Justice Apparatus Research Articles

The Great Persecution

The contribution sheds light on a mass witch trial that began in 1661 at the court in Hrastovec. It is related to proceedings initiated a decade later and taking place simultaneously in at least five courts. Those convicted were forced to list the names of many witchcraft meeting participants, which were described with all sorts of demonic imagery. The trials were thus interconnected and kept dragging on because of the confrontations between the accused. Despite the many mass trials, the number of the indicted even exceeded those that were actually put to trial. The proceedings were caused by weather storms, and many people were only tried when a new round of trials followed a storm. The trials were affected by the people’s understanding of the causes of the disasters, conspiracy theories, and various actors such as the rural population affected by the disasters, neighbourly disputes, superstitions, belief in magic, cruel, bloodthirsty judges and their personal motives, and the Inner Austrian government in charge of the criminal justice apparatus.

Sovereignty of the International Criminal Court

Appalled by the increasing brutality and emboldened by the collapse of ideological barriers, international law now intends to reach out for criminals hiding behind the veil of sovereignty. It aims to sensitize the world against gross human rights violations through the threat of legal action. The rapid entry of the Rome Statute on July 1, 2002, heralds a new era in international politics. It opens new avenues for the international community to monitor human rights violations within states and bring the delinquent individuals to trial. One of the main reasons for the court to come into existence after the end of the Cold War is that many crimes committed against humanity have been ignored by states either due to “military necessity” or under the national sovereignty and territorial integrity clause. The International Criminal Court (ICC) does involve a certain sacrifice of sovereignty because it envisages asserting itself when a state refuses or fails to use its national criminal justice apparatus to deal with the perpetrator of crimes against humanity. This paper argues that the ICC challenges the exclusivity of sovereign states. The ICC imposes certain restrictions and limits on state authority and competes with the state in the exercise of authority.

Between Democratic Modernization and Authoritarian Punitiveness in Brazil: Mass Incarceration, Political Rationalities and the Dynamics of Subnational Variation

Abstract Since the return to democracy in the 1980s, the Federal government in Brazil promoted the democratic modernization of the criminal justice apparatus. However, the arrival of a post-neoliberal government to the federal administration at the beginning of the century took place simultaneously with the emergence of mass incarceration. Rather than readily blaming their penal policies for this development, the present work addresses aspects of subnational variation and different political rationalities for comprehending this increase in the prison population. The coexistence of neoliberal and post-neoliberal rationalities of governance around the country between 2007 and 2018 corresponded to significantly diverse trends in incarceration at the state level, in which neoliberal governments played a more prominent role. Besides, authoritarian punitiveness has acted as an obstacle to the modernization of crime and punishment practices and institutions throughout this period. The resurgence of authoritarianism as an autonomous political rationality in the 2018 elections reconfigured policies and attitudes in the field, mostly by reversing past modernizing efforts.

The Effects of Criminal Evidence Obtained Illegally

The effects of illegal criminal evidence and its role in the procedures and their impact on the accused to know the authenticity of the criminal evidence obtained illegally. In addition, it supports all legal professionals, and resulting from the criminal investigation and scientific and technological developments in the modern era. The importance of modern forensic evidence in this field has increased with the scientific development and technology and the use of various rapid developments in modern scientific ways to try to get rid of crimes that are difficult for the old methods to detect. The justice apparatus needs legal and scientific basis to supports criminal evidence so that it is fair in front of everyone and far from misleading. The effects of illegal criminal evidence must be dealt with by setting laws that keep pace with modern developments and banishing illegal evidence in order to rid the innocent accused of the crimes against you without legitimate evidence.

Is Internalized Racism One More Piece of the Puzzle in Racial Disparities in Prosecution?

Although diversifying the criminal justice apparatus may yield more equitable outcomes, empirical tests of how prosecutors’ race affects their decisions are limited. Informed by Internalized Racism Theory (IRT), we hypothesized that Black prosecutors would be most punitive toward Black defendants, followed by Latino/a defendants, and least toward White and Asian defendants. Employing hierarchical logistic modelling, we analyzed data from a large prosecutorial office to examine the extent to which prosecutors’ race is associated with racial disparities in custodial plea offers and charge reductions. We found notable support for our hypotheses. In cases disposed of by Black prosecutors, Black and Latino/defendants are significantly more likely to receive custodial plea offers than are similarly-situated White and Asian defendants. Although the direction of the relationship with charge reductions was in line with our hypotheses, no significant effects were detected.

ACCESS TO JUSTICE

ACCESS TO JUSTICE

Running head: Bail, Reform, and Foucault’s Dangerous Individual

Over 2.5 million people in the US are incarcerated annually for the sole reason that they cannot afford cash bail. This nearly exclusively affects the working-class, and disproportionately affects Black and brown individuals and communities. Whether someone is incarcerated pending trial affects employment, family stability, and even likelihood of conviction. Across the US, reform efforts are being considered and adopted, but in this paper, I use a political theory approach to argue that racial capitalist ideologies that construct the accused as specifically ‘dangerous’ impede just policy transformation. I start by centralizing Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the ‘dangerous individual’ as a frame for analyzing the logics and movement of the dangerous figure, and then re-situate the concept of the dangerous person in the contemporary US bail context. Ultimately, I argue that the dominance of oppressive ideologies in the bail discourse demonstrates the pervasive race and class biases that persist in the criminal justice apparatus, even in policy reform approaches that promise unbiased outcomes like algorithmic assessments.

Qualifying Violence: Visible Data, Invisible Lives in Recife, Brazil

AbstractThis article brings attention to the rise of digital computing in policing in Brazil, where new technologies have been integrated into the criminal justice apparatus to surveil, manage, and police criminalized communities. I examine a reformist public policy called the Pacto pela Vida (Pact for Life) in Recife and foreground the process of collecting and interpreting data at crime scenes as a means by which to analyze how criminality is understood and conceptualized. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, I explore how data collected by the police link racial identifiers, places, and different types of offenses. Hence, I argue that the Pacto governmentality infers a preexisting logic of power and control over the Black poor using new technologies and policing models mainly imported from the United States. When police collect data at crime scenes and categorize it according to provided standards, the sociocultural context in which events occur become invisible.

The Paradigm Shift in the Disciplining of Village Cadres in China: From Mao to Xi

AbstractVillage cadres are important agents for the state yet disciplining them has been difficult. There are few disciplinary tools that can easily hold them to account. Prior to 2018, Party discipline did not apply to non-Party cadres. Legislation was ambiguous in relation to these grassroots agents and had to rely heavily on legal interpretation. The impact of the cadre evaluation system on village cadres, who are not considered to be public servants on the state payroll, was limited. This situation has changed since 2018. The party-state has consolidated and institutionalized ways in which grassroots cadres are checked and disciplined. Instead of relying on policy regulation, which had been the dominant disciplinary method since 1949, village cadres are now fully subject to Party rules and state laws. These changes have been accomplished through the application of three measures. First, village Party secretaries are to serve concurrently as village heads, and members of village and Party committees are to overlap, thereby making them subject to Party discipline. Second, village cadres are now considered to be “public agents” and are on an equal legal footing with other state agents. Finally, a campaign waged by the criminal justice apparatus cleaned up village administration and prepared it for upcoming village elections in a new era.

Critical stasis and disruptive performances: ICJ and the Anwar R trial in Koblenz

This article explores the extraterritorial criminal court case against Anwar R, a high-ranking member of the Syrian regime on trial for crimes against humanity in Koblenz, Germany. Empirically anchored in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Koblenz and with the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, the article illuminates the trial as a ‘disruptive performance’. The case against Anwar R punctuates two instances of negative stasis and unsettles two accounts of chronicity, namely, those of the Syrian conflict and of the field of international criminal justice. In order to illuminate the trial as a disruptive performance, the article empirically situates the Koblenz case both in relation to the Syrian war that it relates to, to the international criminal justice apparatus that it is a part of and to the underlying compilation of evidence that substantiates it. It thus clarifies both the symbolic potential and the constitutive process that has brought it into being.

Review of Digitize and Punish: Racial Criminalization in the Digital Age by Brian Jefferson (University of Minnesota Press)

In Digitize and Punish, Brian Jefferson argues that the US policing and incarceration infrastructure is increasingly marked by new forms of racialized digital criminalization. Examining the incorporation of digital technologies into the criminal justice apparatus, Jefferson shows the central role that digital technology and data science has had in reinforcing racial surveillance practices since the War on Drugs and Crime began more than four decades ago. Jefferson’s timely new book traces the merging of carcerality and technology in Chicago and New York City, unveiling forms of digital racial management that have remained largely obscured from the public.

Gender punitivism: Queer perspectives on identity politics in criminal justice

The article examines the convergence of identity politics and punitivism, two tendencies that profoundly affect current LGBT activism and state criminal policies. It considers the case of Argentina, a country often deemed exemplary in terms of gender-related legislation, and analyses a 2018 sentence that incorporates the concept of ‘travesticide’ in order to examine how the role of identity in political strategies, added to prevailing notions of gender, limits the possible approaches and answers to violence against gender non-conforming communities. It then takes this a step forward to understand how these answers are, in turn, often reduced to punitivist outcomes, narrowing the understanding of reparation and exposing the most vulnerable subjects in the community to further violence. As a contribution to Queer Criminologies, the article seeks to expose the limitations of identity politics, and in particular of its advocacy for gendered rights, showing how they can force gender non-conforming subjects to choose between rights, most notably between legal recognition of their gender identity, and safety vis-à-vis the state apparatus of criminal justice.

THE AUTHORITY OF MORAL OVERSIGHT: ON THE LEGITIMACY OF CRIMINAL LAW

ABSTRACTAn influential view in recent philosophy of punishment is that the apparatus of criminal justice should be geared at least in part to state censure of wrongdoing. I argue that if it were to be so geared, such an apparatus would make ambitious claims to authority, and that the legitimacy of the relevant state would then depend on whether those claims can be vindicated. This paper looks first at what kind of authority is being claimed by this apparatus. The criminal law, I argue, cannot merely be thought of as claiming a right to rule and to be obeyed. Rather, its authority is better understood as the authority of moral oversight: a power to alter, at will (though within certain limits), citizens’ liability to answer for their compliance with—and to be officially censured for their failure to comply with—a designated set of pre-existing moral 7reasons. The paper then looks at whether a state could realistically be expected to possess such authority—that is, whether a state that claims to have such a power could ever be legitimate.

Are We Still Cheap on Crime? Austerity, Punitivism, and Common Sense in Trumpistan

Literature on “late mass incarceration” observed a contraction of the carceral state, with varying opinions as to its causes and various degrees of optimism about its potential. But even optimistic commentators were taken aback by the Trump-Sessions Administration’s criminal justice rhetoric. This paper maps out the extent to which federal, state and local actions in the age of Trump have reversed the promising trends to shrink the criminal justice apparatus, focusing on federal legislation, continued state and local reform, and the role of criminal justice in 2020 presidential campaigns. The paper concludes that the overall salutary trends from 2008 onward have slowed down in some respects, but continued on in others, and that advocacy concerns should focus on particular areas of the criminal justice apparatus.

Petitions and Local Politics in the Late Mughal Empire: The view from Kol, 1741

AbstractThis article uses a 1741 testimonial document from Kol (present-day Aligarh) to explore the workings of petitions in the local politics of the late Mughal empire. I suggest that even solitary documents such as this can be read as artefacts of the continuing processes of local politics which operated in excess of the administrative logic of the Mughal state. After surveying the place of petitions in the Mughal apparatus of justice from an administrative perspective, I examine the story of a vanished artisan named Hira to demonstrate that even scattered documents from the Mughal archive can reveal traces of the larger political processes of which a petition might be a single example. In this light, I demonstrate how the testimonial at hand can illuminate the everyday workings of the social and political order of the locality, and its relationship with larger structures of ideology and state power in an era of political decentralization.

The Restorative Justice Apparatus: A Critical Analysis of the Historical Emergence of Restorative Justice

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theoretical reservoir, this article conceptualizes restorative justice (RJ) as an ‘apparatus’, that is, a dynamic ensemble of elements whose emergence is related to the development of a distinctive political rationality (ethopolitics). This approach enables a multidimensional comprehension of RJ, since it targets both discursive and non-discursive elements, their power/knowledge relations and subjugating effects. Furthermore, the article explores possibilities for an emancipatory RJ, against the subjective entrapment that the apparatus produces, offering some practical examples. Overall, this work aims to offer a theoretically engaged and critical scrutiny of RJ by using an underexploited analytical device – the apparatus – apt to make visible unexpected dimensions of this ‘new’ frontier of western penalty. This could enhance our understanding of the emergence and possible trajectories of RJ, by identifying risks and opportunities as well as tools for disentanglement from its most problematic institutional developments.

Mob justice, corrupt and unproductive justice system in Nigeria: An empirical analysis

This study problematized the situation of justice administration in Nigeria by examining the public perception of the apparatus of justice in term of corruption, lack of equity, fairness and justice for all as a response to recourse to mob justice in Lagos state. A total of 904 respondents were selected using simple random and purposive sampling techniques. The instruments employed for data collection were questionnaire and interview. In addition, the information gathered was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Scientists and thematic analysis. The results indicated that the increase in mob justice in Lagos state is as a result of the public dissatisfaction and loss of confidence in the institution of police and judiciary to administer justice impartially. The paper, therefore, suggests that a complete overhaul of the Nigerian criminal justice system is essential for the system to be able to fulfil public aspiration for justice.

The Expanding Boundaries of Crime Control: Governing Security through Regulation

The governance of crime and security has undergone major transformations in recent decades. Several important shifts in the rationale and logic of crime control have led to a growth in regulatory practices and an expansion of regulatory provisions. As a result, the scope of actors who regulate behaviors have widened as have the types of tools to facilitate the governance of crime and security also expanded. We argue that the expansion of the boundaries of crime control is facilitated through a wide variety of criminal justice and non-criminal-justice regulatory tools to tackle both social problems and crime. We suggest that the time has come for criminologists to look beyond criminology’s traditional narrow focus on criminal law and the criminal justice apparatus utilized for crime control and engage in the broader discourse of regulation and governance of crime and security.

Neoliberalism, mass incarceration, and the US debt–criminal justice complex

While debtors’ prisons in the United States were outlawed in the early 19th century, recent reports indicate that a growing number of people across the US are currently imprisoned for debt. This process typically occurs in two ways: debtors are found in contempt of court for non-appearance after being pressured into repaying consumer debt, or offenders are incarcerated for unpaid legal financial obligations (LFOs) incurred in the criminal justice system. While numerous legal scholars have examined these practices, little scholarship has situated this phenomenon within the politico-economic landscape of neoliberalism. Seeking to chart the intersections between economic restructuring and the expansion of the carceral state over the past 40 years, this article situates the modern debt–criminal justice complex within the broader historical trajectories of debt, incarceration, and institutional racism within the US. Emphasizing the centrality of US state reforms implemented under neoliberalism, this article examines the transformation of the federal welfare system toward ‘workfare’, as well as bankruptcy reforms implemented in the context of rising consumer debt during the 1990s and early 2000s. I maintain that these overlapping transformations, alongside the expansion of the criminal justice apparatus, were central historical processes that shaped the modern debt–criminal justice complex in the US, which continues to criminalize low-income and racialized populations across the country.

Acusaciones contra jueces legos ante jueces de Letras: uso social del avance de la justicia letrada. Zona centro-sur de Chile, 1824-1875

El articulo dialoga con la literatura que ha examinado a los denominados “jueces legos”, como sosten de las practicas judiciales e integrantes de las sociedades a las que pertenecian los litigantes. Es una discusion centrada en el periodo previo a la expansion de la justicia letrada que se instalo en los distintos paises de Latinoamerica desde la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. La investigacion problematiza los usos sociales de la emergente justicia letrada, que emprendieron actores sociales para judicializar conflictos mantenidos con jueces legos de su territorio. A la vez, se interesa en las reacciones de los jueces de Letras frente a estas practicas y estrategias. El escrutinio se concentra en la zona centro-sur de Chile durante el periodo de configuracion de un aparato de justicia republicana, caracterizado por la atribucion progresiva de facultades fiscalizadoras a los jueces de Letras sobre los jueces legos. Se analiza un cuerpo documental de 47 expedientes judiciales por acusaciones criminales de distintos sectores sociales, contra subdelegados e inspectores de su residencia, ante jueces de Letras de la zona. Los conflictos y los usos sociales se estudian desde un enfoque culturalista, recurriendo a la nocion de “culturas juridico-judiciales” para comprender los valores, discursos y el saber-hacer en instancia judicial. Los resultados se presentan mediante un estudio de casos, a traves de los que se evidenciaron las lecturas que ensayaron los actores sociales, respecto al proceso de fiscalizacion judicial. Desde esa evaluacion, los litigantes trasladaron sus querellas contra subdelegados e inspectores, hacia los juzgados de Letras que iban instalandose en este espacio. Ademas, estos magistrados manifestaron una validacion de estos movimientos, aceptando las acusaciones y solicitudes procesales de los litigantes. Palabras claves: jueces legos, historia de la Justicia, Chile, siglo XIX.