Criminal Justice Ethics 

About: Criminal Justice Ethics is an academic journal published by Taylor & Francis. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Criminal justice & Criminal law. It has an ISSN identifier of 0731-129X. Over the lifetime, 626 publications have been published receiving 4040 citations.

Commentaries on the issue: A policy perspective

Abstract: On July 29, 1994, Jesse Temmendequas invited seven-year-old Megan Kanka into his home to see his puppy. Once inside, Timmendequas forced Megan into his room, strangled her with a belt, and sexually assaulted her. She died from asphyxiation. Only after Megan's death did authorities reveal that Timmendequas had two previous convictions for child sexual abuse. Timmendequas had been sentenced to ten years at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center, known as Avenel. With time off for good behavior, Timmendequas was released after serving only six years. At the time of Megan's murder, Timmendequas lived across the street from the Kankas with two other convicted sex offenders whom he had met at Avenel. The outrage of community members that convicted sex offenders could live anonymously in their communities led to the passage of "Megan's Law" in New Jersey. In 1990, Washington State enacted its Community Protection Act(1) after a seven-year-old Tacoma boy was lured into a wooded area by a recently released sex offender who orally and anally raped the boy and then cut off his penis. The man had a twenty-four-year record of assaults on young people, including the kidnapping and assault of two teenage girls and involvement in the murder of a fifteen-year-old schoolmate.(2) Registration of sex offenders with police is relatively unproblematic.(3) It is Community notification that has sparked the greatest controversy. In arguments before New Jersey's Supreme Court, lawyers opposed to Megan's Law criticized the law as stigmatizing and humiliating for offenders. They also said it was punitive, increasing the punishment to which offenders had originallly been sentenced, and was therefore unconstitutional.(4) In addition, they said that the law was an invasive measure that infringed the privacy and liberties of convicted sex offenders who had supposedly paid their debt to society. Other commentators point out that the stigma attached to sex offenders by society, and reinforced by notification laws, interferes with their ability to find jobs and places to live and to resume a normal life. Whatever the merit of these objections as a matter of law--an issue I leave to those with legal backgrounds--they do not have much moral force. As Megan's mother, Maureen Kanka, expressed it, "I have a dead little girl. How can they sit there and worry about if it's punishment? What about our kids? That's ultimately what it comes down to. Our kids have rights and it's time someone started addressing them."(5) It seems to me that Mrs. Kanka has framed the issue correctly. When a little boy has been raped and had his penis cut off, or when a little girl has been raped and murdered, worry about humiliating the people who committed these crimes seems a little overly sensitive. I start then with the assumption that the paramount issue is the protection of children, that their rights to be safe from violent sexual assault certainly outweigh the rights of sexual predators not to be stigmatized. The trouble is that notification laws will not protect children. They are at best ineffective and at worst create a false sense of security that may actually expose children to risk. In addition, there is the danger of vigilantism that risks harming innocent bystanders and is contrary to the rule of law even when directed at the guilty. First, Megan's Law focuses on a tiny percentage of those who commit sexual crimes against children, namely, dangerous strangers. Between seventy-five and eighty-nine percent of child sexual abuse is committed by relatives and friends.(6) Yet Megan's Law explicitly targets for community notification sexual predators whose "sexual preference is for minor children outside his or her immediate family."(7) Thus, it fails to protect children from the most common kind of sexual abuse, that inflicted by friends and relatives. Indeed, such laws may "promote a false sense of security, lulling parents and kids into the big-bad-man mindset when many molesters are in fact trusted authority figures or family members. …

Morality and the retributive emotions

Abstract: (1982). Morality and the retributive emotions. Criminal Justice Ethics: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 3-10.

A Tale of Two Theories

Abstract: My own mode of discussing Douglas Husak's excellent new book, Overcriminalization,1 is by comparing the theory that book defends—what Husak calls “minimalism”—with a theory with which I am already ...

Shame, forgiveness, and juvenile justice

Abstract: The question of how best to deal with juvenile delinquency, and with crimes committed by young offenders, raises wider issues Debates about juvenile justice are rarely concerned only with young people and are rarely confined to questions of managing the criminal justice system Historically, "policies concerning deviant children have been at the moral center of debate over crime, poverty and education"(1) The question of whether, and how, the state should punish deviant children raises further fundamental questions in moral and political philosophy It raises a question about the appropriate balance between retribution and rehabilitation--or indeed, about whether either of these approaches is adequate It raises a question about the divide between a public sphere governed by common and statutory laws and a private sphere governed by family rules It is part of the debate about the relationship between rights and obligations In addition, juvenile justice has been a testing ground for criminological theory Smaller-scale explanations of crime, focussing on psychological or social variables, have been tested empirically with increasingly sophisticated data analysis as the criminology industry has expanded Young people have regularly been the subject of such tests After several decades of research, there is still no clear consensus on whether juvenile delinquency is primarily a symptom of inadequate internal self-control or whether it is primarily a symptom of inadequate external social control Hence the renewed call for an interdisciplinary approach in criminology(2) An interdisciplinary approach would seek to transcend this impasse between sociology's "over socialized conception" of the individual and psychology's focus on fixed character traits(3) It would seek to understand better the system of social and political rules within which individuals interact It would give as much weight to human passions as it does to human reason A successful interdisciplinary approach to juvenile justice would, in other words, seek to overcome the divide between the social sciences and the humanities; it would integrate recent advances in psychology and sociology with contemporary thinking in moral and political theory One would expect proposals for public policy to flow from an integrated theory of this sort In this paper, however, I intend to proceed in the reverse order I am not proposing to integrate existing theories and then to suggest new public policies in juvenile justice Rather, I wish to describe an existing model of dealing with young offenders and then to consider its broader implications As with earlier debates about juvenile justice, the issues raised by this model of dealing with young offenders extend more generally to criminology, moral philosophy, and political theory The Family Group Conference in Theory and Practice The core of the model at issue here is currently operating throughout New Zealand/Aotearoa It has also been introduced in a modified form in parts of Australia Its central component is a process known as the Family Group Conference (F G C) When New Zealand's national parliament passed legislation in 1989 adopting the Family Group Conference process for dealing with young offenders and their victims, one of its primary aims was to achieve a system of justice that was culturally appropriate to the country's Maori and Pacific Island Polynesian population(4) However, the process would appear to be broadly applicable to virtually any juvenile justice system The basic design of the Family Group Conference is disarmingly simple A young person who has committed an offense against an identifiable victim is brought face to face with that victim (There may be more than one offender or more than one victim; a single conference deals with the effects of the offense) Both offender(s) and victim(s) are accompanied by family members, guardians, peers, or other people with a significant relationship to the offender or the victim …