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interesting piece on sentencing history (and theory)

By Douglas A. Berman

After spending the day dealing with some frustrating realities of current federal sentencing, this historical paper appearing on SSRN is just the kind of change of pace my sentencing brain needs.  The piece is titled "Rehabilitating Durkheim: Social Solidarity and Rehabilitation in Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829-1850" and here is the abstract: Durkheim famously postulated that crime tears at the moral fabric of society and that punishment was the means by which society strengthened its solidarity: by condemning the criminal and his criminal act, society reminds itself that there is still great consensus surrounding the values it holds dear, those values which it has enshrined in the criminal law. However, the more a society advanced, he argued, the less intense its punishments would become, and the more its punishments would become based solely on the privations of certain rights...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on June 04, 2008 (boomark / email).