Crime and Punishment around the World, Volume 1: Africa and the Middle East

Crime and Punishment around the World, Volume 1: Africa and the Middle East
By Graeme R. Newman
Number Of Pages: 468
Publication Date: 2010-10-19
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0313351333
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780313351334

It is a subject as old as civil society, yet one that still fuels debate. Now the many and varied aspects of that subject are brought together in the four-volume Crime and Punishment around the World. This unprecedented work provides descriptions of crimes—and the justice systems that define and punish them—in more than 200 nations, principalities, and dependencies.

Each chapter examines the historical, political, and cultural background, as well as the basic organization of the subject state's legal and criminal justice system. It also reports on the types and levels of crime, the processes leading to the finding of guilt, the rights of the accused, alternatives to going to trial, how suspects are prosecuted for their crimes, and the techniques and conditions of typical punishments employed. Comprising a study that is at once extraordinarily comprehensive and minutely detailed, the essays collected here showcase the variety and the universality of crime and punishment the world over.

Volume 1 of Crime and Punishment around the World contains 55 individual entries for the countries making up Africa and 15 individual entries for each of the countries in the Middle East. The purpose of this volume is not to compare and contrast issues of crime and punishment in Africa and the Middle East, but simply to of er insights into developments in this area in individual countries of the two regions. Yet this mosaic of criminal justice systems will provide readers with similarities and dif erences in the evolution of the regions’ criminal justice systems and the extent to which colonial infl uences shaped the existing forms of social regulation, crime control mechanisms, and social governance. Readers will note that data are sparse and dated on many matters of crime and justice.