Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Prologue: The Bus 1. Introduction 2. The California Political Economy 3. The Prison Fix 4. Crime, Croplands, and Capitalism 5. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children 6. What Is to Be Done? Epilogue: Another Bus Notes

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

It is often useful within the social sciences to rely on personal experiences, or at least take this as our point of departure. So, given the challenge to lecture on the topic “Society and the victim,” I started out with some reflections on my own past history. Had I ever been a victim, and if so, when and how? And I will ask you in this audience to engage in the same exercise. Have you ever been victims? When was that? Where was it? What characterized the situation? How did you react? How did your surroundings react? Maybe I could ask you to scribble down just a few words from your own personal histories as a victim, not for my use, but for your own. Such personal memories might prove valuable during my presentation, and particularly during our later discussions.

The Ideal Victim

For informal justice to be restorative justice, it has to be about restoring victims, restoring offenders, and restoring communities as a result of participation of a plurality of stakeholders. This means that victim-offender mediation, healing circles, family group conferences, restorative probation, reparation boards on the Vermont model, whole school antibullying programs, Chinese Bang Jiao programs, and exit conferences following Western business regulatory inspections can at times all be restorative justice. Sets of both optimistic propositions and pessimistic claims can be made about restorative justice by contemplating the global diversity of its practice. Examination of both the optimistic and the pessimistic propositions sheds light on prospects for restorative justice. Regulatory theory (a responsive regulatory pyramid) may be more useful for preventing crime in a normatively acceptable way than existing criminal law jurisprudence and explanatory theory. Evidence-based reform must move toward a ...

Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts

Conventionally, crime is regarded principally as harm or wrong and the dominant ordering practices arise post hoc. In the emerging pre-crime society, crime is conceived essentially as risk or potential loss, ordering practices are pre-emptive and security is a commodity sold for profit. Though this dichotomy oversimplifies a more complex set of changes, it captures an important temporal shift. As the intellectual offspring of the post-crime society, criminology must adapt to meet the challenges of pre-crime and security. This article examines the key features a theory of security needs to encompass. It explores the immanent capacities of criminology for change and suggests exterior intellectual resources upon which it might draw. It concludes that the pre-crime society need not be a post-criminological one.

Pre-crime and post-criminology?:

This is the fi rst of a two-part paper on penal exceptionalism in Scandinavia — that is, low rates of imprisonment and humane prison conditions. Part I examines the roots of this exceptionalism in Finland, Norway and Sweden, arguing that it emerges from the cultures of equality that existed in these countries which were then embedded in their social fabrics through the universalism of the Scandinavian welfare state.

/pdf/scandinavian-exceptionalism-in-an-era-of-penal-excess-part-i-2ihwtalffe.pdf

SCANDINAVIAN EXCEPTIONALISM IN AN ERA OF PENAL EXCESS Part I : The Nature and Roots of Scandinavian Exceptionalism

Crime and punishment are social and cultural manifestations; they are closely bound up with people's perceptions of morality, norms and values. In this book, Nils Christie argues that crime is a fluid and shallow concept - acts that could be construed as criminal are unlimited and crime is therefore in endless supply. It should not be forgotten that there are alternatives, both in the definition of crime, and in responses to it. A Suitable Amount of Crime looks at the great variations between countries over what are considered 'unwanted acts', how many are constructed as criminal and how many are punished. It explains the differences between eastern and western Europe, between the USA and the rest of the world. The author laments the size of prison populations in countries with large penal sectors, and asks whether the international community has a moral obligation to 'shame' states that are punitive in the extreme.The book is written in an engaging and easily accessible style that will appeal to anyone interested in understanding contemporary problems of crime and punishment.

A Suitable Amount of Crime

Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style?

This paper takes as its point of departure the high level of triviality in much writing on crime and crime control. This is related to what is seen as an oversocialization within criminology, as within so many other fields of social science. Four barriers for understanding are discussed: lack of access to ourselves; oversocialization within the university system; the dangers of the eager state; and the effects of easily available files and archives of material reflecting the state-perspective on deviance.

Four Blocks Against Insight: Notes on the Oversocialization of Criminologists

Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

Victim movements are growing in most western countries. This is a natural consequence of modernity. Neighbourhoods are weakened, state control moves in and victims might feel they are left behind, forgotten in the legal process. Now they demand a new entrance. This is easy to understand, but difficult to absorb in a penal process. Victim power might be a strong driving force towards the punitive society. And may be it is bad also for victims. Civil meetings between victims and the persons or systems that might have hurt them might be more constructive alternatives, both for victims and their communities. In such meetings there are no limits to what can be expressed. Here delivery of pain is not at the centre, but the question of what happened, how could you do this to me or mine, or to values dear to us? Victim movements stand at a crossroad. They might strengthen civil societies and their members, or create further damage.

Nils Christie

Papers

A Suitable Amount of Crime

Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style?

Four Blocks Against Insight: Notes on the Oversocialization of Criminologists

Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

Victim movements at a crossroad