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A collection of essays surveying the evolution of sentencing policies and practices in Western countries over the past several years. This book addresses plea-bargaining, community service, electronic monitoring, standards of use of incarceration, and legal perspectives on sentencing policy developments, among other topics.

In lucid and engaging prose, Michael Tonry reveals the historical foundation for the current state of the American criminal justice system, while simultaneously offering a game plan for long overdue reform.

This book is the result of David Bayley's multi-year study of policing in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States. A recognized authority on policing, Bayley set out to examine the police as a whole, to work out whether police do what the citizens of democratic societies require and expect, and to formulate a future policy for the role of police in crime prevention.

In 1840, Alexander Maconochie, a retired naval captain, became superintendent of two thousand twice-convicted prisoners on Norfolk Island, a thousand miles off the coast of Australia. He transformed the brutal convict settlements into a controlled, stable, and productive environment. This book offers an account of this pioneer in penal reform.

This is an examination of adolescent violence in the United States as both a social phenomenon and a policy problem. Franklin Zimring, a scholar of law and crime, scrutinizes criminal statistics and demographic trends in order to authoritatively address public worries.

An in-depth critique of the USA's dominant political and legal response to hate crime in the STUDIES IN CRIME AND PUBLIC POLICY series. The fallacious construction of hate crime epidemics by politicians and the media is considered, and it is argued that the laws created in response to such prejudicial views can be regarded as symbolic politics.

This book provides a broad summary of American criminal justice in a time of great concern about solutions to the current crime epidemic. Allen suggests that the way to a more effective penal policy can be found by a closer adherence to the law rather than the current trend to bypass certain laws in the name of the "war on crime".

An examination of the social and legal changes that have transformed the juvenile court since the 1970s. The book explores the complex relationship between race and youth crime to explain both Supreme Court decisions and a political impetus to "get tough" on young offenders.

Children of the Prison Boom describes the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration for a generation of vulnerable children. Wakefield and Wildeman find that parental imprisonment leads to increased mental health and behavioral problems, infant mortality, and child homelessness which translate into large-scale increases in racial inequality.

During 2000-1 in Afghanistan, the Taliban achieved a longtime goal of national and international drug policy agencies: a large, sudden, and unanticipated reduction in world opium production. This cutback provides an unprecedented opportunity to study the dynamics of the world opiate market and ask whether further interventions could effectively reduce the flows of drugs. Based on an extended, multi-national study, the authors construct a new model for the traffickingof drugs and revenues and offer the first account of the world market in heroin and other illicit opiates during and after the 2001 ban. The authors' broader findings demonstrate how robust production, trafficking, and consumption combine to make successful long-term interventions on the supply-siderare exceedingly difficult, though specific policies can impact the organization and behavior of markets. For reductions in both production and consumption, where the cultivation of opium is entrenched in the normal life and legitimate economy of millions of people, international agencies and foreign governments must provide adequate and long-term support to foster both alternative development policies and law enforcement programs.

Both those who study crime and those who fight it agree that crime is not spread evenly across city landscapes. Rather, clusters of crime-a few "hot spots"-host a vastly disproportionate amount of criminal activity. Even within the most crime-ridden neighborhoods, crime concentrates at a few locations while other areas remain relatively crime-free. So if police focus their limited resources at these problem places-a practice known as hot spots policing-they will bebetter positioned to lower citywide crime rates, and do it more efficiently. In Policing Problem Places, Anthony Braga and David Weisburd demonstrate that hot spots policing is a powerful and cost-effective approach to crime prevention. While putting police officers where crime happens most is an old and well-established idea, in practice it is often avoided or not properly implemented. Braga and Weisburd draw on rigorous scientific evidence to show how police officers should use problem-oriented policing and situational crime-prevention techniques to addressthe place dynamics, situations, and characteristics that cause a spot to be "hot." But the benefits of hot spots policing do not end with conserving public dollars and police resources. Illustrating how policing problem places can benefit police-community relations, especially in minority neighborhoods whereresidents have long suffered from high crime and poor police service, Braga and Weisburd show how police can make efforts to develop positive and collaborative relationships with residents and avoid the indiscriminant enforcement tactics that undermine the legitimacy of the police. A vital resource for police departments everywhere, Policing Problem Places offers a blueprint for rethinking what police should do and how they should do it.

Spells out how American crime policy has reached the lowpoint it has and where we can go from here. This work explains how the worst of policies can be undone and how the avoidable human suffering they produce can be diminished.

Provides a critical examination of knowledge about gangs and major gang control programs across the nation. This book focuses on gang proliferation and crime patterns, and highlights known risk factors that lead to youths joining gangs and to gang formation within communities. It is useful for criminologists, social workers, and policy makers.

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal?

This volume surveys the evolution of sentencing policies and practices in western countries over the last 25 years of the 20th century. Topics covered include plea-bargaining, community service and electronic monitoring, and standards of use of incarceration.

Policing as an occupation is rife with opportunities for corruption. This book provides a systematic analysis of the subject, while also addressing the question of what can be done to ensure successful corruption control. It argues that the mechanisms for control suffer from severe shortcomings that substantially limit their effectiveness.

An assessment of incapacitation in which the authors expose the increasing reliance on restraint to justify imprisonment, analyse the existing theoretical literature and empirical research on incapacitation's effects, and explore the links between incapacitation and criminal justice policy. In the STUDIES IN CRIME AND PUBLIC POLICY series.

This book reviews what has been known about gangs, and updates that information into the 1990s. It covers reported changes in the structure and crime patterns of gangs, their age, ethnic, and gender characteristics, and their spread into almost all corners of the nation. It also reviews and updates situation in other countries to determine how unique the American gang really is.

Former minister and current British government legislator Lord Windlesham examines the American federal crime-control laws that surfaced before and after the 1994 "Republican Revolution" in Congress. He focuses on the pressure populist opinion and special interests exert on shaping crime policy.

Police departments across the USA are busily "reinventing" themselves, adopting a new style known as "community policing". Police departments that succeed in adopting this new stance have an entirely different relationship to the public that they serve. Chicago made the transition, and this book examines why it did, how it did it, and how well it worked.

Part of the "Studies in Crime and Public Policy series", this book examines the trends in penal theorizing. It explores the legitimacy of actual practices by examining what would count as adequate justification for them. It is aimed at criminologists, philosophers, and others interested in theories of punishment.

Restorative Justice has become an important new way of thinking about crime, responsive regulation an influential way of thinking about business regulation. In this volume, John Braithwaite brings together his important work on restorative justive with his work on business regulation to form a sweepingly novel picture of the way society regulates itself.

This text has three aims: the first is to show that what separates the USA from other countries is not crime rates but lethal violence. Secondly, the book seeks to clarify the causes of violence by looking at the proximate causes of violence. The last section concerns the prevention of violence.

This title is a treatment of the politics and the impact of the "get tough" criminal sentencing legislation in the US. It includes a major empirical study of the celebrated California "three strikes" law, the law that imposed a 25-years to life imprisonment the moment of a third felony conviction.