In the past week’s posts about my new book, I’ve sketched out some of the hidden costs of professionalizing our system and suggested ways in which we might deliberately slow down our speedy, impersonal assembly-line justice. This set of posts has focused on one aspect: giving victims larger roles. (The book offers an even more […]
Author Archive | Stephanos Bibas (University of Pennsylvania), guest-blogging
The Machinery of Criminal Justice #5: Returning Power to the Public in a Lawyer-Driven System
By Stephanos Bibas (University of Pennsylvania), guest-blogging on March 16, 2012 11:04 am in Crime Victims Rights, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure
In this week’s guest-blog posts on my new book, I’ve explored just a few of the ways in which our criminal justice machine has drifted far from its moral roots. Today I want to summarize the range of problems and offer just a couple of possible solutions, though the book goes into many more. Lawyers’ […]
The Machinery of Criminal Justice #4: Semi-Privatizing Criminal Justice
By Stephanos Bibas (University of Pennsylvania), guest-blogging on March 15, 2012 11:05 am in Crime Victims Rights, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure
In yesterday’s guest-blog post on my new book, I explored the gulf between criminal-justice insiders and outsiders, the lawyers and laymen who see criminal justice very differently. The book explores in detail some of the human needs that criminal justice professionals overlook, such as the thirst for remorse, apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Today I’ll suggest […]
The Machinery of Criminal Justice: The Gulf Between Insiders and Outsiders, and Its Costs
By Stephanos Bibas (University of Pennsylvania), guest-blogging on March 14, 2012 10:43 am in Crime Victims Rights, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure
In yesterday’s guest-blog post on my new book, I discussed some of the ways in which criminal justice developed from a common-sense morality play into a professionalized machine during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now I want to describe what the gulf between criminal justice insiders and outsiders looks like today; offer a few examples […]
The Machinery of Criminal Justice: From Public Morality Play to Hidden Plea Bargaining Machine
By Stephanos Bibas (University of Pennsylvania), guest-blogging on March 13, 2012 9:22 am in Crime Victims Rights, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, History
In yesterday’s guest-blog post on my new book, The Machinery of Criminal Justice, I surveyed how colonial American criminal justice was public, participatory, informal, and run by laymen. To be clear in response to some comments, I did not imply that we should go back to Salem witch trials, let alone medieval European trial by […]
The Machinery of Criminal Justice: Colonial Criminal Justice as a Morality Play
By Stephanos Bibas (University of Pennsylvania), guest-blogging on March 12, 2012 10:46 am in Crime Victims Rights, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, History, Uncategorized
I’d like to thank Eugene and his fellow co-conspirators for graciously letting me guest-blog this week about my new book, The Machinery of Criminal Justice, which was just published by Oxford University press and is available here. In a nutshell, the book is about: 1) how America moved from a populist system of public jury […]