The sexual disorders in the current and proposed DSM contain a potpourri of categories that increasingly intersect with the criminal justice system. Caveats saying the DSM is designed for clinical and not legal purposes notwithstanding, our classification system has difficulty distinguishing what we consider criminal behavior from culturally unacceptable behavior and mental disorder. Several cu...

Introduction: As proponents of restorative justice, we tend to believe that these processes should be integrated into the criminal justice system because they work, they make sense and they address the real needs of people. To us, the justification for using restorative practices is almost self evident, However, the truth is that most criminal justice practitioners are extremely skeptical about...

She is one of a series of lecturers for the Seventh International Speakers Consortium, and her talk, sponsored by the BSU Criminal Justice Administration Program and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, is presented as part of the BSU Criminal Justices Speakers Series. For further information about Van Ruijven's lecture, contact Ted Hopfenbeck at 385-3249 or Bob Marsh at 385-3243.

What does health have to do with justice? Everything! More than seven million people in the United States are currently under some form of criminal justice supervision, and control (whether in jail, prison, or on probation or parole), and they have somatic and mental health issues in rates that are much higher than those found in the general population. Ignoring these issues will contributes to...

International research has suggested that women in the criminal justice system carry a higher burden of many illnesses than women in the community, especially mental health disorders, substance use disorders, sexually transmitted infections, and a history of violent victimization. Knowledge of these health disparities is often used to advocate for relevant screening and treatment services for w...

In post–civil rights America, the ascendance of “law-and-order” politics and “postracial” ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Counte...

Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England is comprised of four books, written in two volumes, running well over 1500 pages in length. Within this enormous work there may be no more wellknown or more memorable line than that which has come to be known as the Blackstone Ratio: “the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”1 The Blackstone Ra...

Diversion programs are initiatives in which persons with serious mental illness who are involved with the criminal justice system are redirected from traditional criminal justice pathways to the mental health and substance abuse treatment systems. This article is a review of the research literature conducted to determine whether the current evidence supports the use of diversion initiatives to ...

The criminal trial constitutes a drama performed by its leading actors (legal professionals) plus supporting actors (including spectators). How conscious and strategic are their performances? This article argues that conscious legal performativity is part of a sustained tradition of 'infotainment' with lasting implications for today's real-life courtroom dramas. The adoption of stereotypical co...