Suchergebnisse

Given the desert-centric character of retributive penal theory, it seems odd that its supporters rarely discuss the undeserved losses and suffering of crime victims and the state's role in responding to them. This asymmetry in the desert-focus of retributive penal theory is examined and the likely arguments in support of it are found wanting. Particular attention is paid to the claim that offenders, rather than the state, should supply compensation to victims. Also, standard retributive accounts of why the deserving should be punished are shown to support state-supplied victim compensation.

Congress has considered adopting a program to provide a 75 percent subsidy for the costs of state programs which would give payments to the victims of criminal attacks. All victims, in state and federal jurisdictions, would be compensated for their losses, should they not have sufficient private insurance. The traditional arguments made for victim compensation are reviewed and criticized. An institutional history of the victim's role in society discusses the various forms of compensation that existed in different jurisdictions. The distinction between civil law and criminal law appeared to lead to the demise of compensation by the criminal. The various forms of public compensation adopted in most Anglo-Saxon countries since the early 1960s are reviewed. After deriving an estimate of the possible costs of public victim compensation in the United States, the theory of public choice is applied to explain the origins of the political pressures for the compensation program. The theory of bureaucracy produces predictions as to the impact of the federal subsidy to state programs and with respect to the motives of the administrators of such programs. Rawlsian notions of justice provide a proper perspective for a consideration of equity in a democratic setting. The application of such a paradigm of justice does not, contrary to the traditional views on equity, generate a compensation program of the nature of the one considered here. A program designed to be just and to provide equal treatment for equal victims would also be based on some criterion of efficiency. The moral hazard problem is discussed with respect to public compensation. A simple economic model is developed to display the possible inefficiency of the compensation program as currently proposed. Finally, the growth of crime and the decline in punishment over the last three decades are explored. If there has been a collective loss of will to enforce the laws and punish the law-breakers, victim compensation may be nothing more than a perverse response to the problems generated by a change in behavioral standards with respect to crime. ; Ph. D.

Afroza, a Bangladeshi woman who worked for sixteen years without getting paid and was not allowed to go home to visit her family. Keni, an Indonesian woman whose employers injured her with a hot iron, leaving disfiguring third-degree burns all over her body. Kartika, an older Sri Lankan woman whose employers made her work around the clock without pay, shaved her head to humiliate her and gouged pieces of flesh out of her arm with knives.These are some of the women whose faces and stories still haunt me after ten years of investigating human rights abuses against migrant domestic workers in Asia and the Middle East.

In recent years, numerous states have established programs to compensate victims of violent crime, and efforts to enact a national victim compensation law continue. One of the major obstacles to positive legislative action on victim compensation programs has been the lack of reliable estimates of the potential costs of such programs. In this article, a series of compensation program models with varying eligibility criteria are examined. Data from a variety of sources—victimization surveys, the Uniform Crime Reports, and existing state compensation programs—are brought together to determine the effects of differing statutory criteria on the coverage and costs of possible national victim compensations programs. Program model recommendations are made and policy issues are discussed.

Discusses issues of fairness in distribution of financial benefits by the government's Victim Compensation Fund (VCF) to surviving family members of those killed in Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.