David A Green
John Jay College, CUNY, Sociology, Faculty Member
Research Interests: Discourse Analysis, Political Economy, Public Opinion, Political Culture, Legitimacy, and 8 moreMedia Framing, Social Constructionism/ Constructivism, Punishment and Prisons, Punishment, Media, Public Judgement, Media Manipulation, Consensus Democracy, Electoral Systems, Majoritarian Systems Economic Performance, Punitiveness, and Crime and the Media
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Most recent analyses of US penality describe and explain the exceptional harshening of punishment over the previous three decades. This article challenges and qualifies these accounts by identifying 10 cultural, moral, and practical... more
Most recent analyses of US penality describe and explain the exceptional harshening of punishment over the previous three decades. This article challenges and qualifies these accounts by identifying 10 cultural, moral, and practical drivers of a bipartisan reconsideration of the discourses and policies responsible for mass incarceration. These penal-reform catalysts and drivers include: (1) the crime decline; (2) the Great Recession; (3) the prisoner-reentry movement and attendant changes in the moral status of prisoners; (4) apparent shifts in public attitudes about punishment; (5) ‘punitive saturation’ and the cyclical nature of penal thinking and policy; (6) changing dominant conceptions of the criminal offender; (7) the return of human dignity to US jurisprudence; (8) the ideational influence of Christian reformers who assail the morality of excessive punishment; (9) the conservative ‘Right on Crime’ initiative that promotes a range of reforms formerly associated with the Left; ...
Research Interests: Sociology, Criminology, Law, Public Opinion, Rehabilitation, and 11 morePolitical Science, Media Framing, Social Constructionism/ Constructivism, Mass Incarceration, Sentencing, Prisoner reentry, Punishment and society, Frame Analysis, Penal Reform, Criminal Justice Reform, and Penal Policy and Criminal Sentencing
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ABSTRACT This article evaluates what Drakeford and Vanstone (2000) have called "doing good by stealth"—the quiet embrace of progressive penal policies, often twinned with contradictorily punitive rhetoric—in order to... more
ABSTRACT This article evaluates what Drakeford and Vanstone (2000) have called "doing good by stealth"—the quiet embrace of progressive penal policies, often twinned with contradictorily punitive rhetoric—in order to critically examine both the motives of policymakers under the pressures exerted by the "penal populism calculus" and the consequences for penal policymaking processes and outcomes. It offers a typological model of penal policymaking strategies and outcomes based on two polar dimensions: covert (quiet) vs. transparent (loud), and fair/effective (high-roading) vs. unfair/ineffective (low-roading). It provides examples of each strategy, examines the arguments for and against each one, and proposes alternative ways to achieve the legitimation goals of penal populism, informed by theories of public deliberation and participatory democracy.
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In an effort to better understand the roots of contemporary school punishment practices, this study compares policy discourse and practice of school punishment and security in the United States and England. American policy discourse is... more
In an effort to better understand the roots of contemporary school punishment practices, this study compares policy discourse and practice of school punishment and security in the United States and England. American policy discourse is predominantly punitive, harsh punishment strategies are favored, and policy makers have centralized decision-making power outside of the classroom. Contrastingly, English policy discourse about and policy responses to student misbehaviour focus more on reducing social exclusion, improving student behaviour, and returning the locus of control over rule enforcement to teachers. However, despite these substantial differences, suspension and expulsion rates are fairly similar in the US and England. Several hypotheses to explain these findings are offered.
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... On the afternoon of 12 February 1993 in Bootle, Liverpool, two ten-year-old boys, later named as Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who were truanting from school, abducted two-year-old James Bulger from the Strand Shopping Centre... more
... On the afternoon of 12 February 1993 in Bootle, Liverpool, two ten-year-old boys, later named as Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who were truanting from school, abducted two-year-old James Bulger from the Strand Shopping Centre while his mother was being served ...
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ABSTRACT This paper builds a case for more defensible assessments of informed public opinion on crime control and penal policy. Mass-mediated portrayals of what the public want and ubiquitous self-selected opinion polls serve as common... more
ABSTRACT This paper builds a case for more defensible assessments of informed public opinion on crime control and penal policy. Mass-mediated portrayals of what the public want and ubiquitous self-selected opinion polls serve as common surrogates for informed public opinion. These highly suspect assessments have gained a level of credence in policy debates that is difficult to justify. Innovations like the Deliberative Poll show promise in facilitating what has been called ‘public judgment’—a more reliable and refined state of informed public opinion. Less ambitious remedial proposals, including the public education programmes advocated by some experts and recently embraced by the Home Office, are insufficiently bold to make a significant and lasting impact on public knowledge and attitudes.
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This article first makes the case that optimism in the reform potential of criminal offenders has recently increased among American policymakers, as evidenced by the bipartisan passage of the Second Chance Act of 2007, which encourages... more
This article first makes the case that optimism in the reform potential of criminal offenders has recently increased among American policymakers, as evidenced by the bipartisan passage of the Second Chance Act of 2007, which encourages prisoner reentry and sets ambitious targets for recidivism reduction. It then sets this apparent renewal of ‘penal optimism’ in historical context by drawing on American evangelical Protestant traditions and examining how these affect contemporary perceptions of the redeemability of criminal offenders. One aim is to acquaint criminologists with the discourse of evangelical Protestantism, a significant and driving force in contemporary penal reform efforts – particularly in the realm of prisoner reentry – by outlining key religious concepts and their implications for penal discourse and policy.
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This article considers the implications of cultural values, political-cultural arrangements and the changing mediascape for the distinct cultural resources on crime and punishment that we consume as citizens. It first explores what we... more
This article considers the implications of cultural values, political-cultural arrangements and the changing mediascape for the distinct cultural resources on crime and punishment that we consume as citizens. It first explores what we mean when we talk about punitiveness, making the important, yet often overlooked, distinctions between public attitudes, political rhetoric, public policy and penal practice. Next, the ways in which the media constrain how we perceive problems and the means of solving them are considered, especially the ways these constraints are influenced by different political-cultural styles. ‘Stealth’ penal reforms, in which punitive rhetoric is employed by politicians to divert attention away from more progressive policies pursued quietly on the sly, are criticized because they tend to legitimize and regenerate only punitive ideational resources for public consumption. Finally, implications for future research are offered along with some practical suggestions for...
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This article presents the results of a comparative analysis of English and Norwegian newspaper coverage of two child-on-child homicides from the 1990s. Domestic coverage of the English case of James Bulger presented it as alarmingly... more
This article presents the results of a comparative analysis of English and Norwegian newspaper coverage of two child-on-child homicides from the 1990s. Domestic coverage of the English case of James Bulger presented it as alarmingly symptomatic of deep-seated moral decline in Britain that only tough, remoralizing strategies could address. Coverage of the Norwegian case of Silje Redergård constructed it as a tragic one-off, requiring expert intervention to facilitate the speedy reintegration of the boys responsible. Four sets of plausible explanations are offered to account for differences in the ways the two cases were constructed. First, different cultural constructions of childhood endure in each country and these condition the responses deemed appropriate for children who commit grave acts. Second, the dominant claims makers were very different in each jurisdiction with consequences for the quality of the discourses readers encountered. Third, while the legitimacy of elite expert...
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Abstract Different ways of doing politics, particularly the distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy, help account for differences in national appetites for punishment, as a comparison of two child-on-child homicides from... more
Abstract Different ways of doing politics, particularly the distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy, help account for differences in national appetites for punishment, as a comparison of two child-on-child homicides from the 1990s-the Bulger case in England ...
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This study identifies the most efficient methodology for sampling from a population of New York Times articles related to terrorism, which were generated through keyword searching. Efficiency was based on which sample statistic was... more
This study identifies the most efficient methodology for sampling from a population of New York Times articles related to terrorism, which were generated through keyword searching. Efficiency was based on which sample statistic was closest to the population parameters of interest. The smallest sample size, where 68% of the sample statistics were within one standard deviation of the population mean and 95% of the sample statistics were within two standard deviations of the population mean, were identified as the most efficient. In addition, we determine whether the frequency of news articles is correlated to the temporal distribution of terrorist incidents found in the Global Terrorism Database, which could possibly be utilized to more efficiently sample from the population. Our findings confirm prior research that shows that sampling efficiency is related to the weekly news cycle and, contrary to prior research, the sample must include between 20 to 29 constructed weeks to achieve representativeness of an entire year of coverage for a population generated through keyword searches. In addition, the study also found that there was a limited relationship between the frequency of terrorist incidents and the amount of terrorism coverage in the news.
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In an effort to better understand the roots of contemporary school punishment practices, this study compares policy discourse and practice of school punishment and security in the United States and England. American policy discourse is... more
In an effort to better understand the roots of contemporary school punishment practices, this study compares policy discourse and practice of school punishment and security in the United States and England. American policy discourse is predominantly punitive, harsh punishment strategies are favored, and policy makers have centralized decision-making power outside of the classroom. Contrastingly, English policy discourse about and policy responses to student misbehaviour focus more on reducing social exclusion, improving student behaviour, and returning the locus of control over rule enforcement to teachers. However, despite these substantial differences, suspension and expulsion rates are fairly similar in the US and England. Several hypotheses to explain these findings are offered.
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This article draws on an emerging comparative literature indicating the significant effects that political systems can have on the deployment of penal power, and the ways they condition responses to crime and to criminal offenders. It... more
This article draws on an emerging comparative literature indicating the significant effects that political systems can have on the deployment of penal power, and the ways they condition responses to crime and to criminal offenders. It explores two political-cultural mechanisms that help account for variations in levels of punitiveness between countries. These mechanisms – called here as the insulation and autonomy effect and the populism disincentive effect – are embedded in jurisdiction specific political cultures and the structures that sustain them.
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Different ways of doing politics, particularly the distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy, help account for differences in national appetites for punishment, as a comparison of two child-on-child homicides from the... more
Different ways of doing politics, particularly the distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy, help account for differences in national appetites for punishment, as a comparison of two child-on-child homicides from the 1990s—the Bulger case in England and the Redergård case in Norway – shows. In England, pressed to act by emotive, condemnatory press coverage in a highly competitive media market, all politicians had incentives to politicize the case. The Labour Party used the Bulger case to indicate its new and tougher approach to law and order and to make the party more electable in the face of rising public concern about crime. Simplistic tabloid rhetoric went largely unchallenged, and the public’s press-fueled fears about crime were legitimated by traditionally left-leaning politicians intent to distance themselves from the expertise of traditional elites. The consensual nature of Norwegian politics decreased incentives to politicize the Redergård homicide in the same way.
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This article considers the implications of cultural values, political-cultural arrangements and the changing mediascape on the distinct cultural resources about crime and punishment we consume as citizens. It first explores what we mean... more
This article considers the implications of cultural values, political-cultural arrangements and the changing mediascape on the distinct cultural resources about crime and punishment we consume as citizens. It first explores what we mean when we talk about punitiveness, making the important, yet often overlooked, distinctions between public attitudes, political rhetoric, public policy and penal practice. Next, the ways in which the media constrain how we perceive problems and the means of solving them are considered, especially the ways these constraints are influenced by different political-cultural styles. “Stealth” penal reforms, in which punitive rhetoric is employed by politicians to divert attention away from more progressive policies pursued quietly on the sly, are criticized because they tend to legitimize and regenerate only punitive ideational resources for public consumption. Finally, implications for future research are offered along with some practical suggestions for enriching public discourse in order to nourish and sustain a broader range of understandings and responses to crime.
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This essay evaluates what Drakeford and Vanstone (2000) have called “doing good by stealth”—the quiet embrace of progressive penal policies, often twinned with contradictorily punitive rhetoric—in order to critically examine both the... more
This essay evaluates what Drakeford and Vanstone (2000) have called “doing good by stealth”—the quiet embrace of progressive penal policies, often twinned with contradictorily punitive rhetoric—in order to critically examine both the motives of policymakers under the pressures exerted by the “penal populism calculus” and the consequences for penal policymaking processes and outcomes. It offers a typological model of penal policymaking strategies and outcomes based on two polar dimensions: covert (quiet) vs. transparent (loud), and fair/effective (high-roading) vs. unfair/ineffective (low-roading). It provides examples of each strategy, examines the arguments for and against each one, and proposes alternative ways to achieve the legitimation goals of penal populism, informed by theories of public deliberation and participatory democracy.
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This article first uses the analytical lenses of crime opportunity, criminal propensity, and routine activity theory to evaluate Wendel et al.'s (2016) plausible and compelling ''more drugs, less crime'' hypothesis, the latest attempt to... more
This article first uses the analytical lenses of crime opportunity, criminal propensity, and routine activity theory to evaluate Wendel et al.'s (2016) plausible and compelling ''more drugs, less crime'' hypothesis, the latest attempt to explain the crime decline that began in the 1990s. The authors' present exposition of the hypothesis is beleaguered by methodological problems that jeopardize the validity of its central claims. An alternative media-consumption hypothesis is then briefly outlined, which suggests that changes in media-consumption patterns beginning in the 1980s were a powerful catalyst for reductions in street crime. Because both hypotheses identify mechanisms that reduce both the opportunities and the propensities to commit crime, they stand out from the majority of crime-decline accounts which are presently oriented toward opportunity almost exclusively. Both hypotheses also happen to subvert conventional wisdom in ironic ways.
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This article first makes the case that optimism in the reform potential of criminal offenders has recently increased among American policymakers, as evidenced by the bipartisan passage of the Second Chance Act of 2007, which encourages... more
This article first makes the case that optimism in the reform potential of criminal offenders has recently increased among American policymakers, as evidenced by the bipartisan passage of the Second Chance Act of 2007, which encourages prisoner reentry and sets ambitious targets for recidivism reduction. It then sets this apparent renewal of 'penal optimism' in historical context by drawing on American evangelical Protestant traditions and examining how these affect contemporary perceptions of the redeemability of criminal offenders. One aim is to acquaint criminologists with the discourse of evangelical Protestantism, a significant and driving force in contemporary penal reform efforts – particularly in the realm of prisoner reentry – by outlining key religious concepts and their implications for penal discourse and policy.
Research Interests:
Most recent analyses of US penality describe and explain the exceptional harshening of punishment over the previous three decades. This article challenges and qualifies these accounts by identifying 10 cultural, moral, and practical... more
Most recent analyses of US penality describe and explain the exceptional harshening of punishment over the previous three decades. This article challenges and qualifies these accounts by identifying 10 cultural, moral, and practical drivers of a bipartisan reconsideration of the discourses and policies responsible for mass incarceration. These penal-reform catalysts and drivers include: (1) the crime decline; (2) the Great Recession; (3) the prisoner-reentry movement and attendant changes in the moral status of prisoners; (4) apparent shifts in public attitudes about punishment; (5) 'punitive saturation' and the cyclical nature of penal thinking and policy; (6) changing dominant conceptions of the criminal offender; (7) the return of human dignity to US jurisprudence ; (8) the ideational influence of Christian reformers who assail the morality of excessive punishment; (9) the conservative 'Right on Crime' initiative that promotes a range of reforms formerly associated with the Left; and (10) the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose model legislation once drove mass incarceration but now aims to curtail it. The article also invites theoretical analysis of whether ongoing shifts represent a structural reordering of the penal field akin to the punitive turn or merely a set of benevolent tendencies within the same carceral paradigm.
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This article presents the results of a comparative discourse analysis of English and Norwegian tabloid and broadsheet newspaper coverage of two child-on-child homicides from the early 1990s. Domestic coverage of the English case of James... more
This article presents the results of a comparative discourse analysis of English and Norwegian tabloid and broadsheet newspaper coverage of two child-on-child homicides from the early 1990s. Domestic coverage of the English case of James Bulger presented it in alarming terms, as symptomatic of deep-seated moral decline in Britain that only tough, remoralizing strategies could address. Coverage of the Norwegian case of Silje Redergård constructed it as a tragic one-off, requiring elite intervention to facilitate the speedy reintegration of the boys responsible. The ways in which blame was apportioned in each case as well as indications of how justice should be achieved are presented, and three tentative sets of explanations are offered to account for the differences. First, the identities of the dominant claims makers were very different in each jurisdiction with consequences for the quality of the discourses encountered by readers. Second, while the legitimacy of elite expertise appears to survive in Norway, it ails in Britain, and addressing this absence of public confidence has become a political priority. Third, a consensual political culture obtains in Norway that makes Norwegian politicians less susceptible to the temptations felt by adversarially acculturated English politicians to politicize high-profile crimes.
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This paper builds a case for more defensible assessments of informed public opinion on crime control and penal policy. Mass-mediated portrayals of what the public want and ubiquitous self-selected opinion polls serve as common surrogates... more
This paper builds a case for more defensible assessments of informed public opinion on crime control and penal policy. Mass-mediated portrayals of what the public want and ubiquitous self-selected opinion polls serve as common surrogates for informed public opinion. These highly suspect assessments have gained a level of credence in policy debates that is difficult to justify. Innovations like the Deliberative Poll show promise in facilitating what has been called 'public judgment'—a more reliable and refined state of informed public opinion. Less ambitious remedial proposals, including the public education programmes advocated by some experts and recently embraced by the Home Office, are insufficiently bold to make a significant and lasting impact on public knowledge and attitudes.