The question "What can justify criminal punishment ?" becomes especially insistent at times, like our own, of penal crisis, when serious doubts are raised not only about the justice or efficacy of particular modes of punishment, but about the very legitimacy of the whole penal system. Recent theorizing about punishment offers a variety of answers to that question-answers that try to make plausible sense of the idea that punishment is justified as being deserved for past crimes; answers that try to identify some beneficial consequences in terms of which punishment might be justified; as well as abolitionist answers telling us that we should seek to abolish, rather than to justify, criminal punishment. This book begins with a critical survey of recent trends in penal theory, but goes on to develop an original account (based on Duff's earlier Trials and Punishments) of criminal punishment as a mode of moral communication, aimed at inducing repentance, reform, and reconciliation through reparation-an account that undercuts the traditional controversies between consequentialist and retributivist penal theories, and that shows how abolitionist concerns can properly be met by a system of communicative punishments. In developing this account, Duff articulates the "liberal communitarian" conception of political society (and of the role of the criminal law) on which it depends; he discusses the meaning and role of different modes of punishment, showing how they can constitute appropriate modes of moral communication between political community and its citizens; and he identifies the essential preconditions for the justice of punishment as thus conceived-preconditions whose non-satisfaction makes our own system of criminal punishment morally problematic. Punishment, Communication, and Community offers no easy answers, but provides a rich and ambitious ideal of what criminal punishment could be-an ideal of what criminal punishment cold be-and ideal that challenges existing penal theories as well as our existing penal theories as well as our existing penal practices.

In this book, Erik Luna and Marianne Wade examine the considerable powers of the American prosecutor and look abroad in order to learn valuable lessons from a transnational examination of prosecutorial authority. They explore parallels and distinctions in the processes available to and decisions made by prosecutors in the United States and Europe. Through the varied topics covered by the contributors on both sides of the Atlantic, they demonstrate how the enhanced role of the prosecutor represents a crossroads for criminal justice with weighty legal and socio-economic consequences.

Techniques, technologies, and applications - the arts and sciences of interrogating criminal suspects, their victims, and the witnesses to their crimes. Sounds exciting, don’t it? ad–ver–saŕ–ial!“Oooooh,†kindâ€a gets you all tingly. Wow! And doesn’t it just set you to thinking about gladiators locked in the deadly dance of hand-to-hand combat? Secrets takes you through the entire process of interrogation from start to finish; BUT, if you were expecting â€waterboarding†and other inefficient methods of torture – FORGET IT! The Adversarial Interview not only works but it’s legal!

Further Reading; Notes; Chapter 9 Transitional Justice: New Democracies Grapple with Their Past; Coming to Terms with the Past: Justice vs. National Reconciliation; The Problem of Punishment; Corrective Justice for Victims of Human Rights Abuses; Summary; Further Reading; Notes; Chapter 10 The Right to be Let Alone: Determining the Scope of Personal Freedom; The Harm Principle; Paternalism; Harm to Third Parties; Moral Relativism and the Diversity of Human Practices; The Possibility of an Offense Principle; Summary; Further Reading; Notes; Part 3 Doing Justice Within the Law.