The Lex Talionis Framework of Negative Reciprocity
The Possibility of Dispensing Entirely with Negative Reciprocity
Negative Reciprocity Once Again: Impartial Administration of Punishment for Malicious Violations of the Fair Terms of Cooperation
Criminal Justice: The State as a Permanent Enforcement Agency
3. Redressing Grievances: The Retaliation Model
The Pure Retaliation Model
Moving away from the Pure Retaliation Model: The Medieval State as a Weak Enforcement Agency
4. Redressing Grievances: The Criminal Justice Model
Moving towards the Criminal Justice Model: The Rise of the Modern State
The Possibility of Taming State Power
Taming the Power of the State
5. Decriminalization
The Eligibility Principle and Decriminalization
The Eligibility Principle’s Ramifications
6. Policing the Police
Stop and Frisk
Systematic Surveillance of Behavior in Public Places
7. State-Imposed Punishment
Whether, What Kind, and How Much Questions Bearing on Punishment
Prison Conditions: The State’s Carceral Responsibility for Inmates
8. Equality: Racial and Class Disparities in the Context of State-Imposed Punishment
Retail vs. Wholesale Approaches to Criminal Justice
The Possibility of Achieving Equal Justice on a Case by Case Basis
Afterword
William Heffernan is Professor of Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He is an editor of Criminal Justice Ethics, a publication of John Jay’s Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics. His books include Privacy And The American Constitution: New Rights Through Interpretation Of An Old Text (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and his articles on constitutional privacy protection have appeared in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Georgetown Law Journal, Wisconsin Law Review, and Notre Dame Law Review.
This book seeks to explain why the concept of justice is critical to the study of criminal justice. Heffernan makes such a case by treating state-sponsored punishment as the defining feature of criminal justice. In particular, this work accounts for the state’s role as a surrogate for victims of wrongdoing—and so makes it possible to integrate victimology scholarship into its justice-based framework. In arguing that punishment may be imposed only for wrongdoing, the book proposes a criterion for repudiating the legal paternalism that informs drug-possession laws.
Rethinking the Foundations of Criminal Justice outlines steps for taming the state’s power to punish offenders; in particular, it draws on restorative justice research to outline possibilities for a penology that emphasizes offenders’ humanity. Through its examination of equality issues, the book integrates recent work on the social justice/criminal justice connection into the scholarly literature on punishment, and so will particularly appeal to those interested in criminal justice theory.