Criminality and Punishment

En el presente trabajo se aborda el fenómeno expansivo del Derecho penal desde el análisis de sus causas, consecuencias y posibles alternativas. Para una comprensión óptima, se recogen y ponen en común postulados de diversos autores a partir de los cuales extraer conclusiones. Se hace asimismo mención de diversos ejemplos de la cultura e historia españolas, especialmente en el ámbito de la seguridad vial, donde el fenómeno se ha manifestado de manera intensiva.

The Waray as a people is not so much different from the rest of the Filipinos.  Just like everyone else, we may show evidence of undesirable traits, but we also have character values that we can be proud of.  The negative connotation of the Waray being brave, in an imprudent inference as synonymous with violence and criminality, must be stopped once and for all.  It is rather apt to advocate that the Waray is imbued with courage, which is a quality of being brave.  We are very well-known to have the ability to face danger, difficulty, uncertainty, or pain without being overcome by fear or being deflected from a chosen course of action.

(from the Introduction)
Intending only to research medieval conceptions of hell, author Alan Bernstein wanted to investigate postmortem retribution in the ancient world for historical context. This investigation turned into an entire book of its own. In The Formation of Hell, Bernstein seeks to explain how the idea of hell achieved a prominent place in people’s minds. He explicitly states that he intends to accomplish this without any prior concern for whether hell actually exists or any preceding judgement as to the nature or value of hell.  In the end, Bernstein provides a superb example of historical investigation and rigorous scholarship. Though there are certain theological and metaphysical implications omitted from the book, the author successfully demonstrates that the notion of hell originally arose late in Judaism out of a need to explain the injustices in the world and became a rhetorical device designed to elicit conformity to religious and cultural mores.

El presente trabajo plantea una aproximación a los conceptos de enfermedad mental e imputabilidad desde una perspectiva multidisciplinar, pero con un enfoque eminentemente jurídico. Su objetivo es analizar la entidad de la psicopatía como causa de inimputabilidad en el sistema jurídico penal español y determinar cómo debe lidiar un Estado del Derecho y del bienestar con los sujetos psicópatas.

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This paper sets out an approach towards the concepts of mental disorder and imputability from a multidisciplinary perspective, though with an eminently juridic point of view. Its aim is to analyse the entity of psychopathy as a non-imputability cause in the Spanish criminal justice system and to determine how a welfare state based on the rule of law ought to deal with psychopaths.

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El artículo es una versión corregida, sintetizada y puesta al día de dos trabajos anteriores, el primero fue publicado en la Revista Eletrônica de Ciências Jurídicas, nº 6 (2009), de la Associação do Ministério Público do Estado do Maranhão, Brasil, intitulado: “¿Policía de investigación? Reflexiones sobre la naturaleza de su función y órgano de adscripción”; cuya versión resumida fue publicada en COMUNES, Revista de Seguridad Ciudadana y Pensamiento Crítico, Nº1 (2012) Universidad Nacional Experimental de la Seguridad, Venezuela. Lo relevante de esta versión es que la misma está puesta al día con la reciente legislación que rige la materia, tal como el Decreto con Rango, Valor y Fuerza de Ley Orgánica del Servicio de Policía de Investigación, el Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas, Penales y Criminalísticas y el Servicio Nacional de Medicina y Ciencias Forenses y la reforma del Código Orgánico Procesal Penal, ambas publicadas el 15 de junio de 2012, que como toda legislación obedecen a determinados contextos y pretextos que se exploran en este trabajo.

The alarm raised by some crimes and the dramatic harms they can cause brought some legislators to conceive medical treatment as a possible way to prevent re-offending. In Italy the so-called security measures are characterized by clinical and therapeutic contents. The laws of some of the United States of America authorize the castration of sex offenders in order to reduce recidivism. But are such measures consistent with the general principles and safeguards of criminal law? Do they respect individual rights and liberties protected by national Constitutions? Are they meant to help the offender or are they a new form of corporal punishment?
This paper considers such issues in a problematic perspective, not necessarily to offer definitive answers, but especially to stimulate a careful meditation on what could be the future content of criminal sanctions.

The story of the Mailoni Brothers created an atmosphere of dread and terror among Zambians, more so the people of Luano Valley. The book, '54 Days in Luano,' is a story of the end of the Mailoni Brothers' menace in the Luano Valley from a military perspective authored by Captain Victor Simukonda, a military historian, researcher and peace scholar serving as Staff Officer at Policy, Doctrine and Strategy Branch at Zambia Army Headquarters. It is a narrative non-fiction book. The author is building his scholarly reputation by writing this book after co-authoring another book with Colonel Jethrow Chipili, Soldiers of the forgotten Army: Northern Rhodesian Askari and the two Great Wars (2021). A one-hundred-page book begins with a well-written introduction and preface that explains the book's purpose. The strength of the narrative is informed and based on the secondary data sources and interviews with the locals and military personnel who took part in the operation. These sources are complemented by the author's military knowledge and experience. It is an easier to read book divided into seven parts with captivating titles. It shows a reader the challenges military personnel encounter in their pursuit of peace and security. It is a valuable contribution since military operations in postcolonial Zambia remains an under-researched area among scholars. The book gives insights into how certain regions' social and economic isolation can breed hardcore criminals from the perspective of peace and conflict.

The essays in this volume provide a new perspective on the history of convicts and penal colonies. They demonstrate that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a critical period in the reconfiguration of empires, imperial govern-mentality, and punishment, including through extensive punitive relocation and associated extractive labour. Ranging across the global contexts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Japan, the Americas, the Pacific, Russia, and Europe, and exploring issues of criminalization, political repression, and convict management alongside those of race, gender, space, and circulation, this collection offers a perspective from the colonies that radically transforms accepted narratives of the history of empire and the history of punishment. In this introduction, we argue that a colony-centred perspective reveals that, during a critical period in world history, convicts and penal colonies created new spatial hierarchies, enabled the incorporation of territories into

Lifetime may feel empty and dull. What looked important yesterday may not be important now. Survivors of assault (i.e rape) find new sense in their lives as a result of assault. It is impossible to undo what has happened but lifetime can be good again and better. Every survivor needs someone to spend time and talk with about how they feel to redefine their future.

A análise econômica do comportamento criminoso passou a ser feita fundamentada em um rigoroso modelo teórico matematicamente estruturado a partir do artigo Crime and punishment: An economic approach de Gary Becker (1968). Não obstante, sabemos muito pouco sobre as origens do pensamento “econômico” sobre crimes e punições. Assim, nosso principal objetivo é reconstituir essa história. Neste artigo, o faremos mediante a retomada de Adam Smith a Cesare Beccaria (1762-1776). Expomos a posição de Smith que, embora usualmente retratada como contrária ao arcabouço utilitarista, esconde passagens onde o autor se aproxima muito do raciocínio econômico-utilitário para refletir sobre a criminalidade. Por fim, expomos os argumentos de Beccaria, reconhecido como uma influência no pensamento de Becker e outros autores do movimento da Law and Economics.

This article is an exploration of two forces that come into play in the
development of epistemic and legal practices of exclusion: (1)
invisibility conditioned by racial criminalization and (2) its disenfranchising effect on particularly black people well into the present.

This is a book about prison, rehabilitation, cells, hallways, human psychology, values, conspiracy theory, justice, dysfunctions, "criminal minds", morality, and many more. The issues revealed in it are part of my work as educator in the biggest and most notorious prison in Rep. of Macedonia - Idrizovo.

In 1994, convicted murderer Stephen Mobley's death penalty case attracted intense international debate when his attorneys attempted to have Mobley tested for genetic deficiencies based on his family history of disorders. According to the attorneys, indications that Mobley shared a genetic propensity for serious misconduct could help explain some of his troubling tendencies and why he should not be executed. Ultimately, the trial and appellate courts rejected that reasoning. In 2005, Mobley was executed. Yet Mobley's death once again stirs the genetics and crime debate with a key question: How have courts and litigators treated genetics evidence in criminal cases during the years following Mobley's first trial? Much of the controversy concerning Mobley v. State was based on the presumption that such evidence would skyrocket in use and abuse. This article seeks to determine if such forecasts have been realized.

Contrary to predictions at the time of Mobley's appeal, it appears that little has occurred in the area of genetics and crime warranting the concern that Mobley generated. Of course, the criminal justice system should remain alert to potential hazards of genetics evidence. Yet unsupported fears could also curtail some defendants' constitutionally legitimate attempts to submit aggravating factors in their death penalty cases, in particular, genetics evidence that could validate the existence of more traditionally accepted mitigating conditions, such as mental illness. Presumably, judges and juries would be less likely to think that a defendant is feigning states such as schizophrenia or alcoholism if such disorders commonly occurred across generations of the defendant's family.

Part I of this article briefly reviews the facts and legal arguments in Mobley. Part II addresses the primary issues that concerned the court in Mobley, noting that many of the original reasons for the controversy over the potential use of genetics evidence remain the same as they did in 1994. Part III discusses the twenty-seven key genetics and crime cases occurring between 1994 and 2004, since Mobley spurred the topical dispute. These cases, which are surprisingly small in number, share several important characteristics: they overwhelmingly constitute murder convictions in which defendants attempted to use genetics evidence as a mitigating factor in a death penalty case (as Mobley did), and the evidence is introduced mostly to verify a condition (such as a type of mental illness) that is commonly acceptable for mitigation. Part IV contends that, contrary to some commentators' warnings during the first Mobley trial, the last decade has not revealed a legally irresponsible application of genetics factors in criminal cases. Rather, courts continue to regard genetics variables skeptically, and society still embraces the same political and moral concerns over the role of such information. At the same time, courts have failed to provide sound and conceptually consistent reasons for denying defendants' offers of genetics evidence.

This article concludes that unwarranted constraints on the admissibility of genetics evidence in death penalty cases can undercut some defendants' efforts to fight their executions. By imposing unreasonable limitations on genetics arguments, the criminal justice system may be undermining the very principles and progressive thinking the cap on genetics evidence was originally intended to achieve.

This issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy contains three papers on a topic of increasing importance within the field of ‘‘neurolaw’’—namely, the implications for criminal law of direct brain intervention based mind altering techniques (DBI’s). To locate these papers’ topic within a broader context, I begin with an overview of some prominent topics in the field of neurolaw, where possible providing some references to relevant literature. The specific questions asked by the three authors, as well as their answers and central claims, are then sketched out, and I end with a brief comment to explain why this particular topic can be expected to gain more prominence in coming years.

Chronicles that were written in many aspects of social life, including daily life, entertainment and sports, at a time when history writing was beginning to show some methodology, describe vengeance as a sentiment that is required to survive and succeed. In acts of vengeance narrated in chronicles, social structure manifests itself over three axes, namely religion (Christian-Muslim), status (ruler-subject) and gender (men-women). In some cases, an act that is too trivial to cause a feeling of vengeance warrants revenge simply because of the social structure involved. Reasons for revenge in chronicles are divided into two categories: social reasons such as observing a different religion or denomination, apostasy, claiming to be prophets, uprising, bribery and personal reasons such as jealousy, lack of protocol, murder of someone in the family. Vengeance is enacted in two different ways: direct with the religious assistance or ploys and indirect with collective punishments such as occupation, exile, pillage and individual punishments such as selling as slaves, killing by weapons, decapitation, burning, skinning, confinement, filling the mouth with dirt. Since all acts of vengeance become public to a certain degree, its aftermath is discussed in detail. Therefore, the public nurtures different sentiments as celebration, mourning and regret after the act of revenge. Victims try to find some ways to avoid revenge indirectly with the assistance of Prophets (Mohammad or Jesus Christ) or Khidr and directly with his own survival plan such as flight, converting, paying tribute.

The 2- volume collection of art works, some very old and some not, provides glimpses of the ways in which we and our ancestors have punished those who broke the rules and laws; to repeat, some real, some imagined. The reader, confronted with an expanse of horror, sits back relieved that we no longer treat criminals or misfits or sinners or women or children or animals in the ways depicted in these volumes. But I urge you to pay close attention to the pictures of prison (Book 2), for they hide the horrors of modern punishment within them. Yet out of all this violence and dread, there is but one consolation for the existence and seeming necessity of punishment: it makes possible that one highly regarded human trait of mercy.

In February 1640 Andreas Meister, a Leipzig vinegar grocer, was denounced as a despicable heretic. Due to a denunciation, written by a neighbour, Meister should have denied resurrection, desecrated God and the Holy Bible, reviled the ministry as well as disparaged Christian marriage. This paper reveals both the social and cultural context of these charges. Early modern ideas of blasphemous conduct and speeches as a dreadful sin and crime shaped the labeling of Andreas Meister as a heretic. At once ideas of a good Christian life and manner shaped his defense in court. Against the backdrop of interpersonal frictions and the threats by the Thirty Years' War, in particular the experience of actual devastations, mundane conversations could lead into disaster.

In my dissertation, The History of Criminal Selectivity: A Reading from Marx, Engels, and Contemporary Marxist Thought, I assess the historical and social-economic conditions that underpin the unequal legal treatment and selective prosecution of people based upon class, race, gender, and age. I identify particular patterns of “criminal selectivity.” I consider this phenomenon from the rise of capitalism to today, throughout Europe and the United States. Although the unequal functioning of the criminal justice system is widely recognized today as a key concept for analyzing crime and punishment, the selectivity phenomenon has not been strictly conceptualized and developed

To cite this work/Para citar este trabajo: Vegh Weis, Valeria "The History of Criminal Selectivity", American Sociology Association, 2015

Dieses Buch greift eine zentrale Lücke in den Untersuchungen zur Kontrollgesellschaft und den governmentality studies auf: Vor dem Hintergrund der gegenwärtigen Kontrollgesellschaft analysiert der Autor nicht nur die Konturen ihrer dominanten Vergesellschaftungslogik der Kontrolle. Vielmehr transformiert sich die gegenwärtige Vergesellschaftung in der Spätmoderne, wie am Gegenstand aktueller Kriminalpolitik paradigmatisch herausgearbeitet wird. Ihre Veränderungen werden mit der (Wieder-)Einführung und (Re-)Aktualisierung einer souveränen Vergesellschaftungslogik bestimmt.

In the early modern period blasphemy was deemed a heinous sin and crime, that not only desecrates God through word and deed but also threatens human communities by evoking God's wrath and vengeance. Thus, authorities all over Europe punished acts of blasphemy severely, if known to court. But why and how did early modern people perceive and read specific conduct and manners of speaking as blasphemous, when curses and other perturbing virile gestures were at once - at least to a certain extent - part of everyday life. This paper focusses on pre-court as well as in-court negotiations and constructions of blasphemy as an anti-community sin and crime.

Direct brain intervention based mental capacity restoration techniques — for instance, psycho-active drugs — are sometimes used in criminal cases to promote the aims of justice. For instance, they might be used to restore a person’s competence to stand trial in order to assess the degree of their responsibility for what they did, or to restore their competence for punishment so that we can hold them responsible for it. Some also suggest that such interventions might be used for therapy or reform in criminal legal contexts — i.e. to make non-responsible and irresponsible people more responsible. However, I argue that such interventions may at least sometimes fail to promote these responsibility-related legal aims. This is because responsibility hinges on other factors than just what mental capacities a person has — in particular, it also hinges on such things as authenticity, personal identity, and mental capacity ownership — and some ways of restoring mental capacity may adversely affect these other factors. Put one way, my claim is that what might suffice for the restoration of competence need not necessarily suffice for the restoration of responsibility, or, put another way, that although responsibility indeed tracks mental capacity it may not always track restored mental capacities.

Scholars have paid relatively little, fragmented and discontinuous attention to the history of convict transportation in the Spanish empire... Only two syntheses centred on convict transportation are available to date: Ruth Pike’s pioneering study on penal servitude in early modern Spain, published in 1983, and Lauren Benton’s more recent chapter in A Search for Sovereignty. Both focus on the flows directed to the presidios, or military outposts, in the five decades between the end of the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763) and the beginning of the process of Latin American independence (1810s-1830s).
The history of convict transportation in the Spanish empire, however, is much longer and includes a broader range of punitive regimes. The first two sections of this chapter take this expanded chronological and thematic frame in order to offer an overview, and to provide, respectively, a general description and periodisation of the various forms of convict transportation and a preliminary evaluation of the quantitative scale of the phenomenon as a whole. In the subsequent sections I use the presidio perspective to explore aspects of convict transportation that can be equally investigated in relation to other mobility-oriented punishments. First, I seek to provide a comprehensive description of convict flows to the presidios and relate them to the structure of the Spanish empire. I then foreground the distinctiveness of each route and the variety of groups of prisoners transported along different routes and standing in each destination, and point to the entanglements and disentanglements between the convict voyages and the journeys of other migrants. Finally, I address the relationship between the process of sentencing, the destinations of transportation and agency, and the role that punishment-related spatial mobility played in the lives of the convicts. All in all, the chapter foregrounds the way convict transportation was shaped by, and in turn impacted on, the structures, spatiality, conceptualisations and goals of the empire – a point that I especially highlight in the concluding section.

The Protestant theological doctrine of the uses of the moral law had a striking analogue in the classic Anglo-American doctrine of the purposes of criminal law and punishment. Protestant theologians have long argued that God’s moral law was not a pathway to salvation, but it still had “uses” in this life: (1) a civil use that restrains person from sinful conduct by threat of divine punishment; (2) a theological use that condemns sinful persons in their consciences and drives them to repentance; and (3) an educational use that teaches those who have already been saved the good works that please God and induce others to come to God, too. Protestant jurists, in turn, developed an analogous theory of three purposes of why a state needs criminal law and punishment: (1) deterrence of individuals and groups through the threat of criminal punishment; (2) retribution, the necessary punishment needed to restore a convicted criminal within the community; and (3) rehabilitation, teaching a person the good works that become proper citizenship. This Article analyzes the close conceptual connections between these theological and legal doctrines and the historical evidence that each influenced the development of the other. The Article also calls for a proper balancing of the three uses of moral law and the three purposes of criminal law.

This articles studies the view the popular classes had of those condemned to death at the end of the nineteenth century. The impact that the trial, the law sentence and the subsequent execution of prisoners had on popular literature of that time is analysed together with its relation to popular urban culture representations, From this point of view, the executions can be understood as a discursive field in which the punitive logic of the State collided with the symbolic inversion of the criminal, converted into a popular hero or canonized after the execution itself.The intense debate that executions brought about among the lower classes of Santiago can be interpreted as a public ritual under a sacrificial matrix that has a close relationship with the symbolism of violent deaths and the cult of the animitas in Chile. From this point of view, the evolution of popular opinion from that of an initial repulsion to that of the posthumous canonization of those condemned can be read as the different stages by which the condemned becomes a sacrificial hero than incarnated the internal violence of society and who's destiny is to become the nexus between earthly misery and the miraculous abundance of the heavens.

Criminal infringement notices (CINs) are now a familiar component of the criminal justice system, especially in the policing of public order and minor offences. Successive Australian state and territory governments have implemented CIN schemes with the objective of reducing administrative demands and trial backlogs, cutting down on paperwork, freeing up police time, saving costs and keeping police ‘on the beat’. This article examines how CINs have been rationalised on the basis of neoliberal economic values, which have overshadowed ordinary criminal justice concerns of morality and responsibility. It focuses on the introduction of criminal code infringement notices in Western Australia for two offences: disorderly behaviour, and steal anything up to the value of $500. The author argues that there is a need to recognise—and to resist—the encroachment of neoliberal economisation discourses into the realm of criminal law.

El Vigilantismo es una corriente ideológica que propugna
el derecho a la autodefensa de los individuos cuando el Estado
no es capaz de proporcionársela de manera eficaz. Experimentó un
considerable auge en los Estados Unidos a partir de los años setenta,
presentándose como una alternativa válida en la lucha contra la elevada
criminalidad. El Vigilantismo defiende una visión eminentemente punitiva
de la Justicia. La película «Death Wish», de Michael Winner (Paramount
Pictures, 1974), y protagonizada por Charles Bronson, en el papel
de Paul Kersey, retrata de forma certera esta doctrina.
Vigilantism is an ideological stream that advocates the
right to self-defense of the individuals when the Government is unable
to provide it effectively. It underwent a considerable boom in
the United States from the 1970s, posing as a valid alternative in the
fight against high rates of criminality. Vigilantism defends an essential
punitive vision of Justice. The film «Death Wish», directed by
Michael Winner (Paramount Pictures, 1974), with Charles Bronson,
playing the role of Paul Kersey, is an acute portrait of this doctrine.