Joachim J. Savelsberg

Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment

Recent dramatic increases of criminal punishment in the United States and very different trends in the Federal Republic of Germany suggest a critique of basic sociological theory traditions. The article confronts structural-functionalist, Marxist, and legalistic approaches with these trends and suggests an alternative and more complex theory. Utilizing and ideal-typical comparison between the two countries, this article develops a set of interrelated hypotheses on the impact of the institutionalization of (a) knowledge production in the public, political, and academic sectors and (b) political and legal decision making on (c) macro outcomes of political and legal decision making. Using the case of criminal punishment, the article suggests new themes for theory development and empirical macro-sociological research. It also contributes to the understanding of current instabilities in the political process in the United States.

Institutionalizing collective memories of hate: Law and law enforcement in Germany and the United States

The institutionalization of distinct collective memories of hate and cultural traumas as law and bureaucracy is examined comparatively for the case of hate crime law. A dehistoricized focus on individual victimization and an avoidance of major episodes of domestic atrocities in the United States contrast with a focus on the Holocaust, typically in the context of the destruction of the democratic state, in Germany. Such differences, in combination with specifics of state organization and exposure to global scripts, help explain particularities of law and law enforcement along dimensions such as internationalization, coupling of minority and democracy protection, focus on individual versus group rights, and specialization of control agencies.

Knowledge, Domination and Criminal Punishment Revisited Incorporating State Socialism

A theory of criminal punishment that introduces the organization of knowledge production and of political and legal decision-making as central concepts (Savelsberg, 1994a) is further developed. This article first explicates the general theoretical model. Second, the comparative perspective is enhanced as a previous comparison between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the United States (US) is extended to include the experience of state socialist systems. Three distinct empirical patterns of punishment dynamics are identified. Each of them is associated with a distinct type of social organization: decentralized domination - personalistic; decentralized domination - bureaucratic; and monopolized domination - bureaucratic. An analysis of the cases of Poland, building on earlier work by Greenberg (1980), and the German Democratic Republic reveals that the organization of domination and knowledge production are crucial to the understanding of criminal punishment under conditions of totalitarianism as well. Yet, bureaucratization does not necessarily lead to stability in punishment trends as the US-West German comparison had suggested. Bureaucratization in combination with monopolization of decision-making power is likely to result in rather dynamic trends. Further, punishment under conditions of totalitarianism appears to follow immediate and strategic political rationales. Politics of punishment in such contexts also do not face the translation problems that haunt the application of political motives to control practices in systems with decentralized power structures.

Introduction: Mutual engagement: Criminology and sociology?

Criminology and its relationship to sociology are at a crossroad, and this symposium is about the relationship between these two fields. It originates in a session at the 1999 Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association in Chicago, where an unusually high attendance indicated that the topic resonates with concerns and interests of many sociologists who work in the field of criminology. In this introduction we propose a set of theses on the state of criminology and the relationship between criminology and sociology. The introduction is followed by four articles, which demonstrate the relationship between criminology and sociology when it is at its best. These articles demonstrate how criminology can gain when it is open to ideas from different sub-fields within sociology. Jim Short makes this point for criminology and sociological theory in the context of the Chicago School, Diane Vaughan for criminology and the sociology of organizations, John Hagan for criminology and the sociology of social inequality, and Susan Silbey for criminology and the sociology of law. These are our theses: – Thesis 1: Criminology has grown as a multi-disciplinary field out of disciplines, especially sociology. – Thesis 2: Criminology, like other multi-disciplinary fields, begins to isolate itself from sociology. – Thesis 3: Criminology is not a discipline, as it does not have an intellectual core. – Thesis 4: Criminology’s isolation from sociology comes at great cost. – Thesis 5: As criminology closes itself off from other academic disciplines, including sociology, it opens itself up to extra-scholarly influences, especially those of the state. It is at risk of losing its academic integrity. – Thesis 6: Concern with disciplinary credentials should be replaced by a renewed focus on intellectual ideas. In the following pages we explicate these theses and briefly introduce the subsequent articles by Short, Vaughan, Hagan, and Silbey as examples for how criminological research can gain when it remains open to sociology.

Institutional Environments and Scholarly Work: American Criminology, 1951-1993

Neoinstitutional theses are examined for the constitution of criminological knowledge during the transformation of penal regimes and the accompanying emergence of a specialized field of criminology. Effects of this reorganization, historical period, and research funding on scholarly journal publications are examined. Results are based on a content analysis of 1,612 articles published in leading journals between 1951 and 1993. Multivariate analyses support neoinstitutional ideas, as topical and theoretical foci are associated with themes suggested by the policy sector. The replication of the policy sector in academic organization tightens this association. Further, articles based on political funding are more likely to engage new preoccupations of the political sector. Theoretical conclusions drawn in the articles under study, however, are independent of institutional factors.

Crime and human rights : criminology of genocide and atrocities

Introduction How Have Governments Responded to Atrocities and Human Rights Violations? PART ONE: ARE THERE TRENDS IN CONTROLLING HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS? When Are Atrocities Crimes? How and Why Have States and Governments Been Constrained? PART TWO: WHAT CAN CRIMINOLOGY CONTRIBUTE TO (AND LEARN FROM)THE STUDY OF SERIOUS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS? Introduction How Does Genocide Unfold? The Case of the Holocaust Can Genocide Studies and Criminology Enrich Each Other? How Can Criminology Address Contemporary Atrocities? PART THREE: HOW CAN HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS BE FOUGHT? What Is the Role of Criminal Courts? How Effective Can Courts Be and What Can Help Them?

The Making of Criminal Law Norms in Welfare States: Economic Crime in West Germany

Using the cognitive mapping approach, I investigate the genesis of criminal law norms against economic crime in West Germany. Four theoretical approaches can be derived from the interaction of two dimensions: differentiation versus Marxist theory, and functionalist versus conflict-group theory. Focusing on interests, anticipated functions, and conflict lines, I analyze the argumentation structures in the judicial committee of the Bundestag concerning the criminalization of price fixing in cases of public tender. The results show that the rationalities of politicians are oriented to dominance groups and power, not policy; communicative relatedness between representatives of different political parties is low; and cognitive maps are restricted and do not indicate policy rationality but legitimatory purposes.

Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur

How do interventions by the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court influence representations of mass violence? What images arise instead from the humanitarianism and diplomacy fields? How are these competing perspectives communicated to the public via mass media? Zooming in on the case of Darfur, Joachim J. Savelsberg analyzes more than three thousand news reports and opinion pieces and interviews leading newspaper correspondents, NGO experts, and foreign ministry officials from eight countries to show the dramatic differences in the framing of mass violence around the world and across social fields. “A pathbreaking examination of the multiple international narratives around Darfur by human rights advocates, humanitarians, journalists, and diplomats. Thorough and rigorous—an essential contribution to the scholarship.” — ALEX DE WAAL, Executive Director, World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School, Tufts University “Darfur is the modern genocide that refuses to end, and this volume gives this mass atrocity the attention it deserves. It does so in highly original ways, including an unprecedented global analysis of media coverage, activism, and advocacy.” — JOHN HAGAN, John D. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and Law at Northwestern University and Co-Director of the Center on Law and Globalization at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago “Joachim Savelsberg’s engagement with the critics of the human rights regime, coupled with his analysis of media representations and their national variations (and similarities), provides a perspective that is more encompassing than anything I am aware of.” — DANIEL LEVY, Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University JOACHIM J. SAVELSBERG is Professor of Sociology and Law and Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair at the University of Minnesota. He is the coauthor of American Memories: Atrocities and the Law and author of Crime and Human Rights: Criminology of Genocide and Atrocities .

Genocide, criminology, and Darfur

Darfur and the Crime of Genocide is an extremely timely book. The genocide in Darfur, the central subject of this book, is ongoing, and the international community continues to be hesitant with its response. The book shows how grave the suffering is and what the underlying causes are. It provides shattering qualitative illustrations from interviews and sophisticated statistical analyses of the 2004 Atrocities Documentation Survey (ADS), a large-scale victimization survey initiated by the US State Department. The book is path-breaking in several respects. First, it unequivocally brings the topic of genocide to criminology and simultaneously delivers a sociologically based criminology to genocide scholarship (see also Savelsberg, 2010). Second, this book strengthens previous attempts by some scholars (such as Bill Chambliss, Stanley Cohen, and Austin Turk) to consider the state and its agents as potential criminal offenders. This notion is anything but new to genocide researchers, but it has not at all been taken seriously by criminology, which thoroughly envisions the state as a bulwark against crime, but not as a perpetrator itself. Third, the authors impressively link empirical social science with the jurisprudence of genocide. Dissecting the legal definition of genocide, they use the ADS to prove that the criteria of genocide are fulfilled. Fourth, Hagan and Rymond-Richmond show how criminological thought can be enriched by the incorporation of a ‘critical collective framing approach’ to conceptualize perpetrators and their intent at microand macro-analytical levels. The book further shows how criminology benefits from drawing on diverse specialty areas in sociology, a point others have made for the study of organizations (Diane Vaughan), law (Susan Silbey), stratification (John Hagan), sociological theory (Jim Short), networks and framing (Ross Matsueda), and the sociology of knowledge (Savelsberg) (see Crime, Law, and Social Change, 2002, 2006). Darfur and the Crime of Genocide also provides special insights when read through a sociology of knowledge lens. We here encounter (1) a theory of offending with a strong sociology of Theoretical Criminology

DIALECTICS OF NORMS IN MODERNIZATION

The frequently lamented weakening of wakening of social and law norms in modern societies is examined. After some concern about norm erosion in classical sociology, empirical social research on mass communication, industry, the military, and urban life soothed earlier concerns. Yet criminological evidence on late modern and rapidly modernizing societies, qualitative research in the sociology of culture, and quantitative lifecourse research attest to a weakening of normative standards during the second half of the twentieth century. Their findings are propelled by communitarian discourses. However, long-term historical research and some studies in the sociology of law demonstrate the growing strength of norms that regulate interpersonal violence. Contradictory evidence thus suggests replacing one-dimensional and unidirectional ideas about the impact of modernization on the strength of legal and social norms by a dialectic understanding. A set of hypotheses is developed, based on diverse literatures on organizations and the economy, culture of life course, political and social movements, and crime and the law. The hypotheses concern the dialectic consequences for the strength of norms, of the growing size of social units, growing participation in labor markets, transition of economic forms, formal rationalization of law, and the shift from a noninterventionist state to an interventionist welfare state.