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Overview
This title examines the role of political culture and penal populism in the response to the emotive subject of child-on-child homicide. Green explores the reasons underlying the vastly differing responses of the English and Norwegian criminal justice systems to the cases of James Bulger and Silje Redergard respectively. Whereas James Bulger's killers were subject to extreme press and public hostility, and held in secure detention for nine months before being tried in an adversarial court, and served eight years in custody, a Redergard's killers were shielded from public antagonism and carefully reintegrated into the local community. This book argues that English adversarial political culture creates far more incentives to politicize high-profile crimes than Norwegian consensus political culture. Drawing on a wealth of empirical research, Green suggests that the tendency for politicians to justify punitive responses to crime by invoking harsh political attitudes is based upon a flawed understanding of public opinion. In a compelling study, Green proposes a more deliberative response to crime is possible by making English culture less adversarial and by making informed public judgment more assessable.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780191629761 |
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Publisher: | OUP Oxford |
Publication date: | 01/20/2012 |
Series: | Clarendon Studies in Criminology |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Dr David A. Green is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He completed an MPhil in Criminology at the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 2001 and was then awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue a PhD. Afterwards he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford and Research Associate at the University of Oxford Centre for Criminology.
Table of Contents
List of Tables xxi
List of Figures xxii
When Children Kill Children 1
Introduction 1
The James Bulger case 1
The Silje Redergard case 7
Explaining Difference 9
The argument 11
English crime and politics 16
The Norwegian contrast 18
Addressing Penal Populism 19
Three Caveats 21
Plan of the Book 23
Culture, Politics, and the Media in Norway and England 29
Cultural and Historical Backdrop 30
Child education and well-being 31
Social solidarity and the welfare state 33
Political Economy and Economic Conditions 35
Political Cultures 37
Consensus versus majoritarian democracy 37
Trust and civil society 40
Media Markets and Cultures 43
Press markets 43
Ownership 48
Accountability 50
Conclusion 51
Crime and Punishment in Norway and England 53
Legal Systems 53
Crime 54
Recordedcrime 54
Victimization 57
Punishment 58
Imprisonment rates 59
Prison regimes and conditions 60
Penalties and sentences 63
Sentence lengths 65
Youth Justice 67
The Nordic diversionary consensus 67
Young people in custody 69
Public Attitudes toward Crime and Punishment 72
Public punitiveness 72
Fear of crime 76
Conclusion 76
The Constraints and Effects of Political Culture 77
A Conceptual Model 77
Structure and Culture 80
Sentencing guidelines 81
The US Constitution 82
'Morphogenesis' 82
The Constraints of Political Culture 83
Constraining choice 86
The making of culture 88
High-Profile Cases and the 'Crisis-Reform Thesis' 90
Conclusion 94
The Constraints of Discourse 95
Discourse and 'Knowledge Utilization' 97
Analysing Discourse 99
Knowledge and power 102
The constraints of 'interpretive repertoires' 105
Discourse and sensibilities 107
Six Reasons to Study Discourse 107
Conclusion 113
Media Constraints and the Formation of Political Opinions 117
The Evolution of Political Communication Research 118
Agenda-setting 119
Impersonal influence 120
Claims-Making and the Dangers of Discourse Homogeneity 121
Media Frames and Discursive Constraints 128
Loaded questions 130
Simple justice 131
Unintended consequences 133
The Formation of Political Opinions 135
Conclusion 137
Contextualizing Tragedy 141
The Methodology 142
Theoretical underpinnings 143
Research protocols 145
Overview of the coverage 147
Comparing Prominence 149
Comparing Claims-Makers 152
Comparing the Legitimacy of Elite Experts 155
Attitudes to therapy 159
The status of the 'ologists' 161
Child-on-Child Killings in Perspective 164
Legitimating Claims and the Silent Opposition 167
Comparing Frames, Themes, and Angles 169
Marking off the discursive terrain 169
Begotten, not made: evil and innocence 173
Comparing Rhetorical Strategies: Rhetoric and Resonance 180
The Suitability of Vehicles 184
Conclusion 187
English Penal Policy Climates and Political Culture 189
The Post-Bulger Case Penal Climate 190
The merging of discourses 190
The pressure to get tough fast 193
Crises of solidarity 198
The Evolution of English Penal Policy and Political Culture 200
Insulated elite dominance 201
Practitioner influence 202
Managerialism 203
Populism and the public voice 204
The Press, the Public, and Political Culture 207
New Labour and the 'red top' press 207
The rise of the public voice 210
New Labour, Old Testament? 214
Conclusion 218
Political Culture, Legitimacy, and Penal Populism 221
Policy Deliberation and Stability 222
By-Products of Political Culture 225
Appetites for punishment 226
Trust 227
Susceptibility to Penal Populism 229
Delegates and trustees 233
Zero-sum and variable-sum assumptions 235
Inclusion and exclusion 236
Conclusion 237
Public Opinion versus Public Judgment 241
Innovations in Public Opinion Assessment 244
Effects of Mediated Proxies for Public Opinion 247
'Evolving standards' and American capital punishment 248
Public opinion and the James Bulger and Sarah Payne cases in Britain 253
So where are we? 257
Coming to Public Judgment 258
Frameworks 260
'Bees in bonnets' 263
Auld, Halliday, and the Prospects of Public Education 265
Conclusion 268
Effecting Penal Climate Change 271
Penal Populism and Political Culture 271
The Case against Re-Insulation 275
'Communicative capacity' and state legitimacy 275
No participation without public judgment 277
Public Engagement 278
Public Journalism 281
Deliberative Forums 284
Six Ways of Institutionalizing Deliberation 286
Conclusion 291
References 293
Index 321
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