Punitive Reforms Research Articles

Den allmänna repressionsnivån och brottens relativa allvar

AbstractA recently proposed overhaul of Swedish criminal law is characte rized by calls for punitive reforms. The government cites changes in the perception of the severity of different crimes, the appropriate general level of repression, the balance between the interests of the penal system, and the function of punishment, as reasons for a more repressive criminal law. Yet the general level of repression and the impact of previous repressive measures in Sweden are relatively unknown. This article demonstrates what a more repressive criminal law would mean by providing an overview of punitive reforms proposed in Sweden between 2010 and 2023. Over 150 enacted punitive changes are identified, 81 of which were presented by the Ministry of Justice in connection to the judicial system. About 40 % of the total changes relate to the assessment of the seriousness of different crimes. This highlights the impact of the cited perceptions on the general level of repression and provides an empirical foundation for the discussion on punitiveness in Sweden.

Violent bureaucracy: A critical analysis of the British public employment service

Between 2010–2015, the Coalition’s pursuit of a radical austerity programme saw Britain’s Jobcentre Plus experience some of the most punitive reforms and budget cuts in its history. Focusing on the outcomes of these reforms, a growing body of research has found that claiming processes became a more ‘institutionally violent’ and injurious experience for out-of-work benefit claimants. The present article draws upon ideas, developed by Bauman (1989), which focus on the processes that facilitate ‘institutional violence’. We use this framework to analyse ten interviews with front-line workers and managers in public/contractor employment services. In doing so, we expose an array of policy tools and hidden managerial methods used during the Coalition administration which encouraged front-line staff to deliver services in ways that led to a range of harmful outcomes for benefit claimants.

Conceptualizing Legal Childhood in the Twenty-First Century

The law governing children is complex, sometimes appearing almost incoherent. The relatively simple framework established in the Progressive Era, in which parents had primary authority over children, subject to limited state oversight, has broken down over the past few decades. Lawmakers started granting children some adult rights and privileges, raising questions about their traditional status as vulnerable, dependent, and legally incompetent beings. As children emerged as legal persons, children’s rights advocates challenged the rationale for parental authority, contending that robust parental rights often harm children. And a wave of punitive reforms in response to juvenile crime in the 1990s undermined the state’s long-standing role as the protector of children. We address this seeming incoherence by identifying a deep structure and logic in the regulation of children that is becoming clear in the twenty-first century. In our conceptual framework, the law’s central goal, across multiple legal domains, is to promote child wellbeing. This unifying purpose has roots in the Progressive Era, but three distinct characteristics distinguish the modern approach. Today, lawmakers advance child wellbeing with greater confidence and success by drawing on a wide body of research on child and adolescent development and the efficacy of related policies. This is bolstered by the clear understanding that promoting child wellbeing generally furthers social welfare, leading to a broader base of support for state policies and legal doctrines. Finally, there is a growing recognition that the regulation of children and families has long been tainted by racial and class bias and that a new commitment to minimizing these pernicious influences is essential to both the legitimacy and fairness of the regime. In combination, these features make the contemporary regulatory framework superior to earlier approaches. Rather than pitting the state, parents, and child in competition for control over children’s lives—the conception of family regulation since the 1960s—our Child Wellbeing framework offers a surprisingly integrated regulatory approach. Properly understood, parental rights and children’s rights, as well as the direct role of the state in children’s lives, are increasingly defined and unified by a research-driven, social-welfare-regarding effort to promote child wellbeing. This normatively attractive conceptualization of legal childhood does not define every area of legal regulation, but it is a strong through-line and should be elevated and embraced more broadly. In short, our framework brings coherence to the complex legal developments of the past half-century and provides guidance moving forward for this critical area of the law.

Punitive reform and the cultural life of punishment: Moving from the ASBO to its successors

This paper explores the process of punitive reform through a cultural theory lens. The existing literature focuses on high-end punishments of historical pedigree e.g. imprisonment or the death penalty. This paper instead takes as its focus low-end, contemporary punishments. In doing so, it provides original insights into the utility a cultural methodology can bring to understanding punitive reform in the digital age. It tests the applicability of Philip Smith's theory of the cultural life of punishment to case studies of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) and its replacements in England and Wales, the Criminal Behaviour Order and the Injunction. The ASBO was a punitive zeitgeist of its time becoming rooted in popular culture. However, it was ultimately abolished after attracting a predominantly negative cultural narrative. Thus far, after attracting some controversy at the legislative stage, the Criminal Behaviour Order and Injunction have received minimal scrutiny, despite being more problematic than their predecessor. This paper argues that the lower cultural impacts of the new punishments are responsible for the lack of scrutiny.

More Kool-Aid, Anyone?

When President Obama said states could leave No Child Left Behind ... well ... behind, I experienced moment of pure joy. I envisioned fireworks, I saw Lollipop Guild singing, Ding, dong, witch dead. mind's karaoke blasted, We won't get fooled again... But joy lasted less than nanosecond. Sadly, I remembered next line: Meet new boss, same as old As that lyric worked through my consciousness, reality settled in, and I realized this new boss isn't same as old boss. It's worse. With each incarnation of federal government's reform efforts, power of boss has grown punitive, callous, and arbitrary. And, each time we enter new phase, we spiral deeper and deeper into rabbit hole, and rabbit hole only place hallucinations are mistaken for vision, and Kool-Aid vendor runs fastest growing business in kingdom. One of fed's new visions, state waivers from NCLB regulations, powerful example of hallucination dressed up as vision. I have just two very simple Questions: Can someone just once take responsibility for failure--or even just call failure failure--rather than blaming teachers, public schools, parents, and communities? And can we just once look at failure and learn something about where we went wrong? The real failure can be found in Washington, D.C., and in state departments of education that went along with draconian plan. And what we should learn that big, sweeping, punitive reforms simply don't work. Instead, federal government seems to assume that failure requires legislation, tighter controls. Obama claims to be giving states more flexibility by offering opportunity to opt out of NCLB--if they meet a few new guidelines. But what I see an admission that NCLB failed to meet its primary vision--that all students would reach proficiency in reading and math by 2014. Of course, no reasonable person thought it would. But politicians and bureaucrats said it over and over as crowded audiences drank their Kool-Aid and nodded their heads--it sounded just swell coming from podium. Now though, Los Angeles Times has reported that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan strongly supports Obama's decision to let states opt out because the current law drives down standards, weakens accountability, causes narrowing of curriculum, and labels many schools as failing. Yikes. And Obama says, My ad-ministration giving states opportunity to set higher, honest standards. What? Are you saying NCLB standards are not honest? And Diane Ravitch, one of architects of NCLB and now severe critic, reports reform and its emphasis on testing have set back American education by generation. (By way, almost every teacher I know could have told her this back in 2001, but why listen to us?) She also said 2014 goal is timetable for demolition of public education in United States. Good grief, isn't that treason or something? Reading those criticisms from seat of power, why does anyone need to request waiver to discontinue using such failed system? I seriously question whether any state should receive federal money to continue this program. Instead, as taxpayer and citizen, I think any superintendent who continues to implement NCLB ought to be jailed for malpractice. And now education department has had an-other brilliant vision. They are planning a study. …

<em>Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870-1900</em>, by Elizabeth Hurren

Reviewed by: Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870–1900 Julie-Marie Strange (bio) Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870–1900, by Elizabeth Hurren; pp. xii + 296. Woodbridge and Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2007, 50.00, $95.00. The story of the late-nineteenth-century crusades to cut the cost of poor relief by restricting and, where possible, removing outdoor relief in order to force both the deserving and undeserving poor into the workhouse has been eclipsed by historians' perceptions that, by the turn of the twentieth century, attitudes towards poverty had taken a more humanitarian turn. In this meticulously researched book, Elizabeth Hurren reminds readers that the last three decades of the nineteenth century witnessed one of the most punitive episodes in the life of the poor law. The crusades against outdoor relief began as an attempt to force able-bodied, idle, and habitual beggars into the workhouse, but an influential lobby of politicians, civil servants, and well-known philanthropists pushed for the complete withdrawal of outdoor relief. Driving such extreme measures was a desire to cut taxes, framed within a rationale based upon classic political economy and a self-help ethos. As Hurren observes, the removal of outdoor relief shifted philanthropic rhetoric away from a "mixed economy of welfare" and the "makeshift" economies of the poor to emphasise individual responsibility. Throughout the book Hurren italicises the terms "crusader" and "crusade." This mirrors existing historiographical language, but the italics also underline the fervour with which crusaders pursued their cause. Indeed, Hurren's scholarship bristles with a sense of the injustice of punitive reforms packaged in the rhetoric of welfare-to-work schemes. Hurren's book is divided into three parts. Part 1 offers a rigorous and informative overview of the machinery, rationale, and administration of the New Poor Law in a national context alongside a comprehensive introduction to the key arguments of the crusaders and those who opposed their measures. Part 2 introduces Hurren's case study analysis of the crusades in practice, first, by setting the regional stage for poor law administration and, second, by outlining the implementation of the crusades within the Brixworth Union, a relatively large rural poor law union in Northamptonshire. Part [End Page 721] 3, the bulk of the book, unpicks the particulars of agricultural labourers' experiences of poverty, their responses to the reforms, and the campaigns to reinstate outdoor relief. While contributing to the wealth of historical material on "being" poor, Hurren's chief success is integrating that story within a broader appreciation of mixed local welfare economies. Her rich empirical material also enables Hurren to establish the personal networks driving poor law governance and philanthropic organisation, an area that remains under-researched in the busy field of poverty studies. Hurren's decision to focus on the Brixworth Union is important. One of the book's key arguments is that historians' concentration on urban contexts has fostered the perception that the crusades had relatively limited impact. Examining Brixworth, one of the seven most effective crusading unions, Hurren demonstrates the enormous consequences (psychological, communal, personal, and financial) of removing outdoor relief. Unpicking the minutiae of a rural seasonal economy, Hurren highlights why outdoor relief was so pivotal to the makeshift economies of the agricultural labouring classes and, consequently, why the removal of a "right" to outdoor assistance had such devastating effects: parish guardians refused to pay for burials and sent families literally "begging" for charitable assistance in burying their dead. Indeed, the success of crusading rested partially on forcing the poor to turn to other charitable agencies for welfare aid. Similarly, Hurren demonstrates the importance of the rural within the national administrative framework: the successes of the crusades in Brixworth were championed by the Local Government Board while national criticism of the crusades used Brixworth as an example of the harsh economic impact on respectable labourers—particularly the aged poor—and the potential for poor law reform to ignite social unrest. Moreover, that the management of the poor law in Brixworth was engineered primarily by just three key players—a prominent landowner, a Conservative MP, and a parson—illustrates the dynamism...

Introducing the Issue

Introducing the Issue Laurence Steinberg (bio) American juvenile justice policy is in a period of transition. After a decade of declining juvenile crime rates, the moral panic that fueled the "get-tough" reforms of the 1990s and early 2000s—reforms that eroded the boundaries between juvenile and criminal court and exposed juvenile offenders to increasingly harsh punishments —has waned. State legislatures across the country have reconsidered punitive statutes they enacted with enthusiasm not so many years ago. What we may be seeing now is a pendulum that has reached its apex and is slowly beginning to swing back toward more moderate policies, as politicians and the public come to regret the high economic costs and ineffectiveness of the punitive reforms and the harshness of the sanctions. Several concrete indicators of this shift are noteworthy. First, in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2005 Roper v. Simmons opinion abolishing the juvenile death penalty, several state legislatures have repealed, or are considering repealing, statutes imposing sentences of life without parole on juvenile murderers.1 Other states have scaled back, often in response to mounting economic costs, automatic transfer laws that send youth to the adult criminal system by statutory exclusion. 2 Many states have increased funding for community-based treatment programs as alternatives to institutional placement.3 In a few states where youth under eighteen are prosecuted in adult criminal court instead of juvenile court, promising efforts are under way to increase the age to eighteen, as it is in most states.4 Finally, several states have expanded procedural protection for juveniles in criminal court by enacting statutory provisions authorizing findings of incompetence to stand trial on the basis of developmental immaturity.5 Although many of the punitive reforms of the 1990s still remain in place, a policy shift appears to have taken place. Several developments have converged to change the direction of the nation's youth crime policy. Among the most important was the steady decline in juvenile crime beginning in 1994. In the same way that the upward trend in juvenile violence during the 1980s set the stage for the spate of punitive legislation during the 1990s, this downward trend has opened the door to discussions about returning to more moderate policies. Advocates for reform also have been successful in focusing media and political attention on a broad range of emerging social science evidence about [End Page 3] adolescent development and juvenile crime. Editorials and op-eds in local and national newspapers have pointed to this evidence in arguing that adolescents lack the emotional and mental maturity of adults, that juvenile offenders should be given a second chance, that the public supports rehabilitative efforts, and, perhaps most important, that trying juveniles as adults is simply not cost-effective. Evidence of the high economic cost to the government of the wholesale incarceration of juveniles with adults.together with studies finding that adolescents released from adult correctional facilities are more likely to re-offend than those sentenced to juvenile facilities.have influenced the public debate.6 Those who applaud the trend toward justice policies that recognize the differences between adolescents and adults may be heartened by these developments, but they should not naively assume that this trend will proceed unabated. Juvenile crime rates, which have risen and fallen cyclically for four decades, will likely rise again, though perhaps not to the extremes of the early 1990s. Indeed, although rates continue to be low, they have crept up recently; in the past year or two, violent crime by juveniles has edged above the 2004 rates, which were the lowest in nearly two decades.7 It is too early to tell whether recent reports of an uptick in juvenile crime indicate a reversal of the downward trend that the United States enjoyed for well over a decade, or, instead, a transient fluctuation. But stories about rising juvenile crime rates have begun to appear with increasing frequency in newspapers around the country, and publicity about juvenile crime quite often triggers swings in policy. If the current upturn in juvenile offending is indeed the beginning of a worrisome trend, it will take only a couple of widely publicized juvenile crimes and a few outspoken pundits...

PUBLIC PREFERENCES FOR REHABILITATION VERSUS INCARCERATION OF JUVENILE OFFENDERS: EVIDENCE FROM A CONTINGENT VALUATION SURVEY*

Research Summary:Accurately gauging the public's support for alternative responses to juvenile offending is important, because policy makers often justify expenditures for punitive juvenile justice reforms on the basis of popular demand for tougher policies. In this study, we assess public support for both punitively and nonpunitively oriented juvenile justice policies by measuring respondents' willingness to pay for various policy proposals. We employ a methodology known as “contingent valuation” (CV) that permits the comparison of respondents' willingness to pay (WTP) for competing policy alternatives. Specifically, we compare CV‐based estimates for the public's WTP for two distinctively different responses to serious juvenile crime: incarceration and rehabilitation. An additional focus of our analysis is an examination of the public's WTP for an early childhood prevention program. The analysis indicates that the public is at least as willing to pay for rehabilitation as punishment for juvenile offenders and that WTP for early childhood prevention is also substantial. Implications and future research directions are outlined.Policy Implications:The findings suggest that lawmakers should more actively consider policies grounded in rehabilitation, and, perhaps, be slower to advocate for punitive reforms in response to public concern over high‐profile juvenile crimes. Additionally, our willingness to pay findings offer encouragement to lawmakers who are uncomfortable with the recent trend toward punitive juvenile justice policies and would like to initiate more moderate reforms. Such lawmakers may be reassured that the public response to such initiatives will not be hostile. Just as importantly, reforms that emphasize leniency and rehabilitation can be justified economically as welfare‐enhancing expenditures of public funds. The evidence that the public values rehabilitation more than increased incarceration should be important information to cost‐conscious legislators considering how to allocate public funds. Cost‐conscious legislatures may become disenchanted with punitive juvenile justice policies on economic grounds and pursue policies that place greater emphasis on rehabilitation. They may be reassured, on the basis of our findings, that the public will support this move.

Juvenile (In)Justice: Congressional Attempts to Abrogate the Procedural Rights of Juvenile Defendants

The juvenile justice system seeks both to protect society from violent juveniles and to treat juvenile offenders as humanely as possible. Believing that these dual objectives are no longer reconcilable, Congress has sought to implement punitive reforms within the federal juvenile justice system that facilitate prosecuting and incarcerating youths in adult institutions. The most recent example of these efforts, House Bill 1501, sought to reform the procedures governing transfer hearings in federal courts by granting prosecutors the authority to make transfer decisions and shifting the burden of proof during transfer hearings onto juvenile defendants. Such reforms, however, are ill-conceived because they increase the likelihood that youths capable of being rehabilitated will be exposed to the consequences of prosecution in criminal court. Society is better protected when amenable youths remain within the juvenile justice system. Rather than attempting to abrogate the procedural rights of juvenile offenders, Congress should implement additional procedural safeguards to further limit the transfer of amenable youth. Language: en

Juvenile Offenders in the Adult Criminal Justice System

Most state legislatures have instituted punitive reforms in response to rising rates of youth crime, including provisions that transfer an increasing number and range of adolescents to criminal courts for adult prosecution. Proponents assert that juvenile court sanctions and services constitute neither just nor effective responses to savvy juvenile offenders and propose that criminal prosecution will insure more proportionate punishments, provide more effective deterrence, and achieve greater incapacitation. The empirical evidence is too limited to be definitive, but it suggests that most of those assertions are wrong. Expansive transfer policies send many minor and nonthreatening offenders to the adult system, exacerbate racial disparities, and move adolescents with special needs into correctional systems ill prepared to handle them. Transfer results in more severe penalties for some offenders, but there is no evidence that it achieves either general or specific deterrent effects. There is credible evide...

Gender and Welfare Reform

The parameters of the welfare reform debate of the 1990s have been shaped by neoclassical economic theory, which assumes hedonistic individual agents make a dichotomous choice between labor time and “leisure” time. This characterization has led to punitive reform proposals which inadequately reflect the context in which parents make economic decisions. This paper reports the research component of a collaborative effort amongst grass roots groups and academics to change the terms of this debate in a rural state. The research adopts an alternative methodological approach which leads to a more realistic and richer conceptualization of the economic behavior of single parent families. The findings suggest that single parents' decisions are guided by their primary goal of provisioning for children. Using a “basic needs budget” as a benchmark, the data suggest that many single parents simply cannot afford to take a paid job and that a major impediment is gender discrimination in labor markets.

The "Problem of Duty": Family Desertion in the Progressive Era

This article examines the response of social welfare activists to male desertion of dependent families between 1890 and 1920. Charity workers and settlement residents initially worked to define the unique family problems presented by male desertion, but after 1900 began to advocate revision of existing statutes penalizing the deserter. By 1915, however, this period of punitive reform gave way to a new emphasis on deserters' psychological inabilities to adjust to a proper family life.