed and index crime rate. (shrink)

Inchoate crime consists of acts that are regarded as crimes despite the fact that they are only partial or incomplete in some respect. This includes acts that do not succeed in physically harming the victim or are only indirectly related to such a result. Examples include attempts (as in attempted murder that does not eventuate in the killing of anyone), conspiracy (in which case the crime has only been planned, not yet acted out) and incitement (where the inciter (...) does not himself commit the crime he is urging others to undertake). The present paper attempts to analyze these inchoate crimes from a libertarian perspective, based on the non-aggression principle. (shrink)

This is a paperback reprint of a book published in 1989. In this comprehensive treatise Greenawalt explores the three-way relationship between the idea of freedom of speech, the law of crimes, and the many uses of language. He begins by considering free speech as a political principle, and after a thorough and incisive analysis of the justifications commonly advanced for freedom of speech, looks at the kinds of communications to which the principle of free speech applies. He then turns to (...) an examination of communications for which criminal liability is fixed. Focusing on threats and solicitations to crime, he attempts to determine whether liability for such communications seriously conflicts with freedom of speech. He then goes on to develop the significance of his conclusions for American constitutional law. (shrink)

This symposium contribution offers a reconsideration of a range of “vice crime” legislation from late nineteenth and early twentieth century American law, criminalizing matters such as prostitution, the use of opiates, illegal gambling, and polygamy. According to the standard account, the original justification for these offenses was purely moralistic and paternalistic ; and it was only later, in the late twentieth century, that those who supported such legislative initiatives sought to justify them in terms of their ability to prevent (...) harms. This piece argues that the rationale for these vice crimes laws was much more complicated than has traditionally been thought, encompassing not just moralistic justifications but also a wide range of harm-based rationales—similar to those that underlie modern, technocratic, “preventive justice” legislation involving matters such as anti-social behavior orders, sex offender registration, stop-and-frisk policing, and the fight against terrorism. (shrink)

The “asymmetry myth” is that war crimes are committed by one's enemies but never, or hardly ever, by one's own combatants. The myth involves not only a common failure to acknowledge our own actual war crimes but also inadequate reactions when we are forced to recognize them. It contributes to the high likelihood that wars, just or unjust in their causes, will have a high moral cost. This cost, moreover, is a matter needing consideration in the jus ante bellum circumstances (...) of preparedness for war as well as of conduct within it. As part of the symposium on Ned Dobos's book, Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine, I will argue that the strength of the asymmetry myth is sustained by certain forms of romantic nationalism linked to the glamorization of military endeavor. (shrink)

Denis Dutton claimed that, to grasp why it matters to the artistic value of a painting like The Disciples at Emmaus that it was painted by van Meegeren in the first half of the twentieth century rather than by Vermeer in the seventeenth century, we need to locate what van Meegeren did in a wider class of ‘artistic crimes’ involving ‘misrepresented artistic performances’. I begin by clarifying how the notions of ‘artistic performance’ and ‘misrepresentation’ are to be understood in the (...) context of Dutton’s paper. I survey a range of examples of misrepresented artistic performances in Dutton’s sense, and ask when they involve ‘artistic crimes’. I then seek a principled way of justifying what seem to be our clear intuitions—apparent in our artistic practice—as to which ‘misrepresented artistic performances’ are artistic crimes and which are not. (shrink)

This book was the first booklength treatment of the philosophical foundations of international criminal law. The focus is on the moral, legal, and political questions that arise when individuals who commit collective crimes, such as crimes against humanity, are held accountable by international criminal tribunals. These tribunals challenge one of the most sacred prerogatives of states - sovereignty - and breaches to this sovereignty can be justified in limited circumstances, following what the author calls a minimalist account of the justification (...) of international prosecution. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book should appeal to anyone with an interest in international law, political philosophy, international relations, and human rights theory. (shrink)

Larry May argues that the best way to understand war crimes is as crimes against humanness rather than as violations of justice. He shows that in a deeply pluralistic world, we need to understand the rules of war as the collective responsibility of states that send their citizens into harm's way, as the embodiment of humanity, and as the chief way for soldiers to retain a sense of honour on the battlefield. Throughout, May demonstrates that the principle of humanness is (...) the cornerstone of international humanitarian law, and is itself the basis of the traditional principles of discrimination, necessity, and proportionality. He draws extensively on the older Just War tradition to assess recent cases from the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia as well as examples of atrocities from the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross. (shrink)

Organised crime is chameleonic in nature. It is transnational, dynamic, overlapped criminal activities and pervasive in nature. In the same way, money laundering is the predicate offence and it is naturally linked to other organised crimes. After the cold war, this nexus culminated during the occurrence of 9/11 in particular which was a lethal combination of money laundering and terrorist financing. This combination is currently being experienced by Pakistan; where various terrorist groups are involved with direct and indirect support (...) of proceeds from drug trafficking, assassination, land grabbing, arms smuggling and various other organised crimes routing through the abusage of financial and non-financial channels and support to terrorism. This has left serious socio-politico and economic consequences in the south Asian region and global as well. The researcher found very limited evidence of money laundering characteristics in the existing research literature on Pakistan. Thus to carry out research work on the subject was need of the hour in Pakistan. This led the researcher to find out root causes and existing weaknesses at the regime’s end in countering financial crime and financing of terrorism. (shrink)

The discourse of hate crime has come to Europe, supported not least by international human rights actors and security and policy organisations. In this article, I argue that there is a need for a philosophical response to challenging claims about the conceptualisation and classification of hate crime. First, according to several scholars, hate crime is extraordinarily difficult to conceptualise and there is a fatigue among practitioners caused by the lack of clarity and consensus in the field. I (...) agree that there is a need, not for additional definitions, but for a more comprehensive conceptual framework, that may help us think more clearly about given definitions of hate crime; about their basic structure, cross-cutting problems, and possible variations. Supplying such a conceptual perspective represents a timely task for applied philosophy. I engage with this by offering a four-tiered concept of hate crime. Second, the involvement of human rights actors in the consolidation of hate crime law and policy in Europe has supported the classification of hate crime as a human rights violation. Ultimately, what is at stake is not only our understanding of hate crime, but also our maintenance of a precise and pointed discourse on human rights violations. I argue that we should hesitate or even abstain from classifying hate crime as a human rights violation, and that doing so is compatible with taking both hate crimes and human rights seriously. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the question of whether crime victims can be said to have a moral right to see their victimizers punished that could explain why they often feel wronged or cheated when the state fails to punish offenders. In the first part, I explain what I mean by a “right to punishment” and what it is for such a right to “explain” the frustrated crime victim’s reaction. In the second part, I distinguish such a right (...) from a Lockean-style right to punish, which is also shown incapable of providing the needed explanation. In the third part I argue that it is difficult to identify any benefit such that the right to punishment could plausibly be understood as a right to that benefit. I discuss two main candidates here: the vaguely Hegelian idea that punishment is itself some sort of restitution for the wrong done to the victim; and the idea, due to Victor Tadros, that punishment is a form of compensation for wrongdoing by contributing indirectly to protecting victims from future harm. In the final section, I suggest instead that the frustrated crime victim’s reaction, when justified, is best explained, not by the violation of any right to punishment, but rather by the state’s failure to treat the victim as an equal. (shrink)

America frequently talks about impeaching a president, but the impeachment provisions of the American constitution are widely misunderstood. In High Crimes and Misdemeanors, constitutional scholar Frank O. Bowman, III offers unprecedented clarity to the question of impeachment, tracing its roots to medieval England through its adoption in the Constitution and 250 years of American experience. By examining the human and political history of those who have faced impeachment, Bowman demonstrates that the Framers intended impeachment to be a flexible tool, adaptable (...) to the needs of any age. Written in a lively, engaging style, the book combines a deep historical and constitutional analysis of the impeachment clauses, a coherent theory of when impeachment should be used to protect constitutional order against presidential misconduct, and a comprehensive presentation of the case for and against impeachment of President Trump. It is an indispensable work for the present moment. (shrink)

A solution to the problem of “overcriminalization” appears to be decriminalization of certain crimes. This Essay focuses on a group of crimes that has been labeled “proxy crimes” as a candidate to be eliminated. What are proxy crimes? Douglas Husak defines them as “offenses designed to achieve a purpose other than to prevent the conduct they explicitly proscribe.” Michael Moore describes them as involving situations where we “use one morally innocuous act as a proxy for another, morally wrongful act or (...) mental state.” Put that way, proxy crimes seem highly problematic, and Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan bluntly put it, “We reject proxy crimes.” This Essay asks whether we should reject proxy crimes by presenting and evaluating Alexander and Ferzan’s treatment of the subject. After describing several different types of crimes that may be characterized as proxy crimes and Alexander and Ferzan’s rejection of most of them and their arguments for doing so, this Essay argues that their rejection of proxy crimes is incomplete, which leaves their theory open to a range of possibilities regarding the proper place of proxy crimes in criminal law. This Essay concludes that getting a handle on the problem of proxy crimes and overcriminalization requires a theory of the state and an articulation of the proper relationship between the state and its citizens that can give guidance on when the state can demand obedience from citizens to support the state and when failures to comply with such demands render one criminally culpable. Without such a theory, proposals to address overcriminalization cannot travel very far. (shrink)

Scholars depict punishment as a moral dialogue between the community and the offender, which addresses both the offender’s crime and character. However, how the penal message evolves vis a vis that crime and character as it passes through the different stages of the criminal process has remained under-theorized. This article, building on communicative theory, explores the interrelation between crime and character along the penal process, from sentencing, through prison, to parole release. We argue that in the penal (...) dialogue the relationship between crime and character evolves in a dynamic way through three phases: separateness (sentencing), fusion (prison), and re-distinction (parole) of crime and character. The proposed analysis develops the communicative meaning of the penal process, provides a normative account of the work of punishment administration authorities, and explores applications of our proposed normative analysis for the administration of the punishment. (shrink)

If crime is a social problem, then ways of preventing it must be sought. Punishment has been the traditional approach to preventing crime, either as a deterrent, or as a means of reforming the offender. Neither of these approaches is wholly acceptable. Even if deterrence punishment, as grounded in utilitarianism, effectively prevents crime, there may be other methods which produce better results. Reform fails to justify any form of punishment since not only does punishment not reform, but (...) it interferes with the reformative process. Reform is limited in scope to those people who commit crimes and are caught. If crime is to be prevented, then it is necessary to go beyond the crime and the criminal and consider the social contexts in which people act, and the ways in which they learn to react to them. By shaping both the environment and people's responses to it, society can solve the problem of preventing crime, without the need for punishment. (shrink)

Taking as its starting point Miri Gur-Arye’s critical discussion of a legal duty to report crime, this paper sketches an idealising conception of a democratic republic whose citizens could be expected to recognise a civic responsibility to report crime, in order to assist the enterprise of a criminal law that is their common law. After explaining why they should recognise such a responsibility, what its scope should be, and how it should be exercised, and noting that that civic (...) responsibility must include a responsibility to report one’s own crimes; it discusses whether that civic responsibility could ground at least a limited legal duty to report certain types of crime. It then turns to the question of whether a civic responsibility to assist the criminal law’s enterprise of bringing wrongdoers to account could include a responsibility to arrest suspected or known offenders if the police cannot or will not do so—a responsibility to make a citizen’s arrest, and the legal power to discharge that responsibility: how far should citizens feel entitled, or duty-bound, thus to ‘take the law into their own hands’? (shrink)

Situational crime prevention (SCP) measures attempt to prevent crime by reducing the opportunities for crime to occur. One of the ways in which some SCP measures reduce such opportunities is by providing victims with advice about how to avoid being victimised, for instance through public awareness campaigns or safety apps. Some scholars claim that this approach to preventing crime often or always promotes victim-blaming and that it is therefore morally wrong to pursue such strategies. Others have (...) made sweeping rejections of this claim. However, in this paper, I suggest that neither view is correct. Specifically, I demonstrate that there are at least three distinct ways of interpreting what I term the victim-blaming argument against advice-giving SCP measures – i.e. as an argument based on a concern for direct victim-blaming, indirect victim-blaming, or self-blame – and that both SCP opponents and supporters have legitimate grounds for their position, depending on how the argument is spelled out. (shrink)

In the early 1980s, a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to concerted advocacy-group lobbying, Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of "hate crime" laws requiring the collection of statistics on, and enhancing the punishment for, crimes motivated by certain prejudices. This book places the evolution of the hate crime concept in socio-legal perspective. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter adopt a skeptical if not critical stance, maintaining that legal (...) definitions of hate crime are riddled with ambiguity and subjectivity. No matter how hate crime is defined, and despite an apparent media consensus to the contrary, the authors find no evidence to support the claim that the United States is experiencing a hate crime epidemic--instead, they cast doubt on whether the number of hate crimes is even increasing. The authors further assert that, while the federal effort to establish a reliable hate crime accounting system has failed, data collected for this purpose have led to widespread misinterpretation of the state of intergroup relations in this country. The book contends that hate crime as a socio-legal category represents the elaboration of an identity politics now manifesting itself in many areas of the law. But the attempt to apply the anti-discrimination paradigm to criminal law generates problems and anomalies. For one thing, members of minority groups are frequently hate crime perpetrators. Moreover, the underlying conduct prohibited by hate crime law is already subject to criminal punishment. Jacobs and Potter question whether hate crimes are worse or more serious than similar crimes attributable to other anti-social motivations. They also argue that the effort to single out hate crime for greater punishment is, in effect, an effort to punish some offenders more seriously simply because of their beliefs, opinions, or values, thus implicating the First Amendment. Advancing a provocative argument in clear and persuasive terms, Jacobs and Potter show how the recriminalization of hate crime has little value with respect to law enforcement or criminal justice. Indeed, enforcement of such laws may exacerbate intergroup tensions rather than eradicate prejudice. (shrink)

Early in the 1980s, a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to what was said to be an epidemic of prejudice-motivated violence, Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of 'hate crime' laws that required the collection of statistics and enhanced the punishment of crimes motivated by certain prejudices. This book places in socio-legal perspective both the hate crime problem and society's response to it. From the outset, Jacobs and Potter (...) adopt a skeptical if not critical stance. They argue that hate crime is a hopelessly muddled concept and that legal definitions of the term are riddled with ambiguity and subjectivity. Moreover, no matter how hate crime is defined, the authors find no evidence to support the claim that the US is experiencing a hate crime epidemic—nor that the number or rate of hate crimes is at an historic zenith. (shrink)

In a paper published in 2006, I argued that the best way of defending something like our current practices of punishing war criminals would be to base the justification of this practice on an expressive theory of punishment. I considered two forms that such a justification could take—a ‘denunciatory’ account, on which the purpose of punishment is supposed to communicate a commitment to certain kinds of standard to individuals other than the criminal and a ‘communicative’ account, on which the purpose (...) of the punishment is to communicate with the perpetrator, and argued for a denunciatory account which I developed at some length. In this paper I would like to reconsider the plausibility of a communicative account. One difficulty that such accounts face is that the punishment of war criminals often involves the inflicting of harsh treatment on them by individuals who are members of states other than their own. On a communicative account this is problematic: on such an account—or at least on the version of it proposed by Duff (2000)—it is essential that those who are punish and those who punish them belong to a single community. When this requirement is not satisfied harsh treatment does not constitute punishment. Duff has argued that the problem can be solved by regarding all human beings as members of a single moral community: here I argue that this suggestion is unsatisfactory and propose an alternative. One consequence of my account is that if it is correct there may limitations on the range of kinds of war criminal that can legitimately be punished by international tribunals. (shrink)

This paper assesses the extent to which enhancing a penalty for hate crimes is a necessity. It conducts its analysis by looking at the theoretical justifications for and against such enhancement and also the impact of hate crimes on their victims, their groups and society, in comparison to non-bias crimes. It recognizes the particularly damaging effect of hate crimes on these three levels but argues that care must be taken to ensure a high threshold framework and a clear vision in (...) terms of protected characteristics. It argues that if penalty enhancements are to be any use, victims should be empowered to access the criminal justice system whilst the right to freedom of expression must be preserved. The paper commences with a definitional and conceptual framework of hate crimes, proceeds with the theoretical argumentations for and against hate crime legislation, conducts a legislative analysis of hate crimes, using examples from around the world as well as an assessment of the approach of the European Court of Human Rights to hate crime. (shrink)

Gabriel Tarde, along with Durkheim and others, set the foundations for what is today a common-sense statement in social science: crime is a social phenomenon. However, the questions about what social is and what kind of social phenomenon crime is remain alive. Tarde’s writings have answers for both of these capital and interdependent problems and serve to renew our view of them. The aim of this article is to reconstruct Tarde’s definition of crime in terms of genus (...) and specific difference, exploring his criminology as a case of his general sociology. This procedure shows that Tarde succeeded in creating a comprehensive theory of crime and criminals founded not only on his most well-known concept, imitation, but also on his equally important concepts of invention, opposition, social logic and social teleology. For Tarde, crime is a complex phenomenon related to criminal inventions, criminal propagations, the production of penal laws, the execution of controls and punishments, and the collective reactions to all these. (shrink)

Traditional means of crime prevention, such as incarceration and psychological rehabilitation, are frequently ineffective. This collection considers how crime preventing neurointerventions could present a more humane alternative but, on the other hand, how neuroscientific developments and interventions may threaten fundamental human values.

This article opens with the consequentialist–deontologist debate, with the former concerned about the relevance of punitive measures against their crime reducing potentials, while the latter highlights punishment as censure of wrongful acts and the proportion of the punishment to the degree of crime. The article briefly discusses the empirical research on the impact of penal sanctions and focuses on three main kinds of empirical research into possible general deterrent effects—namely, association studies, quasi-experimental studies, and contextual and perceptual studies. (...) It addresses the methodological issues involved in deterrence research and summarizes the results precisely. This article also discusses reductivism in the view of the possibility that penal sanctions could influence the offender's will. The results suggest that crime preventive aims can justify sentencing policies only to a limited degree, at least for the foreseeable future. (shrink)

Traditional interpretations of legal doctrine have seen the actus reus and the mens rea as independent elements of a crime. Here it is argued that various puzzles surrounding the nature of intent and of attempt can be better addressed if we reject that idea. Following Williamson’s account of knowledge, it is suggested that the two are inseparable. The crime consists in the performance of an intentional act. It follows that an act has been performed and that the performer (...) is in a certain mental state. But these cannot in general exist independently of each other. (shrink)