Michael Tonry
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 245523 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Michael Tonry |
| PRENOMES | Michael |
| SOBRENOME | Tonry |
| ASSINATURA | TONRY M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Minnesota |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 109 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 504 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 101 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 12 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1984 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
W. E. B. Du Bois and Black People's Blocked March Toward Equality
W. E. B. Du Bois, a man of extraordinary gifts, in 1897–1898 completed a survey of the lives of 9675 Black Philadelphians. Black inequality and crime were, he observed, products of interactions among legacies of historic racism, contemporaneous discrimination, and conditions of deep structural disadvantage. Criminologists have long documented the criminogenic effects of structural disadvantage, concluding that they are race-neutral, affecting peo…
Comparative Studies of Sentencing
“Penal populism” and steeply rising crime rates do not make sentencing laws, policies, and practices markedly harsher and imprisonment rates rise inexorably; that happened only in the United States. Sentencing policy and practice in most European and Common Law countries and Japan have remained largely insulated from partisan politics. Imprisonment rates have been broadly stable in most Western countries and Japan for five decades. Imprisonment r…
How and Why Western Europe Avoided Mass Incarceration
Why Mass Incarceration Is Uniquely American
Mass incarceration, among Western countries a uniquely American phenomenon, resulted from a transformation of American criminal justice systems. Indeterminate sentencing systems in which legislatures established maximum sentences, prosecutors processed cases, judges decided who went to prison, and parole boards decided how long people stayed there were replaced by determinate systems in which legislatures prescribed minimum sentences, prosecutors…
Why Americans Are a People of Exceptional Violence
Among Western countries, the United States is an exceptionally violent place. Serious intentional violence—homicides, other violent gun crimes, mass killings, and police killings of civilians—is dramatically more common. Many American laws—regarding self-defense retreat doctrines, stand-your-ground laws, permissive or minimal regulation of access to handguns and semiautomatic weapons, corporal punishment of children—are much more tolerant of beha…
Delegated Vigilantism and Less-than-Lethal Lynching in Twenty-First-Century America
Whites have been afraid of Black people since “20 or so” were “purchased” in Jamestown, the first permanent British colony, in 1619. Southern Whites’ fears of racial insurrections and wars pervaded American politics through the Civil War. For nearly a century afterward, southern and many other Whites feared economic and social competition from Black people and believed they were inferior human beings. Since the 1960s, most Whites have ceased beli…
Foreword, Comparative Policing Review
Punishments, Politics, and Prisons in Western Countries
Imprisonment rates and patterns and the professionalism and decency of prison operations vary widely between countries and, within the United States, between states. The explanations for differences are deeply embedded in national or local histories and political cultures; substantial changes are hard to achieve. Day-to-day life even in the “best” prisons is usually drab, monotonous, and unpleasant; in the worst it is squalid, unhealthy, and some…
Has the Prison a Future
Fatalism and Indifference
American criminal laws and criminal justice systems are harsher, more punitive, more afflicted by racial disparities and injustices, more indifferent to suffering, and less respectful of human dignity than those of other Western countries. The explanations usually offered—rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s, public anger and anxiety, crime control politics, neoliberal economic and social policies—are fundamentally incomplete. The deeper exp…
Doing Justice in Sentencing
The five propositions that encapsulate what I would want to happen if people I love were caught up in the criminal system can be, and usually are, presented more abstractly. In that language, here are the concepts and principles that characterize just punishment systems
In Memoriam Joan R. Petersilia (1951–2019)
This review synthesizes the historical literature on the criminalization and incarceration of black Americans for an interdisciplinary audience. Drawing on key insights from new histories in the field of American carceral studies, we trace the ...Read More
Doing Justice, Preventing Crime
In the 2020s, no informed person disagrees that punishment policies and practices in the United States are unprincipled, chaotic, and much too often unjust. The financial costs are enormous. The moral cost is greater: countless individual injustices; mass incarceration; the world’s highest imprisonment rate; extreme disparities, especially affecting members of racial and ethnic minority groups; high rates of wrongful conviction; assembly-line cas…
Organized Crime
Of One-eyed and Toothless Miscreants
Abstract Interest in retributive theory, and emphasis on proportionality between crime and punishment as a requirement of justice, revived in English-speaking countries in the 1970s. After less than a half century, however, retributivism’s influence is waning. It is beset by challenges. Some, such as difficulties in scaling crime seriousness and punishment severity, and linking them, are primarily analytical and of interest mostly to theorists. O…
Of One-Eyed and Toothless Miscreants
Fifty Years of American Sentencing Reform
Efforts to standardize sentences and eliminate disparities in a state or the federal system cannot succeed; distinctive practices and norms, diverse local cultures, and practical and political needs of officials and agencies assure major local differences in sentencing practice. Presumptive sentencing guidelines developed by sentencing commissions, however, are the most effective means to improve consistency, reduce disparity, and control correct…
Predictions of Dangerousness in Sentencing
Predictions of dangerousness are more often wrong than right, use information they shouldn’t, and disproportionately damage minority offenders. Forty years ago, two-thirds of people predicted to be violent were not. For every two “true positives,” there were four “false positives.” Contemporary technology is little better: at best, three false positives for every two true positives. The best-informed specialists say that accuracy topped out a dec…
The President's Commission and Sentencing, Then and Now
The proposals made in 1967 by the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice on sentencing were sensible, humane, well informed, and ambitious. They were premised on an assumption that indeterminate sentencing, then ubiquitous, would long continue, and sought to remedy its weaknesses and build on its strengths. That assumption proved wrong. Within a decade, indeterminate sentencing and its rehabilitative aspirati…
Punishment and Human Dignity
A new conception of justice in punishment is needed that is premised on respect for offenders’ human dignity. It needs to acknowledge retributive and utilitarian values and incorporate independently important values of fairness and equal treatment. Punishment principles, policies, and practices lined up nicely in mid-twentieth-century America. Utilitarian principles implied a primary goal of crime prevention through rehabilitation and avoidance o…
Making American Sentencing Just, Humane, and Effective
American sentencing laws are rigid, harsh, and often unjust. Mass incarceration is a tragedy and a national embarrassment. Laws enacted in the 1980s and 1990s that mandated lengthy prison terms are the primary causes. The challenges are to undo mass incarceration, repeal or fundamentally overhaul the laws that caused it, and rebuild American sentencing systems. American legislators have not yet seriously addressed the subject. Hundreds of minor c…
From Policing to Parole
Equality and Human Dignity
Concern for equality and human dignity is largely absent from American sentencing. Prison sentences are imposed much more often than in any other Western country. Prison terms are incomparably longer. The greater frequency of imprisonment is a product of punitive attitudes and politicization of crime control policies. The longer terms result partly from abolition of parole release in every jurisdiction for all or some inmates, but mostly from the…
Differences in National Sentencing Systems and the Differences They Make
The Fog Around Cost‐of‐Crime Studies May Finally Be Clearing
Determinants of Penal Policies
Explanations of American punishment policies
None of the conventional explanations why American penal policies became so severe — rising crime rates, harsh public attitudes and cynical electoral politics — are persuasive. Nor are various `conditions of late modernity' such as the limited capacities of governments, increasing population diversity or increasing insecurity and risk aversion. All these things characterized every developed country in much of the period 1975—2000 and most did not…
Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration
The Malign Effects of Drug and Crime Control Policies on Black Americans
The disproportionate presence of blacks in American prisons, jails, and Death Rows, and the principal reasons for it—higher rates of commission of violent crimes and racially disparate effects of drug policies and sentencing laws governing violent and drug crimes—are well known. Since the late 1980s, black involvement in violent crime has declined substantially, but racial disproportions have not. Blacks are six to seven times more likely than wh…
Communities and Crime
Symbol, Substance, and Severity in Western Penal Policies
Similar economic transformations, public opinion patterns, social developments and crime trends have affected most western countries over the past few decades. Punishment trends, however, whether measured in terms of imprisonment rates, average sentence lengths, preferences for or against short or long prison sentences and adoption of various forms of new community penalties vary widely. Why similar economic, social, crime and public opinion tren…
Remodeling American Sentencing
When and if the will to roll back mass incarceration and to create just, fair, and effective sentencing systems becomes manifest, the way forward is clear. First, three‐strikes, mandatory minimum sentence, and comparable laws should be repealed. Second, any three‐strikes, mandatory minimum sentence, and comparable laws that are not repealed should be substantially narrowed in scope and severity. Third, any three‐strikes, mandatory minimum sentenc…
The Social, Psychological, and Political Causes of Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System
Imprisonment rates for black Americans have long been five to seven times higher than those for whites. The immediate causes are well known: high levels of black imprisonment resulting in part from higher black than white arrest rates for violent crime and vastly higher black drug arrest rates. Drug arrest disparities result from police decisions to concentrate attention on drugs blacks sell and places where they sell them. Prison disparities are…
Gender, Race, and Sentencing
Race and gender pose empirical and policy problems that are both similar and different for the U. S. criminal justice system. They are similar in that blacks and women occupy subordinate social and economic positions in American life, and their interests are less likely to be represented in the justice system than are those of white men. They are different in that blacks are overrepresented in arrest statistics and jail and prison populations whi…
Why Crime Rates Are Falling throughout the Western World
Crime rates have moved in parallel in Western societies since the late Middle Ages. Homicide rates declined from 20 to 100 per 100,000 population in western Europe to one per 100,000 in most Western countries by the beginning of the twentieth century. Crime rates in major cities and in countries fell from the early nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth. From the 1960s to the 1990s, rates for violent and property crimes rose in all …
The Mostly Unintended Effects of Mandatory Penalties
Policy and knowledge concerning mandatory minimum sentences have long marched in different directions in the United States. There is no credible evidence that the enactment or implementation of such sentences has significant deterrent effects, but there is massive evidence, which has accumulated for two centuries, that mandatory minimums foster circumvention by judges, juries, and prosecutors; reduce accountability and transparency; produce injus…
Intermediate Sanctions
Most American jurisdictions have recently established new intermediate sanctions programs. Few such programs have diverted large numbers of offenders from prison, saved public monies or prison beds, or reduced recidivism rates. These findings recur in evaluations of community service, intensive supervision, house arrest, day reporting centers, and boot camps. The principal problems have been high rates of revocation and subsequent incarceration (…
Public criminology” and evidence‐based policy
Crime and Human Rights—how Political Paranoia, Protestant Fundamentalism, and Constitutional Obsolescence Combined to Devastate Black America
Crime, Criminal Justice, and Criminology in the Nordic Countries
Making peace, not a desert
Unthought Thoughts
Fashions in punishment policies and forms vary with changes in sensibilities (as do fashions in the arts, attitudes towards homosexuality, drug use and religious tolerance). Propositions and policies that appear unthinkable in some times become commonplace in others; beliefs and positions that are hotly contested or widely endorsed in some times are forgotten in others. With a bit more modesty, and longer memories, contemporary advocates and poli…
Sentencing in America, 1975–2025
American sentencing policy has gone through four stages in the past 50 years. Indeterminate sentencing was followed by a sentencing reform period in which policy initiatives sought to make sentencing fairer and more consistent, a tough on crime period in which initiatives sought to make sentences harsher and more certain, and the current period, which is hard to characterize. Most tough on crime initiatives remain in place, co-existing with rehab…
The costly consequences of populist posturing
In its effort to win electoral support by attacking the courts and other criminal justice agencies, loudly seeking to rebalance the criminal justice system in favour of the victim, and weakening civil liberties and protections against wrongful convictions, the Labour government of Tony Blair played dangerous games. There is ample evidence that tensions between the young and the old, and between the well-off and the dispossessed, were exacerbated.…
Learning from the Limitations of Deterrence Research
Public policy and scientific knowledge concerning deterrence have long been marching in different directions. Despite the proliferation of three‐strikes, mandatory minimum, and concealed weapons laws and retention of capital punishment in 37 states, there is little credible evidence that changes in sanctions affect crime rates, and there is no credible evidence that capital punishment deters better than life sentences or that allowing citizens to…
Federal Sentencing “Reform” since 1984
The federal sentencing system was conceived in one era and delivered in another. When the first bills that culminated in passage of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 were introduced, they aimed at reducing the worst excesses of indeterminate sentencing and achieving greater fairness, consistency, equality, accountability, and transparency in sentencing federal offenders. The overriding goal was reduction of unwarranted racial and other disparitie…
The Racialization of Latinos in the United States
"Social tensions between majority and minority populations often center on claims that minorities are largely responsible for crime and disorder. Members of some disadvantaged groups in all developed countries, sometimes long-standing residents and other times recent immigrants, experience unwarranted disparities in their dealings with the criminal justice system. Accusations of unfair treatment by police and courts are common. The Oxford Handboo…
Racial Disproportion in Us Prisons
Outside the United States, probably the best known characteristics of America's correctional system are that capital punishment continues in use and that American incarceration rates are four to 15 times higher than those in other developed countries. Within the United States, the most notable characteristics are the absolute numbers in confinement and that they are disproportionately black. Blacks in 1991 made up 12 per cent ofAmerica's populati…
Prosecutors and Politics in Comparative Perspective
Less imprisonment is no doubt a good thing
Research on Sentencing
The sentencing commission and its guidelines
Prediction and Classification
Recent moves toward increased use of preventive detention, selective incapacitation, and predictions of dangerousness have paralleled vigorous debates concerning the legal and ethical implications of those developments. People's views about these matters are often firmly held and not easily changed by empirical evidence or logical argument. In general, those who believe in limited state power and attach high importance to civil liberties tend to …
Criminology
Structuring Sentencing
Since the modern sentencing reform movement began in the mid-seventies, much has been learned about the effects of efforts to structure sentencing discretion. Many new programs failed to achieve their objectives; some innovations seem inherently flawed. Mandatory sentencing laws seem always to create injustice in individual cases and to produce efforts by judges and lawyers to avoid their application. Voluntary sentencing guidelines have consiste…
Rethinking the Community's Role in Crime
Crime and Justice
Family Violence in Perspective
Prediction and Classification
Communities and Crime
Between Prison and Probation
In this work two leading American criminologists argue that fundamental sentencing reforms are needed before the US corrections system can contend with an escalating crime rate. They recommend the adoption of intermediate punishments—community-based sanctions of increasing severity—which can fill the gap between costly and punitive incarceration currently reserved for a minority of convicted offenders and parole served by the majority of offender…
Communities and Crime
How does crime relate to the quality of life in communities? What role does fear play in influencing crime patterns? What is the effect of crime on a community's school's teachers, and pupils? How does environmental design affect crime? Can household and community mobilization change crime patterns? Examining the ways in which communities both affect crime and are affected by it, this volume seeks to explain the wide variation of crime levels amo…
Research on Drugs and Crime
Human Development and Criminal Behavior
Drugs and Crime
Human Development and Criminal Behavior
Overview of theories and hypotheses design and sampling issues measurement and analysis cohort studies appendices
Drugs and Crime
Between Prison and Probation
Across the country prisons are jammed to capacity, and in extreme cases, barges and mobile homes are used to stem the overflow. Probation officers in some cities have caseloads of 200 and more--hardly a manageable number of offenders to track and supervise. And with about one million people in prison and jail, and two and a half million on probation, it clear we are experiencing a crisis in our penal system. In Between Prison and Probation, Norva…
Mandatory Penalties
To many public officials, promotion and enactment of mandatory penalty laws are important symbols of their concern for public safety and citizens' fear of crime. In practice, mandatory minimum-penalty laws accomplish few of their stated objectives and produce unwanted consequences. Their deterrent effects range from nonexistent to short-lived. When they call for short mandatory prison terms for serious crimes, they are often irrelevant because lo…
Sentencing Commissions and Their Guidelines
Sentencing commissions, administrative agencies charged to develop and promulgate standards for sentencing, were first proposed early in the 1970s and first established in 1978. Of four recent major sentencing reform approaches-the others being parole guidelines, voluntary sentencing guidelines, and statutory determinate sentences-only sentencing commission systems continue to be created. Despite controversies associated with the highly unpopular…
Organizational Crime
Racial Disproportion in Us Prisons
Outside the United States, probably the best known characteristics of America's correctional system are that capital punishment continues in use and that American incarceration rates are four to 15 times higher than those in other developed countries. Within the United States, the most notable characteristics are the absolute numbers in confinement and that they are disproportionately black. Blacks in 1991 made up 12 per cent ofAmerica's populati…
Race and the War on Drugs
Three effects of the War on Drugs stand out. First, it was a failure. The street price of cocaine, the war’s signature drug, should have risen if dealing were becoming riskier and drugs less available; prices fell. Massive arrests and street-sweep tactics in many cities, backed up by harsh mandatory prison sentences, should have cleared out the drug dealers and made drugs harder to find; they did not. Most analysts and many police officials belie…
Malign Neglect Race, Crime, And Punishment In America
Despite the perennial claims of politicians that our courts are coddling hardened criminals, the fact is that America already sends a higher proportion of its citizens to prison and for longer terms than any other western nation. To quote the Canadian House of Commons’s Committee on Justice, “If locking up those who violate the law contributed to safer societies, then the United States should be the safest country in the world.” Yet despite well-…
Strategic Approaches to Crime Prevention
Political science (97 obras) · Criminology (91 obras) · Sociology (77 obras) · Law (75 obras) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (68 obras) · Law (54 obras) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (49 obras) · Psychology (48 obras) · Criminal justice (36 obras) · Economic Justice (32 obras)