Enforcing social norms: The morality of public shaming

Public shaming plays an important role in upholding valuable social norms. But, under what conditions, if any, is it morally justifiable? Our aim in this paper is systemically to investigate the morality of public shaming, so as to provide an answer to this neglected question. We develop an overarching framework for assessing the justifiability of this practice, which shows that, while shaming can sometimes be morally justifiable, it very often is not. In turn, our framework highlights several reasons to be concerned about the increasingly widespread phenomenon of online public shaming

The Ethics of Police Body-Worn Cameras

Over the past decade, police departments in many countries have experimented with and increasingly adopted the use of police body-worn cameras. This article aims to examine the moral issues raised by the use of PBWCs, and to provide an overall assessment of the conditions under which the use of PBWCs is morally permissible. It first reviews the current evidence for the effects of using PBWCs. On the basis of this review the article sets out a teleological argument for the use of PBWCs. The final two sections of the article review two deontological objections to the use of PBWCs: the idea that use of PBWCs is based on or expresses disrespectful mistrust, and the idea that the use of PBWCs violates a right to privacy. The article argues that neither of these objections is persuasive, and concludes that we should conditionally accept and support the use of PBWCs

What Caused the Crime Decline?

Crime across the United States has steadily declined over the last two decades. Today, the crime rate is about half of what it was at its height in 1991. What was once seen as a plague, especially in urban areas, is now at least manageable in most places. Rarely has there been such a rapid change in mass behavior. This observation begs two central questions: Why has crime fallen? And to what degree is incarceration, or other criminal justice policy, responsible? Social scientists and policy experts have searched for answers. Various explanations have been offered: expanded police forces, an aging population, employment rates, and even legalized abortion. Most likely, there is no one cause for such widespread, dramatic change. Many factors are responsible.This report isolates two criminal justice policies -- incarceration and one policing approach -- and provides new findings on their effects on crime reduction using a regression analysis. This report issues three central findings, which are summarized: Increased incarceration at today's levels has a negligible crime control benefit:One policing approach that helps police gather data used to identify crime patterns and target resources, a technique called CompStat, played a role in bringing down crime in cities:Certain social, economic, and environmental factors also played a role in the crime drop

Security: Collective good or commodity?

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 Sage.The state monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in Europe and North America has been central to the development of security as a collective good. Not only has it institutionalized the state as the prime national and international security provider, it has helped to reduce the threat from other actors by either prohibiting or limiting their use of violence. The recent growth of the private security industry appears to undermine this view. Not only are private security firms proliferating at the national level; private military companies are also taking over an increasing range of military functions in both national defence and international interventions. This article seeks to provide an examination of the theoretical and practical implications of the shift from states to markets in the provision of security. Specifically, it discusses how the conceptualization of security as a commodity rather than a collective good affects the meaning and implementation of security in Western democracies.ESR

The Rise of Bank Prosecutions

Before 2008, prosecutions of banks had been quite rare in the federal courts, and the criminal liability of banks and bankers was not a topic that received much public or scholarly attention. In the wake of the last financial crisis, however, critics have begun to ask whether prosecutors adequately held banks and bankers accountable for their crimes. In this Essay, I describe the remarkable rise in the number of bank prosecutions in recent years, as well as the still steeper rise in criminal penalties imposed on banks. 2015 was the year that bank prosecutions finally came into their own, both in the record-breaking size of the fines and in the numbers of cases resolved. While the DOJ can claim marked achievements in recent years, which I detail here, I nevertheless caution against treating these data as fully answering critics’ concerns. Despite the apparent rise of bank prosecutions, important “too big to jail” concerns remain: prosecution deals are inadequate both as punishments and as rehabilitative efforts designed to promote compliance. Upon closer examination, the recent string of bank prosecutions, while noteworthy, fails to address persistent concerns that deterrent fines are not routinely imposed, that compliance terms designed to rehabilitate firms are not used effectively, and that individuals remain largely un-prosecuted