Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Decades after Sherman and Berk’s groundbreaking 1984 experiment on domestic violence arrests, it is important to assess the success or failure of the criminalization of domestic violence. This paper analyzes domestic violence arrest policies and compares them to NIBRS arrest rates. Overall, 42% of domestic violence cases result in arrest. Individual states vary in their arrest rates, ranging from a low of 25% to a high of 52%. Multivariate analyses indicate that jurisdictions with mandatory and preferred arrest policies have similar arrest rates to jurisdictions without such policies. Moreover, females are significantly more likely to be arrested than males in jurisdictions with and without mandatory/preferred policies. Explanations for the unintended consequences of arrest policies are explored, and the wisdom of the criminalization of domestic violence is discussed. Suggestions are made for law reform in domestic violence cases.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Politicians in most Western countries now face strong incentives to respond to crime, and the fear and concern about it, with penal populism. This is the tendency for politicians to react cynically and rashly to the public’s crime concerns with tough-sounding policies meant to assuage anxiety, score political points, and bolster public confidence, regardless of how effective or just such policies might be. These pressures can produce two contradictory but parallel responses from political leaders and policymakers. First, in the hopes of gaining eye-catching headlines as well as strong public and press support, politicians can loudly ‘low-road’ crime and punishment debates. They often do this by talking tough and by backing tough-sounding policies (mandatory minimum sentences, two- and three-strikes laws, zero-tolerance policing, ‘no frills’ prisons). Second, leaders and policymakers can also quietly ‘high-road’ by embracing instead less costly, more reasoned and evidence-based policies (early release schemes, sentencing discounts for early guilty pleas, more community-based penalties) that seek more progressive aims, like decreasing the prison population, sparing vulnerable victims the trauma of a trial, and making rehabilitation more effective or more of a priority. ‘Quiet high-roading’ usually contradicts the tough talk most politicians are compelled to engage in publicly, and goes on ‘under the radar’, with any luck unnoticed by what is regarded as the ignorant and hot-headed public and the hostile press. Three problems lie at the heart of penal populism: the erroneous belief in a monolithically punitive public, a mass-scale lack of public knowledge about the state of crime and punishment, and the apparent erosion of public confidence in criminal justice systems and in the legitimacy of governments. Any strategy to change how crime and punishment policy is made but which fails to address all three of these problems seems unlikely to make much of a prolonged impact on penal populism. This paper first explains why stealth tactics are misguided and nearsighted, and then it outlines a more defensible and democratic approach based on substantive public engagement and deliberation.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The horizon we glimpse in Aristotle beyond the realm of moral virtue and practical reason itself has a practical character. This is to say that the circularity involving moral virtue and practical wisdom repeats itself at a higher or more comprehensive level in the relationship between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom: Practical wisdom points beyond itself, and must by its nature point beyond itself, to something purer and more important; but at the same time theoretical wisdom is never completely absolved of its character as that which is posited, projected as the horizon of practical wisdom. The elevation of theory is inescapably practical; the ruling idea cannot altogether shed its character as an idea of ruling.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Proceeding