By James Q. Whitman
ISBN-10: 0195155254
ISBN-13: 9780195155259
ISBN-10: 019518260X
ISBN-13: 9780195182606
ISBN-10: 0198035314
ISBN-13: 9780198035312
Legal punishment in the US is harsh and degrading--more so than at any place else within the liberal west. Executions and lengthy criminal phrases are ordinary in the USA. nations like France and Germany, in contrast, are systematically gentle. eu offenders are hardly despatched to felony, and once they are, they serve some distance shorter phrases than their American opposite numbers. Why is the US so relatively harsh? during this novel paintings of comparative criminal historical past, James Whitman argues that the reply lies in America's positive include of a non-hierarchical social method and mistrust of nation energy that have contributed to a legislations of punishment that's extra prepared to degrade offenders.
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Example text
As I suggested in the introduction, degradation is what its etymology says it is: it is treatment of others that make them feel inferior, lessened, lowered. Such treatment may include violence; but of course, it frequently does not. The notion that punishment often degrades offenders in this sense is entirely familiar. We all know that some quality of inferiority clings to punishment. ' . . When you are subjected to physical punishment, you feel that you must submit to the power of your punisher.
We all know that some quality of inferiority clings to punishment. ' . . When you are subjected to physical punishment, you feel that you must submit to the power of your punisher. "5 And indeed, the forms of punishment often include dramatically degrading elements, such as the prone posture and bared buttocks of a person who is spanked or caned. Daily life and history are full of examples of degrading language and degrading practices in punishment. 7 This is all the familiar stuff of everyday experience.
50 Lenski offered this concept partly as a way of accounting for events like the French Revolution. 51 Lenski's idea depended on some outdated Marxian concepts of revolution, but it had its brilliance nevertheless: a mismatch between resources and status can indeed cause resentment, and perhaps revolutionary resentment. Mismatches between status and punishment can be, in much the same way, a sign that a society is in the grip of dramatic change: humans tend to think there ought to be a proper correspondence between status, wealth, and respectful treatment.