Rethinking Criminal Justice Responses to Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

Insult to Injury: Rethinking Our Responses to Intimate Abuse is Linda G. Mills’s indictment of the overly criminal-justice–reliant response to domestic violence in the United States. Mills advocates a single, new intervention in domestic violence cases to replace the current system of arrests, prosecution, and jail time. (About civil orders of protection, the work is curiously silent.) In this essay, I will argue that although Mills makes some thoughtprovoking points and some accurate criticisms of our current response to domestic violence, her own particular view of domestic violence causation leads her to misread history and oversimplify what is developing into a provocative, serious, and complicated debate about the public response to domestic violence. In her brief against mandatory arrest policies and overreliance on arrest and prosecution, Mills astonishingly presents her case as if she were the lone prophet in the wilderness. As most readers of Violence Against Women are aware, the effectiveness of criminal justice approaches and the issue of mandatory arrest in particular have been extensively discussed by a variety of noted scholars, researchers, and activists. Miller (1989, 2000) has discussed mandatory arrest policies and their effects on women of color and poor women. Early on, Zorza (1994) analyzed the implications of arrest and prosecution of batterers, as have Buzawa and Buzawa (1993, 1996). In a recent survey of the literature on the effectiveness of the criminal justice response, Iovanni and Miller (2001) concluded that the system has only a limited ability to keep women safe due to the fact that the problem has its roots in the structured, gendered inequality in society. Coker’s (2000) survey of the research literature also led her to conclude that for significant numbers of poor women of color, the benefits of mandatory