Feminized Justice

In 1913, Toronto launched Canada's first woman's police court. The court was run by and for women, but was it a great achievement? This multifaceted portrait of the cases, defendants, and officials that graced its halls reveals a fundamental contradiction at the experiment's core: the Toronto Women's Police Court was both a site for feminist adaptations of justice and a court empowered to punish women. Reconstructed from case files and newspaper accounts, this engrossing portrait of the trials and tribulations that accompanied an early experiment in feminized justice sheds new light on maternal feminist politics, women and crime, and the role of resistance, agency, and experience in the criminal justice system.

Criminal Justice Theory, Second Edition is the first and only text, edited by U.S. criminal justice educators, on the theoretical foundations of criminal justice, not criminological theory. This new edition includes entirely new chapters as well as revisions to all others, with an eye to accessibility and coherence for upper division undergraduate and beginning graduate students in the field.

Using Sherry Ortner’s analogy of Female/Nature, Male/Culture, this volume interrogates the gendered aspects of governance by exploring the NGO/State relationship. By examining how NGOs/States perform gendered roles and actions and the gendered divisions of labor involved in different types of institutional engagement, this volume attends to the ways in which gender and governance constitute flexible, relational, and contingent systems of power. The chapters in this volume present diverse analyses of the ways in which projects of governance both reproduce and challenge binaries.

Scholars often accept without question that the Indian Act (1876) criminalized First Nations. In this illuminating book, Shelley Gavigan argues that the notion of criminalization captures neither the complexities of Aboriginal participation in the criminal courts nor the significance of the Indian Act as a form of law. Gavigan draws on court files, police and penitentiary records, and newspaper accounts and insights from critical criminology to interrogate state formation and criminal law in the Saskatchewan region of the North-West Territories between 1870 and 1905. By focusing on Aboriginal people’s participation in the courts rather than on narrow categories such as “the state” and “the accused,” Gavigan allows Aboriginal defendants, witnesses, and informants to emerge in vivid detail and tell the story in their own terms. Their experiences stand as evidence that the criminal law and the Indian Act operated in complex and contradictory ways that included both the mediation and the enforcement of relations of inequality.

Interwar Halifax was a city in flux, a place where citizens debated adopting new ideas and technologies but agreed on one thing -- modernity was corrupting public morality and unleashing untold social problems on their fair city. To create a bulwark against further social dislocation, citizens, policy makers, and officials modernized the city’s machinery of order -- courts, prisons, and the police force -- and placed greater emphasis on crime control. These tough-on-crime measures, Boudreau argues, did not resolve problems but rather singled out ethnic minorities, working-class men, and female and juvenile offenders as problem figures in the eternal quest for order.

Written by three nationally recognized experts in the field, Criminal Courts: A Contemporary Perspective explores all the fundamental topics (court structure, courtroom actors, and the trial and appeals process) as well as other ground-breaking topics, such as specialty courts and comparative court systems. This bestseller provides you with a foundation for understanding key concepts by reviewing the judicial function, the role and purpose of law, sources of law, the various types of law, and the American court system’s structure and operations. You will build on this foundation by learning about participants in the system and the pretrial, trial, and post-trial processes. Packed with contemporary examples and new pedagogical tools, the Fourth Edition has been thoroughly revised with the most up-to-date content and resources to give you a more comprehensive understanding of the criminal courts system.

The appropriate amount of punishment for a given crime is an issue that has been debated by scholars, philosophers and legal professionals since the beginning of civilizations. This book seeks to address this issue in all of its complexity by providing a comprehensive overview of the sentencing process in the United States. The book begins by discussing the overall concept of punishment and then proceeds to dissect individual aspects of punishment. Topics include: the sentencing process; responsibility of the judge; disparity and discrimination in sentencing; and sentencing reform. This book is an ideal text for introductory courses on the judicial system, criminal law, law and society. It can be an essential resource to help students understand patterns in the wide discretion and latitude given to judges when determining punishments within the framework of the United States judicial system.

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies like Rambo and Twister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Man provocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.