American Punitiveness and Mass Incarceration: Psychological Perspectives on Retributive and Consequentialist Responses to Crime
A recent National Academy of Sciences Report explored the drivers of the fourfold increase in incarceration rates in the United States and provided a firm recommendation for significant reduction in incarceration rates. Policy makers representing the entire political spectrum are now publicly airing their views on the need for reform. Although public sentiment is generally favorably disposed toward reform in the abstract, when confronted with specific examples of crime, they tend to favor more punitive, retributive responses to crime. Retributive justifications for punishment that are deeply ingrained in our culture and our legal system as well as our biological and psychological make-up are a major impediment to constructive reform efforts. However, recent advances in research across neurobiological, psychological, and social levels of analysis suggest that following our retributive impulses to guide legal decision making and criminal justice policy is not only costly and ineffective in reducing crime, but unjust and increasingly difficult to justify morally. This article will draw on a body of research anchored in social ecological models of human behavior to argue for more forward-looking, consequentialist responses to crime that aim at the individual prevention of criminal behavior in the least restrictive and most cost effective manner at both the front- and back-ends of our criminal justice system.
The misjudgment of criminal responsibility.
Generally, a criminal statute must consist of two essential elements: a description of the forbidden act (actus reus) and a designation of a guilty mental state (mens rea). For a crime to be committed, an individual must commit the forbidden act with the culpable mental state. For any criminal act, both criminal liability and the possible punishment turn largely on retrospective judgments by legal decision-makers about what a defendant was or was not thinking at the time of committing the forbidden act. Given the central and foundational nature of this legal judgment, there is surprisingly little empirical study of how the mens rea construct functions. Shen and colleagues have studied the reliability of mock jurors' ability to distinguish between the various mental state categories defined in the Model Penal Code and have identified some support for jurors' ability to reliably sort "guilty minds" into their "correct" categories (Shen, Hoffman, Jones, Greene, & Marois, ). The present study builds on this work by examining mock jurors' ability to reliably and "accurately" judge a defendant's mens rea at the time of an offense under conditions reflecting how criminal jurors are tasked with judging a defendant's mens rea. It was hypothesized that folk psychology models of human behavior that generally presume a high degree of personal control and responsibility would bias individuals' judgments of others' criminal behavior in the direction of reflecting intentional and purposeful conduct. Overall, results demonstrate that, in a surprisingly high percentage of cases across many conditions, individual decision-makers are indeed likely to attribute the most culpable mental state (purpose) to defendants, even when the facts on the record are judged by legal experts to depict no more than negligent or reckless conduct.
The Area of Freedom, Security and Justice ten years on: Successes and future challenges under the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Paperbacks. June 2010
This book celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) by bringing together the views of key practitioners and policy-makers who have played an outstanding role in thinking about and shaping EU policies on freedom, security and justice. 
 
Ten years ago, the member states transferred competences to the EU for law and policy-making in the fields of immigration, asylum and border controls, and began the transfer process for criminal justice and policing. This decade of European cooperation on AFSJ policies has experienced very dynamic convergence, the enactment of a large body of European law and the setting-up of numerous EU agencies working in these domains. Such dynamism in policy-making has not been without challenges and vulnerabilities, however. As this collective volume shows, the main dilemmas that lie ahead relate to an effective (while more plural) institutional framework under the Treaty of Lisbon, stronger judicial scrutiny through a greater role for national courts and the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, better mechanisms for evaluating and monitoring the implementation of EU AFSJ law and a more solid fundamental rights strategy. The contributions in this volume address the progress achieved so far in these policy areas, identify the challenges for future European cooperation in the AFSJ and put forward possible paths for making more progress in the next generation of the EU’s AFSJ.