Digital Commons Network^™

Lessons Unlearned: Women Offenders, The Ethics Of Care, And The Promise Of Restorative Justice, Marie Failinger

Faculty Scholarship

The steep rise in female offenders since the 1960s has finally caused criminologists, lawyers, judges, and others to consider why they have not learned more about women offenders’ lives, in order to better understand and explain why they enter, and how they proceed through the criminal system. This article focuses on the reality that women’s relationality, and particularly their relationships with men in their lives, profoundly affect the behavior that lands them in the criminal justice system. This article argues that restorative justice, which is essentially grounded on an ethical understanding of crime and treats the offender as an interacting …

From The Asylum To The Prison: Rethinking The Incarceration Revolution, Bernard Harcourt

Faculty Scholarship

The incarceration revolution of the late twentieth century fueled ongoing research on the relationship between rates of incarceration and crime, unemployment, education, and other social indicators. In this research, the variable intended to capture the level of confinement in society was conceptualized and measured as the rate of incarceration in state and federal prisons and county jails. This, however, fails to take account of other equally important forms of confinement, especially commitment to mental hospitals and asylums.

When the data on mental hospitalization rates are combined with the data on imprisonment rates for the period 1928 through 2000, the incarceration …