Word: penalities
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many citizens in the West have begun to detect what might be called the Fallacy of Progress. For a century or more, "progress" in penal thinking has signified increasingly humane treatment for criminals, as if punishment were in itself a vestigial barbarity. But if progress implies a steady mitigation of punishment, then at some point "punishment" must logically lose its meaning, crossing over to become something else. Besides, not many people are pitilessly marched to jail today for stealing loaves of bread. Poverty may breed crime, but few thieves steal because they are starving in a society of food stamps...
Unfortunately, as most New Yorkers see it, Kapelman may not get his wish. Berkowitz will be eligible to apply for parole in the year 2002, after serving only 25 years. New York's penal law, like many other state penalty statutes, provides for parole eligibility after a prisoner has served his minimum term, or, in cases which carry several sentences, after the single stiffest minimum has been served. The law was designed in 1965 to give courts and parole boards the capability of being lenient. But it also raises, at least remotely, the possibility that a deranged killer like...
After a two-year delay following its Russian-language publication in Paris, Gulag III has reached the U.S. It is the last volume of Solzhenitsyn's 1,800-page chronicle of the Soviet penal system, beginning with the Red Terror of 1918 and ending with the release of millions of political prisoners from slave labor camps in 1956. Up to now the narrative has been one of unrelenting horror, recounted at a high pitch of indignation modulated by black sarcasm...
Until the mid-18th century, criminals were disemboweled and beaten in a ghastly revenge drama. In his own dissection Foucault shows how torture originated in feudal society: "Its ruthlessness, its spectacle ... its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system." Then, within 40 years (1769-1810), Western reformers over threw the penal catechism. An "art of un bearable sensations" gave way to "an economy of suspended rights." But Foucault argues that the real aim of the change was "not to punish less, but to punish better ... to insert the power to pun ish more deeply into...
Many of the Khmer Rouge fled Cambodia following an internecine struggle inside Angka six months ago. The reason for the purge: some of the older organization men dared to propose moderating changes in what had become in effect a penal society. They were eliminated for making these suggestions. In the village of Tien Kam, for instance, the Khmer Rouge "controller" was killed by a girl of 18-who then took his place...