Description
Book SynopsisIn this groundbreaking book that is built on decades of work on the front lines of the criminal justice system, expert psychologist Craig Haney provides a blueprint for fundamental reform by changing our understanding of who commits crime and why. Based on a comprehensive review and analysis of psychological research, Haney offers a carefully constructed framework for enhancing legal fairness and reducing crime through proactive prevention instead of reactive punishment. Haney meticulously reviews evidence documenting the ways in which a person’s social history, institutional experiences, and present circumstances powerfully shape their life course, with a special focus on the role of social, economic, and racial injustice in crime causation. He thus effectively debunks the “crime master narrative”—the widespread myth that criminality is a product of free and autonomous “bad” choices—an increasingly anachronistic view that cannot bear the weigh
Trade ReviewInstead of punitive, oppressive, and racist social control, the author vividly delineates a model of compassionate, innovative, and progressive reforms that will transform the current “politically” driven, chaotic system into an effective criminal justice model. Including policing, the judicial system, and the penal system in the realm of criminal justice reform,
Criminality in Context is a wonderful read for all people vested in better understanding the intersections among crime, legal and penal policy, and the criminal justice system as a whole. * Choice Reviews *
Table of ContentsForeword, by Shadd Maruna
Preface
Introduction Chapter 1: Individualistic Myths and the Crime Master Narrative
Chapter 2: Risks and Contexts: An Alternative Paradigm for Understanding Criminality
Chapter 3: Criminogenic Trauma: Social History and the Life Course
Chapter 4: Institutional Failure: State Intervention as Criminogenic Risk
Chapter 5: Criminogenic Contexts: Immediate Situations, Settings, and Circumstances
Chapter 6: Poverty: Structural Risk and Criminal Behavior
Chapter 7: The Criminogenics of Race in a Divided Society: Racialized Criminality and Biographical Racism
Chapter 8: Individualistic Myths and the Disregard of Context: Deconstructing “Equally Free Autonomous Choice”
Chapter 9: Reorienting the Law: Context-Based Legal Reforms
Chapter 10: Pursuing Social Justice: An Agenda for Fair, Effective, and Humane Crime Policy
Afterword
