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The Denials of Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Michael Meranze
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Extract

The contemporary American will to punish is simultaneously in disarray and experiencing dramatic expansion. Crime, despite the ambiguities of its statistical measurement, remains a central focus of contemporary politics. Notwithstanding a “crisis of penological modernism” that has undercut traditional explanations and justifications for the penal apparatus, prison construction continues at an accelerated pace while proposals for increasing the severity of juvenile punishments seem omnipresent. Criminological discussions continue to stress the technicalities of the problem of punishment while larger social issues remain marginalized. In this situation, the evident problems of the criminal justice system are transmuted into programs for increasing its reach and power.

Type
Forum: Commentary
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 153 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1998

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References

1. Garland, David, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Chicago, 1990), 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Dubber, Markus Dirk, “The Right to Be Punished: Autonomy and Its Demise in Modern Penal Thought,” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Ibid., 116.

4. Meranze, Michael, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 120-57, 173–204.Google Scholar

5. Gatrell, W. A. C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (New York, 1994), 225–97Google Scholar; Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 87-89, 157-67.

6. Cohen, Daniel A., Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York, 1993), 46–49Google Scholar; Halttunen, Karen, “Early American Murder Narratives: The Birth of Horror,” in The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson (Chicago, 1993), 68–76Google Scholar; Linebaugh, Peter, “The Ordinary of Newgate and His Account,” in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. Cockburn, J. S. (London, 1977), 246–69.Google Scholar

7. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace, 49-54, 59-66, 69-76; Evans, Richard J., Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (New York, 1996), 77–86Google Scholar; Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 37-48.

8. For a discussion of elite indifference, see Gatrell, The Hanging Tree, 243-46. In addition, Gatrell includes extensive discussion of the complexities of popular responses in the eighteenth century; see especially ibid., 56-89.

9. Dubber, “The Right to Be Punished,” 136.

10. Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue, 87-328.

11. Dubber, “The Right to Be Punished,” 146.