Community Courts are designed to handle a city’s low-level offenses and quality-of-life crimes, such as littering, loitering, or public drunkenness. Court advocates maintain that these largely victimless crimes jeopardize the well-being of residents, businesses, and visitors. Whereas traditional courts might dismiss such cases or administer a small fine, community courts aim to meaningfully punish offenders to avoid disorder escalating to apocalyptic decline. Courting the Community is a fascinating ethnography that goes behind the scenes to explore how quality-of-life discourses are translated into court practices that marry therapeutic and rehabilitative ideas. Christine Zozula shows how residents and businesses participate in meting out justice—such as through community service, treatment, or other sanctions—making it more emotional, less detached, and more legitimate in the eyes of stakeholders. She also examines both “impact panels,” in which offenders, residents, and business owners meet to discuss how quality-of-life crimes negatively impact the neighborhood, as well as strategic neighborhood outreach efforts to update residents on cases and gauge their concerns. Zozula’s nuanced investigation of community courts can lead us to a deeper understanding of punishment and rehabilitation and, by extension, the current state of the American court system.

Reflecting the overcrowding in Britain's prisons and the increase in non-custodial sentences, this text provides an account of the range of non-custodial sentences available.

Punishment in the Community: The Future of Criminal Justice challenges the widely held assumption that punishment through imprisonment is central to the criminal justice system. Contemporary political debate assumes that penality is synonymous with prison. However, in reality, the vast majority of people admitting to, or convicted of criminal offences are dealt with using non-custodial penal measures.

The project of interpreting contemporary forms of punishment means exploring the social, political, economic, and historical conditions in the society in which those forms arise. The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society draws together this disparate and expansive field of punishment and society into one compelling new volume. Headed by two of the leading scholars in the field, Jonathan Simon and Richard Sparks have crafted a comprehensive and definitive resource that illuminates some of the key themes in this complex area - from historical and prospective issues to penal trends and related contributions through theory, literature and philosophy. Incorporating a stellar and international line-up of contributors the book addresses issues such as: capital punishment, the civilising process, gender, diversity, inequality, power, human rights and neoliberalism. This engaging, vibrantly written collection will be captivating reading for academics and researchers in criminology, penology, criminal justice, sociology, cultural studies, philosophy and politics.

In Community Punishment: European perspectives, the authors place punishment in the community under the spotlight by exploring the origins, evolution and adaptations of supervision in 11 European jurisdictions. For most people, punishment in the criminal justice system is synonymous with imprisonment. Yet, both in Europe and in the USA, the numbers of people under some form of penal supervision in the community far exceeds the numbers in prison, and many prisoners are released under supervision. Written and edited by leading scholars in the field, this collection advances the sociology of punishment by illuminating the neglected but crucial phenomenon of ‘mass supervision’. As well as putting criminological and penological theories to the test in an examination of their ability to explain the evolution of punishment beyond the prison, and across diverse states, the contributors to this volume also assess the appropriateness of the term ‘community punishment’ in different parts of Europe. Engaging in a serious exploration of common themes and differences in the jurisdictions included in the collection, the authors go on to examine how ‘community punishment’ came into being in their jurisdiction and how its institutional forms and practices have been legitimated and re-legitimated in response to shifting social, cultural and political contexts. This book is essential reading for academics and students involved in the study of both community punishment and comparative penology, but will also be of great interest to criminal justice policymakers, managers and practitioners.

In this path-breaking book, David Garland argues that punishment is a complex social institution that affects both social relations and cultural meanings. Drawing on theorists from Durkheim to Foucault, he insightfully critiques the entire spectrum of social thought concerning punishment, and reworks it into a new interpretive synthesis. "Punishment and Modern Society is an outstanding delineation of the sociology of punishment. At last the process that is surely the heart and soul of criminology, and perhaps of sociology as well—punishment—has been rescued from the fringes of these 'disciplines'. . . . This book is a first-class piece of scholarship."—Graeme Newman, Contemporary Sociology "Garland's treatment of the theorists he draws upon is erudite, faithful and constructive. . . . Punishment and Modern Society is a magnificent example of working social theory."—John R. Sutton, American Journal of Sociology "Punishment and Modern Society lifts contemporary penal issues from the mundane and narrow contours within which they are so often discussed and relocates them at the forefront of public policy. . . . This book will become a landmark study."—Andrew Rutherford, Legal Studies "This is a superbly intelligent study. Its comprehensive coverage makes it a genuine review of the field. Its scholarship and incisiveness of judgment will make it a constant reference work for the initiated, and its concluding theoretical synthesis will make it a challenge and inspiration for those undertaking research and writing on the subject. As a state-of-the-art account it is unlikely to be bettered for many a year."—Rod Morgan, British Journal of Criminology Winner of both the Outstanding Scholarship Award of the Crime and Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association's Crime, Law, and Deviance Section

This book challenges the centrality of the prison in our understanding of punishment, inviting us to see, hear, imagine, analyse and restrain 'mass supervision'. Though rooted in social theory and social research, its innovative approach complements more conventional academic writing with photography, song-writing and storytelling.