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Full-Text Articles in Law
Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual: Making Cultural Sense Of Harsh Punishment, Spearit
Legal Punishment As Civil Ritual: Making Cultural Sense Of Harsh Punishment, Spearit
Articles
This work examines mass incarceration through a ritual studies perspective, paying explicit attention to the religious underpinnings. Conventional analyses of criminal punishment focus on the purpose of punishment in relation to legal or moral norms, or attempt to provide a general theory of punishment. The goals of this work are different, and instead try to understand the cultural aspects of punishment that have helped make the United States a global leader in imprisonment and execution. It links the boom in incarceration to social ruptures of the 1950s and 1960s and posits the United States’ world leader status as having more …
A Snitch In Time: An Historical Sketch Of Black Informing During Slavery, Andrea L. Dennis
A Snitch In Time: An Historical Sketch Of Black Informing During Slavery, Andrea L. Dennis
Scholarly Works
This article sketches the socio-legal creation, use, and regulation of informants in the Black community during slavery and the Black community’s response at that time. Despite potentially creating benefits such as crime control and sentence reduction, some Blacks today are convinced that cooperation with government investigations and prosecutions should be avoided. One factor contributing to this perspective is America’s reliance on Black informants to police and socially control Blacks during slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Wars on Drugs, Crime and Gangs. Notwithstanding this historical justification for non-cooperation, only a few informant law and policy scholars have examined closely …