Justice As Prevention

Countries emerging from armed conflict or authoritarian rule face difficult questions about what to do with public employees who perpetrated past human rights abuses and the institutional structures that allowed such abuses to happen. Justice as Prevention: Vetting Public Employees in Transitional Societies examines the transitional reform known as "vetting"-the process by which abusive or corrupt employees are excluded from public office. More than a means of punishing individuals, vetting represents an important transitional justice measure aimed at reforming institutions and preventing the recurrence of abuses. The book is the culmination of a multiyear project headed by the International Center for Transitional Justice that included human rights lawyers, experts on police and judicial reform, and scholars of transitional justice and reconciliation. It features case studies of Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Czech Republic, El Salvador, the former German Democratic Republic, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and South Africa, as well as chapters on due process, information management, and intersections between other institutional reforms.

Beyond Violence: A Prevention Program for Women is a forty-hour, evidence-based, gender-responsive, trauma-informed treatment program specifically developed for women who have committed a violent crime and are incarcerated. This program offers counselors, mental health professionals, and program administrators the tools they need to implement a gender-responsive, trauma-informed treatment program within the criminal justice system. This Participant Workbook helps participants understand the relationships between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; learn new skills, including communication, conflict resolution, decision making, and calming soothing techniques; and become part of a group of women working to create a less violent world.

Like medicine, law is replete with axioms of prevention. ‘Prevention is better than cure’ has a long pedigree in both fields. 17th century jurist Sir Edward Coke observed that ‘preventing justice excelleth punishing justice’. A century later, Sir William Blackstone similarly stated that ‘preventive justice is ...preferable in all respects to punishing justice’. This book evaluates the feasibility and legitimacy of state attempts to regulate prevention. Though prevention may be desirable as a matter of policy, questions are inevitably raised as to its limits and legitimacy, specifically, how society reconciles the desirability of averting risks of future harm with respect for the rule of law, procedural fairness and human rights. While these are not new questions for legal scholars, they have been brought into sharper relief in policy and academic circles in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Over the past 15 years, a body of legal scholarship has tracked the intensified preventive focus of anti-terrorism law and policy, observing how this focus has impacted negatively upon traditional legal frameworks. However, preventive law and policy in other contexts, such as environmental protection, mental health, immigration and corruption has not received sustained focus. This book extends that body of scholarship, through use of case studies from these diverse regulatory settings, in order to examine and critique the principles, policies and paradoxes of preventive justice. "Whereas earlier scholars looked upon preventive justice as a source and means of regulation, the powerfully argued contributions to this volume provide forceful reasons to consider whether we would do better talk about regulating preventive justice." Professor Lucia Zedner, Oxford University

This book analyzes human rights and crime prevention challenges from the perspective of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda, in particular its goal 16 on promoting peaceful, inclusive and just societies, the creation and development of which depend on the interplay between various secular and non-secular (f)actors. The book reflects on the implementation of these two legal instruments from a “back to the future” standpoint, that is, drawing on the wisdom of contributors to the 2030 Agenda from the past and present in order to offer a constructive inter-disciplinary and intergenerational approach. The book’s intended readership includes academics and educationists, criminal justice practitioners and experts, diplomats, spiritual leaders and non-governmental actors; its goal is to encourage them to pursue a socially and human rights oriented drive for “larger freedom,” which is currently jeopardized by adverse political currents.

This book arises from a three-year study of Preventive Justice directed by Professor Andrew Ashworth and Professor Lucia Zedner at the University of Oxford. The study seeks to develop an account of the principles and values that should guide and limit the state's use of preventive techniques that involve coercion against the individual. States today are increasingly using criminal law or criminal law-like tools to try to prevent or reduce the risk of anticipated future harm. Such measures include criminalizing conduct at an early stage in order to allow authorities to intervene; incapacitating suspected future wrongdoers; and imposing extended sentences or indefinate on past wrongdoers on the basis of their predicted future conduct - all in the name of public protection and security. The chief justification for the state's use of coercion is protecting the public from harm. Although the rationales and justifications of state punishment have been explored extensively, the scope, limits and principles of preventive justice have attracted little doctrinal or conceptual analysis. This book re-assesses the foundations for the range of coercive measures that states now take in the name of prevention and public protection, focussing particularly on coercive measures involving deprivation of liberty. It examines whether these measures are justified, whether they distort the proper boundaries between criminal and civil law, or whether they signal a larger change in the architecture of security. In so doing, it sets out to establish a framework for what we call 'Preventive Justice'.

In this book, Slobogin and Fondacaro present their vision for a new juvenile justice system, founded on the evidence at hand and promoting the principles of rehabilitation and reintegration into society. The authors develop their juvenile justice policy proposals effectively by carefully addressing the problems with past policy approches and recent theoretical contributions.

This third book in the Prevention Practice Kit introduces the topics of social justice and cultural relevance in prevention practice - an increasingly important trend in the 21st century. Covering a wide range of research in this field, the authors skillfully help the readers understand, design, and implement social justice-driven, culturally relevant prevention efforts.

Traditional "schools" of crime prevention, like the criminal justice model, social crime prevention or situational crime prevention, have proved to be too narrow and do not combine well with other approaches. However, each of these models provides important insights and contributions for reducing crime. By extracting the main preventive mechanisms of these diverse approaches, this book develops a more holistic, general model that consists of nine preventive mechanisms: building normative barriers to crime, reducing recruitment, deterrence, disruption, incapacitation, protecting vulnerable targets, reducing benefits of crime, reducing harm, and facilitating desistance. The measures to activate the preventive mechanisms may differ according to the type of crime, as may the actors in charge of implementing the relevant measures. However, Tore Bjørgo demonstrates how his model of crime prevention can be effectively applied to diverse forms of crime, from domestic burglaries to criminal youth gangs and driving under the influence to organized crime and terrorism. In doing so, this important book will be of interest to scholars and students of policing, security studies and criminology, as well as practitioners and policy-makers.