Rights And Wrongs: Rethinking The Foundations Of Criminal Justice (Critical Criminological Perspectives)

This book seeks to explain why the concept of justice is critical to the study of criminal justice. Heffernan makes such a case by treating state-sponsored punishment as the defining feature of criminal justice. In particular, this work accounts for the state’s role as a surrogate for victims of wrongdoing, and so makes it possible to integrate victimology scholarship into its justice-based framework. In arguing that punishment may be imposed only for wrongdoing, the book proposes a criterion for repudiating the legal paternalism that informs drug-possession laws. Rethinking the Foundations of Criminal Justice outlines steps for taming the state’s power to punish offenders; in particular, it draws on restorative justice research to outline possibilities for a penology that emphasizes offenders’ humanity. Through its examination of equality issues, the book integrates recent work on the social justice/criminal justice connection into the scholarly literature on punishment, and so will particularly appeal to those interested in criminal justice theory.

• | Author: William C. Heffernan
• | Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• | Publication Date: Apr 26, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 161 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 3030127818
• | ISBN-13: 9783030127817