Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Governing Through Crime

Criminal Law

: Governing Through Crime

Justice Anorexia? Why We Imagine Our Courts to be So Lenient

By Jonathan Simor

Anorexia Nervosa is an eating disorder that leads sufferers to undergo often life threatening disciplining of their food intake in an effort to ward off imagined obesity. Something similar seems to beset our collective penal imagination. Despite decades of growing penal severity that have given us the world's largest prison population (and not just in per capita terms) and the most severe sentences, most Americans still imagine our courts to be the leaky and lenient institutions they were (unfairly) depicted as being in 1970s backlash movies like Dirty Harry (1971). As our justice system comes instead increasingly to resemble the hardened core of the robotic killing machines in the Terminator series, our ability to set proper limits to our own quest for security is very much in question...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on February 12, 2010 (boomark / email).