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Fine Art of Regulated Tolerance: Prostitution in Amsterdam

NCJ Number
175758
Journal
Journal of Law and Society Volume: 25 Issue: 4 Dated: December 1998 Pages: 621-635
Author(s)
C Brants
Date Published
1998
Length
15 pages
Annotation
This paper explores the idiosyncrasies of Dutch policy regarding prostitution, placing them in the broader framework of criminal justice and policy debates in general.
Abstract
The rise of plea bargaining has not only de-emphasized the trial as the appropriate means of settling criminal disputes; it has, more importantly, shown the limitations of orthodox critiques of bureaucratic justice. Orthodox critiques have assumed that plea bargaining violates basic adversarial principles and displaces ethical standards in favor of the values of the marketplace. What has happened instead is that the criminal justice system has been able to shift over to negotiated pleas and to base claims for legitimacy in the very adversarial and ethical standards with which orthodox critiques alleged it was inconsistent. The result is a failure of the orthodox critique to undermine the legitimacy of plea bargaining, because "adversary principles" and "ethical standards," detached from the political economy of criminal justice, are arguably consistent with bargaining even in its most bureaucratic form. This raises the question as to how the bureaucratic production of guilty pleas can be reconciled with principles of adversary justice that are directed to individual cases. The answer increasingly is that legal actors are expected to make decisions upon classes of cases against a background of coercive pressures within codes of conduct. This calls for a more radical critique that addresses the increasing tendency toward coercion of criminal defendants, whose rights and entitlements are subject to serious and continuous erosion. Defendants may be pressured into pleading guilty in a production line in which the actual relationships of power that determine decisions are obscured by a system of professional ethics. 85 footnotes

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