Illicit Sex Within The Justice System

This monograph explains the deviance of illicit sexual immorality in the justice system. It includes extensive research of federal, state, and local scandals occurring in Washington DC, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and other locations in the USA, to demonstrate the impacts of decaying morals on contemporary society and constitutional law. It explains that sexually immoral oligarchies may dilute or forfeit their authority and ability to chide and fastidiously control sexual choices and activities. The text brings to light sexual abuse and indiscretions by justice system members and compares their misconduct to American prison culture to prove systemic breakdown, dissipation of authority, and dwindling power to enforce morality laws.

Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice also traces shifting attitudes toward illegitimacy and paternity from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Both the Catholic Church and the Republic of Venice tried to enforce moral discipline and regulate sex and reproduction. Unmarried pregnant women were increasingly stigmatized for engaging in sex. Their claims for damages because of seduction or rape were largely unproven, and the priests and laymen that they were involved with were often acquitted of any wrongdoing. The lack of institutional support for single motherhood and the exculpation of fathers frequently led to abortion, infant abandonment, or even infant death.

Explores encounters between those who make their living by engaging in street-based prostitution and the criminal justice and social service workers who try to curtail it Working together every day, the lives of sex workers, police officers, public defenders, and social service providers are profoundly intertwined, yet their relationships are often adversarial and rooted in fundamentally false assumptions. The criminal justice-social services alliance operates on the general belief that the women they police and otherwise regulate choose sex work as a result of traumatization, rather than acknowledging the fact that socioeconomic realities often inform their choices. Drawing on extraordinarily rich ethnographic research, including interviews with over one hundred street-involved women and dozens of criminal justice and social service professionals, Women of the Street argues that despite the intimate knowledge these groups have about each other, measures designed to help these women consistently fail because they do not take into account false assumptions about street life, homelessness, drug use and sex trading. Reaching beyond disciplinary silos by combining the analysis of an anthropologist and a legal scholar, the book offers an evidence-based argument for the decriminalization of prostitution.

The History and Theory of Legal Practice in China: Toward a Historical-Social Jurisprudence goes beyond the either/or dichotomy of Chinese vs. Western law, tradition vs. modernity, and the substantive-practical vs. the formal. It does so by proceeding not from abstract legal texts but from the realities of legal practice. Whatever the declared intent of a law, it must in actual application adapt to social realities. It is the two dimensions of representation and practice, and law and society, that together make up the entirety of a legal system. The assembled articles by the editors and a new generation of Chinese scholars illustrate a new “historical-social jurisprudence,” and explore the possible conceptual underpinnings of a modern Chinese legal system that would both accommodate and integrate the unavoidable paradoxes of contemporary China.

To what extent do newly available case records bear out our conventional assumptions about the Qing legal system? Is it true, for example, that Qing courts rarely handled civil lawsuits--those concerned with disputes over land, debt, marriage, and inheritance--as official Qing representations led us to believe? Is it true that decent people did not use the courts? And is it true that magistrates generally relied more on moral predilections than on codified law in dealing with cases? Based in large part on records of 628 civil dispute cases from three counties from the 1760’s to the 1900’s, this book reexamines those widely accepted Qing representations in the light of actual practice. The Qing state would have had us believe that civil disputes were so "minor” or "trivial” that they were left largely to local residents themselves to resolve. However, case records show that such disputes actually made up a major part of the caseloads of local courts. The Qing state held that lawsuits were the result of actions of immoral men, but ethnographic information and case records reveal that when community/kin mediation failed, many common peasants resorted to the courts to assert and protect their legitimate claims. The Qing state would have had us believe that local magistrates, when they did deal with civil disputes, did so as mediators rather than judges. Actual records reveal that magistrates almost never engaged in mediation but generally adjudicated according to stipulations in the Qing code.

How to envision a justice system that combines the least possible punishment with the greatest possible healing, from an all-star cast of contributors “An extraordinary and long overdue collection offering myriad ways that we can and must completely overhaul the way we imagine as well as implement ‘justice.’” —Heather Ann Thompson, historian and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water After decades of overpolicing and ever-more punitive criminal justice measures, the time has come for a new approach to violence and community safety. Parsimony and Other Radical Ideas About Justice brings together leading activists, legal practitioners, and researchers, many of them justice-involved, to envision a justice system that applies a less-is-more framework to achieve the goal of public safety. Grounded in a new social contract heralding safety not punishment, community power not state power, the book describes a paradigm shift where justice is provided not by police and prisons, but in healing from harm. A distinguished cast of contributors from the Square One Project at Columbia University’s Justice Lab shows that a parsimonious approach to punishment, alongside a reckoning with racism and affirming human dignity, would fundamentally change how we respond to harm. We would encourage mercy in the face of violence, replace police with community investment, address the trauma lying at the heart of mass incarceration, reduce pre-trial incarceration, close the democracy gap between community residents and government policymakers, and eliminate youth prisons, among other significant changes to justice policy.

Delinquent Daughters explores the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Mary Odem looks at these moral reform movements from a national perspective, but she also undertakes a detailed analysis of court records to explore the local enforcement of regulatory legislation in Alameda and Los Angeles Counties in California. From these legal proceedings emerge overlapping and often contradictory views of middle-class female reformers, court and law enforcement officials, working-class teenage girls, and working-class parents. Odem traces two distinct stages of moral reform. The first began in 1885 with the movement to raise the age of consent in statutory rape laws as a means of protecting young women from predatory men. By the turn of the century, however, reformers had come to view sexually active women not as victims but as delinquents, and they called for special police, juvenile courts, and reformatories to control wayward girls. Rejecting a simple hierarchical model of class control, Odem reveals a complex network of struggles and negotiations among reformers, officials, teenage girls and their families. She also addresses the paradoxical consequences of reform by demonstrating that the protective measures advocated by middle-class women often resulted in coercive and discriminatory policies toward working-class girls.