Overview,
Part 6: Emerging Moral & Ethical Issues
This section
explores not just emerging ethical concerns, but additional topics frequently
not included in Criminal Justice: cyberlaw, privacy & surveillance, child
protection in a wired world, crime and policing in virtual communities, media,
and televising executions.
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Author, Title &
summary |
Criminal Justice
Ethics topics and pages |
Cyberlaw: The
Constitution & Freedom in Cyberspace
Much can be learned
from studying moral problems that have existed long enough to be the
subject of considerable thought and reflection. Yet society is changing
rapidly, driven by evolving technological capabilities. A substantial
challenge is to identify new moral issues and make sense of how old
moral understandings may or may not apply to new situations. The
readings in this section were chosen because they describe novel and
challenging situations that require moral judgments; they describe
significant moral issues that are neglected in the traditional scope of
criminal justice ethics, and start the difficult process of applying
accumulated wisdom to new generations of problems. Although this section
is the final one in Criminal Justice Ethics, we hope it is a
starting point for the study of problems we must face to establish
ethical communities in real life and to ensure that social justice
remains an important principle as technology changes out lives in
unprecedented ways.
The first reading is by
Harvard law Professor Lawrence Tribe and entitled "The Constitution
in Cyberspace: Law and Liberty Beyond the Electronic Frontier."
Tribe is well known for his scholarship on the Constitution and its
interpretation. This article is the text of a keynote address he gave at
a conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy. He describes some of
the recent problems and outlines a useful series of principles about the
Constitution that can help with its application to computer
networks.
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Privacy and
Surveillance
One of the main concerns with technology
is how increasingly sophisticated databases and record-keeping pose a
threat to individual privacy. Jeffrey Reiman uses the example of the
Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems – where people are passive
passengers in cars moved more efficiently by computer direction – to
explore this issue in, “Driving to the Panopticon: A Philosophical
Exploration of the Risks to Privacy Posed by the Highway Technology of
the Future.” The Panopticon was a plan for a prison that involved the
extensive use of surveillance as a mechanism of control. Reiman is
concerned with forms of social control that accompany the surveillance
involved with keeping track of where people drive all the time. I
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Child Protection,
Obscenity and Freedom
If technology poses dangers to adults,
then it has even more serious potential to harm vulnerable children.
Computers open up new avenues for sex offenders to victimize children,
but the internet may also hold out potential to help by notifying
communities about offenders. Ernie Allen is the C.E.O of the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children and he debates Nadine Strossen,
President of the American Civil Liberties Union in, “Megan’s Law and
the Protection of the Child in the On-Line Age.” They start by
debating the merits of Megan’s law, which requires community
notification of sex offenders. The second debate topic is a recent
Supreme Court of Kansas v Hendricks case that allowed that
allowed the involuntary civil commitment of sex offenders when their
prison terms expired. The final topic for their debate is the
Communications Decency Act, which Congress passed to protect children
from indecency on the internet and which the Supreme Court struck down
in Reno v ACLU.
March 2003, Supreme Court upholds
Megan's Law in Smith
v Doe (Alaska Sex Offender registration Act) and Connecticut
Dept of Public Safety v Doe.
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Child
Protection v Adult Freedom
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Crime &
Governance in Virtual Communities
The next article is Julian Dibble’s
“A Rape in Cyberspace: Or, How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster
Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a
Society.” The first of many intriguing questions is the
appropriateness of the term ‘rape’ for an event in the computer chat
room – a ‘virtual’ encounter in which suffering was caused though
no one’s real life body was harmed. The second main issue is finding
an appropriate response by the virtual community to the offense and
Dibble chronicles the odd collection of cyber-characters as they create
a criminal justice system for their community. This work is part of a
growing genre called the cyber-biography and is the first chapter to
Dibble’s book, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (New
York: Henry Holt, 1998).
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Regulating
virtual communities
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Media and Reality
Crime Shows
The last two essays are about the media
because of its power to shape perceptions about crime and justice. Debra
Seagal took a job at a ‘reality-based’ police show and tells how the
show got put together in “Tales From the Cutting-Room Floor.” The
show has film crews in several cities and ‘story analysts’ like
Seagal sift through thousands of hours of tape, which provide a detailed
empirical study of police behavior. Readers should identify what they
see as the ethical issues and violations on the part of the police.
Seagal is insightful about the values that go into deciding what goes
into the program and what gets left out, including when there is too
much ‘reality’ for the ‘reality-based’ program. Her short
article speaks volumes about media ethics and the ideological
distortions in the ‘reality’ it creates.
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Media, Crime and
Criminal Justice
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Televising
Executions
People on all sides of
the capital punishment debate have advocated televising an execution and
Paul Leighton examines this idea in “Fear & Loathing in an Age of
Show Business.” Television is present in 98% of households – more
than have indoor plumbing – so a televised execution has the potential
to save lives through deterrence and undermine support for capital
punishment by exposing viewers to the ‘reality’ of executions.
Leighton tries to identify the assumptions behind such claims and data
relevant to assessing the likely effects. He also explore the
possibility that a televised execution may cause additional deaths
because of brutalization dynamics or imitation effects.
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