Criminalization

Ableism is embedded in Canadian criminal justice institutions, policies, and practices, making incarceration and institutionalization dangerous – even deadly – for disabled people. Disability Injustice examines disability in contexts that include policing and surveillance, sentencing and the courts, prisons and alternatives to confinement. The contributors confront challenging topics such as the pathologizing of difference as deviance; eugenics and crime control; criminalization based on biased physical and mental health approaches; and the role of disability justice activism in contesting discrimination. This provocative collection highlights how, with deeper understanding of disability, we can challenge the practices of crime control and the processes of criminalization.

In the late nineteenth century, progressive reformers recoiled at the prospect of the justice system punishing children as adults. Advocating that children's inherent innocence warranted fundamentally different treatment, reformers founded the nation's first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899. Yet amid an influx of new African American arrivals to the city during the Great Migration, notions of inherent childhood innocence and juvenile justice were circumscribed by race. In documenting how blackness became a marker of criminality that overrode the potential protections the status of "child" could have bestowed, Tera Eva Agyepong shows the entanglements between race and the state's transition to a more punitive form of juvenile justice. In this important study, Agyepong expands the narrative of racialized criminalization in America, revealing that these patterns became embedded in a justice system originally intended to protect children. In doing so, she also complicates our understanding of the nature of migration and what it meant to be black and living in Chicago in the early twentieth century.

With over 240 million migrants in the world, including over 65 million forced migrants and refugees, states have turned to draconian measures to stem the flow of irregular migration, including the criminalization of migration itself. Canada, perceived as a nation of immigrants and touted as one of the most generous countries in the world today for its reception of refugees, has not been immune from these practices. This book examines "crimmigration" – the criminalization of migration – from national and comparative perspectives, drawing attention to the increasing use of criminal law measures, public policies, and practices that stigmatize or diminish the rights of forced migrants and refugees within a dominant public discourse that not only stereotypes and criminalizes but marginalizes forced migrants. Leading researchers, legal scholars, and practitioners provide in-depth analyses of theoretical concerns, legal and public policy dimensions, historic migration crises, and the current dynamics and future prospects of crimmigration. The editors situate each chapter within the existing migration literature and outline a way forward for the decriminalization of migration through the vigorous promotion and advancement of human rights. Building on recent legal, policy, academic, and advocacy initiatives, The Criminalization of Migration maps how the predominant trend toward the criminalization of migration in Canada and abroad can be reversed for the benefit of all, especially those forced to migrate for the protection of their inherent human rights and dignity.

The book defines and critically discusses the following five principles: the harm principle, legal paternalism, the offense principle, legal moralism and the dignity principle of criminalization. The book argues that all five principles raise important problems that point to rejections (or at least a rethink) of standard principles of criminalization. The book shows that one of the reasons why we should reject or revise standard principles of criminalization is that even the most plausible versions of the harm principle and legal paternalism that have been offered so far are rendered redundant by general moral theories. Furthermore, it demonstrates that the other three principles (or versions thereof), the offense principle, legal moralism and the dignity principle of criminalization, can either be covered by the harm principle, thus making these principles also redundant, or be seen to have what look like other unacceptable implications (e.g. that versions of legal moralism are based on speculative and incorrect empirical assumptions or violate what is called the criminological levelling-down challenge). As such, there is reason to move beyond traditional principles of criminalization, and instead to investigate alternative principles the state should be guided by when attempting to justify which kinds of conduct should be criminalized. Moreover, this book presents and defends such a principle – the utilitarian principle of criminalization.

Drawing on the stories of forty-two incarcerated women, Coming Back to Jail broadens the focus to examine the role of trauma in the women's lives.

This book draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality as a lens to analyze and critique how crime is understood, reproduced, and challenged.

This volume examines the political morality of the criminal law, exploring general principles and theories of criminalisation. Chapters provide accounts of the criminal law in the light of ambitious theories about moral and political philosophy - republicanism and contractarianism, or reflect upon on the success of important theories of criminalisation by viewing them in a novel light.

The criminalization and penalization of poverty through increased surveillance and control of welfare recipients in recent years has led many poverty advocates to claim that "a war against the poor" is currently in progress. The authors argue that poor people in general and people of colour in particular are most often the casualties in governments' desire to roll back the welfare state. Relying on myths and stereotypes about racial difference, the enforcement and policing of welfare fraud policies constructs people of colour and the poor as potential "cheaters" and "abusers" of the system. This has allowed for the stigmatizing and discriminatory treatment of these people to persist unchallenged within the welfare system. Book jacket.