Two phenomena have shaped American criminal law for the past thirty
years: the war on crime and the victims' rights movement. As
incapacitation has replaced rehabilitation as the dominant ideology of
punishment, reflecting a shift from an identification with defendants to
an identification with victims, the war on crime has victimized
offenders and victims alike. What we need instead, Dubber argues, is a
system which adequately recognizes both victims and defendants as
persons.
Victims in the War on Crime is the first book to provide a critical
analysis of the role of victims in the criminal justice system as a
whole. It also breaks new ground in focusing not only on the victims of
crime, but also on those of the war on victimless crime. After first
offering an original critique of the American penal system in the age of
the crime war, Dubber undertakes an incisive comparative reading of
American criminal law and the law of crime victim compensation,
culminating in a wide-ranging revision that takes victims seriously, and
offenders as well.
Dubber here salvages the project of vindicating victims' rights for its
own sake, rather than as a weapon in the war against criminals.
Uncovering the legitimate core of the victims' rights movement from
underneath existing layers of bellicose rhetoric, he demonstrates how
victims' rights can help us build a system of American criminal justice
after the frenzy of the war on crime has died down.