Intersectionality is the study of overlapping social identities and related systems of oppression, discrimination and domination. From an intersectional perspective, aspects of a person’s identity, for example race, class and gender are understood to be enmeshed. To understand how systemic injustice operates and is produced, a multi-dimensional framework which captures how forms of oppression intersect and are shaped by one another, is necessary. Although the merits of an intersectional approach in criminology have been widely shown and discussed in US scholarship, within British criminology, there have been few analyses that have implemented an intersectional lens – either explicitly or implicitly. Correspondingly, close examination of the social construction of race within the criminal justice system has been largely absent in British criminology. In the following paper, I suggest that these two developments are co-constitutive – that British criminology’s unwillingness to engage with race has resulted in the reticence towards an intersectional approach and vice versa. This is both problematic and a missed opportunity. At a time when much criminological research convenes around the intersection of race, class, religion and gender, the absence of intersectional approaches and the lack of discussion about the racializing consequences of the criminal justice system serve to stymie meaningful debate and advancement of the field.
Intersectionalities have become central to theory and research on sex, gender and crime. Viewing crime through an intersectionalities lens allows us to move beyond deterministic views of the relationship between social structures and offending by emphasizing that structures of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality weave together to create a complex tapestry of opportunities and motivations that shape variation in crime and violence across groups and situations. In this essay, we propose a "choice within constraint" framework that focuses on how multiple, interlocking inequalities come together to shape micro-level interactions while also allowing room for agency in how people choose to respond to social and structural opportunities and constraints. More specifically, we cull insights from qualitative studies to build a framework emphasizing how individuals’ active engagement with intersecting cultural meanings of gender (masculinities and femininities) explain variability in decisions to offend across and within hierarchies of sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age.
Too little consideration has been given to conceptualizing race within mainstream criminological scholarship. One consequence of this oversight is the existence of a stale debate over the causes of racial disparities in crime and criminal justice outcomes. This article draws upon intersectionality to present an historical analysis of the policing of African Americans. The article argues that the concept of dehumanization helps explain the structural inequalities that produce crime within African American communities and the presence of racism within law enforcement agencies. The discipline may advance research in this area by adopting a constructionist racialization framework.
This article analyzes narratives of violence based on interviews with 43 marginalized young Danish people. Their narratives reveal that violence is not only experienced as singular, dramatic encounters; violence is also trivialized in their everyday lives. By drawing on anthropological perspectives on everyday violence, we propose a sensitizing framework that enables the exploration of trivialized violence. This framework integrates three perspectives on the process of trivialization: the accumulation of violence; the embodiment of violence; and the temporal and spatial entanglement of violence. This analysis shows how multiple experiences of violence—as victim, witness, or perpetrator—intersect and mutually inform each other, thereby shaping the everyday lives and dispositions of the marginalized youth. The concept of trivialized violence is a theoretical contribution to cultural and narrative criminology research concerned with the everyday experiences of living with violence.
In light of the current spike in opioid addiction in upper middle-class white populations, we examine addiction treatment discourses on the webpages of public methadone clinics and private rehabilitation facilities through a critical theoretical lens. While both discourses exercise social control over opioid-addicted clients by regulating their everyday practices, we find classed differences in these discourses when they are aimed at differently socially located populations. Private treatment discourses trust clients to be led to a state of self-governance through a holistic transformation of ‘mind, body, and spirit’, while public clinics’ websites frame patients as unruly bodies that must be chemically rendered docile through medication before they can return to everyday life.
This article reports primary archival data on the colonial penal history of British India and its reconfiguration into the postcolonial Indian state. It introduces criminologists to frameworks through which postcolonial scholars have sought to make sense of the continuities and discontinuities of rule across the colonial/postcolonial divide. The article examines the postcolonial life of one example of colonial penal power, known as the criminal tribes policy, under which more than three million Indian subjects of British rule were restricted in their movements, subject to a host of administrative rules and sometimes severe punishments, sequestered in settlements and limited in access to legal redress. It illustrates how at the birth of the postcolonial Indian state, encompassing visions of a liberal, unfettered and free life guaranteed in a new Constitution and charter of Fundamental Rights, freedom for some was to prove as elusive as citizens as it had been as subjects.
This article explains why an understanding of deviant leisure is significant for criminology. Through reorienting our understanding of ‘deviance’ from a contravention of norms and values to encompassing engagement in behaviour and actions that contravene a moral ‘duty to the other’, the new ‘deviant leisure’ perspective outlined here describes activities that through their adherence to cultural values inscribed by consumer capitalism, have the potential to result in harm. Using the ideological primacy of consumer capitalism as a point of departure, we explore the potential for harm that lies beneath the surface of even the most embedded and culturally accepted forms of leisure. Such an explanation requires a reading that brings into focus the subjective, socially corrosive, environmental and embedded harms that arise as a result of the commodification of leisure. In this way, this article aims to act as a conceptual foundation for diverse yet coherent research into deviant leisure.
Across the globe, the phenomenon of youth gangs has become an important and sensitive public issue. In this context, an increasing level of research attention has focused on the development of universalized definitions of gangs in a global context. In this article, we argue that this search for similarity has resulted in a failure to recognize and understand difference. Drawing on an alternative methodology we call a ‘global exchange’, this article suggests three concepts—homologies of habitus, vectors of difference and transnational reflexivity—that seek to re-engage the sociological imagination in the study of gangs and globalization.
This article discusses the role played by citizens who acquire firearms for defensive purposes in the governance of security in Latin America. Do states possess the capacity to enforce formal-legal regulations or do citizens participate in the governance of security autonomously? Does the behavior of armed citizens correspond with the strategies and goals defined in security policies? The analysis concludes that firearms facilitate a behavior which delegitimizes authorities and harms state security policies. This role is more frequent in Latin America due to the legitimacy deficits of authorities and the lack of information regarding firearms and users, which hinder state capacities to control armed citizens from a distance. Their conceptualization in scenarios of regulated governance is therefore problematic, since their behavior evades state control frequently and with ease. These citizens are therefore better conceptualized under a nodal governance model.
One by one, UK public institutions are being scandalized for corruption, immorality or incompetence and subjected to trial by media and criminal prosecution. The state’s historic response to public sector scandal—denial and neutralization—has been replaced with acknowledgement and regulation in the form of the re-vamped public inquiry. Public institutions are being cut adrift and left to account in isolation for their scandalous failures. Yet the state’s attempts to distance itself from its scandalized institutions, while extending its regulatory control over them, are risky. Both the regulatory state and its public inquiries risk being consumed by the scandals they are trying to manage.
This article proposes a new theoretical model for studying family involvement in youth delinquency cases in juvenile court. It argues that before we can assess the family’s effect on case outcomes, we must first have a clearer understanding about the process by which family involvement is formed to consider the myriad factors that go beyond the idea of a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ parent. Based on qualitative data on families in New York City Family Court, this article shows how family involvement is not a predetermined factor but rather, the result of the institutional process itself as shaped by the family’s interactions with court staff as well as the youths’ behaviors and interactions with parents and staff.
There is perhaps no experience in late modernity more universal than boredom. This analysis therefore responds to Ferrell’s call to take boredom seriously in the study of crime and crime control. Our analysis of boredom draws from three separate qualitative analyses of police detectives, computer hackers, and prisoners serving life sentences to reveal boredom’s influence across the criminological spectrum. Drawing from cultural criminology, this study frames boredom as a social condition that works in a dialectic with excitement. It rests betwixt and between the nuances of everyday life and saturates the periphery of experience among the three groups studied. Boredom is thus described as an inseparable component of the dynamics of crime and crime control under late modernity.
This article examines the enactment of community treatment orders (CTOs) in Alberta, Canada to illustrate how civil law is used to constitute and govern psychiatric patients in the community. I argue that the logic of CTOs constitutes the psychiatric patient as a fractured subject who is simultaneously capable/incapable of making medical decisions and at risk/risky. These paradoxical characterizations highlight how depictions of rationality and choice are contingent on consenting to a pharmacological regime designed to normalize these patients. This construction functions to eliminate opportunities for rationally informed types of non-compliance and promotes hospitalization as the only way to manage harmful, risky and non-conforming individuals. I contend that CTOs are a flawed instrument of regulation that cannot manage ‘legally’ capable but non-compliant individuals.
A decade has passed since Jock Young and I published ‘Cultural criminology: Some notes on the script’, the opening article of a special edition on cultural criminology for Theoretical Criminology. This ‘sequel’ article looks back on developments in the field during the intervening decade as well as responding to some of the criticisms that have emerged in the same period. In particular, it addresses the following critical concerns: that cultural criminology has an inherent romanticism towards its object of study; that it fails to consider or incorporate broader gender dynamics in its analysis; and that cultural criminologists are unable to formulate any meaningful policy measures other than non-interventionism. In responding to these criticisms the article highlights some of the subtle yet important conceptual reconfigurations that have occurred in cultural criminology as it continues to consolidate its position within the discipline.
In this article, we analyze the politics of emotions within the occupational culture of correctional officers by focusing attention on how sex offenders are constituted as objects of fear and disgust. We draw on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 100 Canadian men and women with experience working as correctional officers in provincial prisons (e.g. New Brunswick, Ontario, Alberta, Nunavut, Prince Edward Island) to understand how sex offenders are viewed within their occupational culture. Utilizing an interpretive hermeneutic approach, this article analyzes Canadian correctional officers’ interpretations of sex offenders. We show the effects of sex offenders’ construction as objects of fear and disgust, in terms of their identities and positionality in the general prison population, and the level of protection and services they receive while in prison.
The central purpose of the article is to explore the psychic components of the early pains of imprisonment described by male and female prisoners serving very long mandatory life sentences for murder. While there is a strong tradition of documenting prisoners’ adaptations to ‘life inside’, little work in prisons sociology explores how life-sentenced prisoners, specifically those convicted of murder, reactively respond and adjust to the early years of these sentences. Having outlined prisoners’ descriptions of entry shock, temporal vertigo and intrusive recollections, we draw upon a Freudian terminology of ‘defence mechanisms of the ego’ to argue that suppression, denial and sublimation represent key ways of ‘defending against’ (rather than ‘adapting to’) these experiences. We suggest that the particular offence–time nexus of our sample—the specific offence of murder combined with a very long sentence—helps to explain these defensive patterns.
Actuarial risk/needs assessments exert a formidable influence over the policy and practice of youth offender intervention. Risk-prediction instruments and the programming they inspire are thought not only to link scholarship to practice, but are deemed evidence-based. However, risk-based assessments and programs display a number of troubling characteristics: they reduce the lived experience of racialized inequality into an elevated risk score; they prioritize a very limited set of hyper-individualistic interventions, at the expense of others; and they privilege narrow individual-level outcomes as proof of overall success. As currently practiced, actuarial youth justice replicates earlier interventions that ask young people to navigate structural causes of crime at the individual level, while laundering various racialized inequalities at the root of violence and criminalization. This iteration of actuarial youth justice is not inevitable, and we discuss alternatives to actuarial youth justice as currently practiced.
Fight pages are user-generated Facebook pages dedicated to hosting footage of street fights and other forms of bare-knuckle violence. In this article, I argue that these pages exemplify an emergent and under-researched online phenomenon that may be termed antisocial media: participatory webpages that aggregate, publically host, and sympathetically curate footage of criminalized acts. To properly apprehend the implications of antisocial media for the mediation, distribution, and consumption of footage of criminalized acts, we must be attentive to the specificities of their architecture, their affordances and, increasingly, their personalization algorithms, which tailor the content a user receives to reflect their inferred preferences. This article therefore analyses the ‘technological unconscious’ of Facebook to demonstrate how the interactivity and personalization of the site’s information landscapes have the potential to reinforce or amplify fight page users’ often-harmful attitudes towards violence.
This article aims to expand interpretations of the representational and spectatorial politics of images by investigating what Wacquant has termed ‘law-and-order pornographies’. By this, he refers to images of crime and punishment accorded signifiers of the pornographic and the prurient in order to describe the fusion of the erotic and the punitive. The first part of the article brings into conversation the fields of porn studies and visual criminology. It examines more closely what is at stake in imbuing crime images with the grammar of the pornographic. The second part of the article argues that the application of the pornographic to images of law and order has been refracted back onto the sphere of adult entertainment, in particular, the phenomenon of ‘revenge pornography’.
Beckett and Murakawa conceptualize the ‘shadow carceral state’ as institutions deriving their authority from administrative and civil law that dole out punishment in conjunction with the penal state. This concept enriches criminological inquiry by expanding the boundaries of what punishment work entails. Left unexplored are the contributions of memory institutions such as penitentiary, prison and jail museums intersecting with the penal state that bolster the latter’s power to deprive liberty and inflict pain. Based on an analysis of three Canadian penal history museums, we illustrate how Correctional Service Canada mobilizes federal prison labour and other involuntary prisoner contributions, as well as agency staffing and resources to naturalize punishment. After examining this symbiosis between punishment and its memorialization, we argue for a conception of the shadow carceral state that includes cultural entities and processes which reproduce state control as a dominant way of responding to criminalized conflicts and harms.
Extending the burgeoning body of work on the penal tourism industry, this project investigates how slavery is forgotten and remembered at a US plantation prison. Through a case study of Angola, I explore if and how the prison’s plantation history is acknowledged at the prison rodeo and arts and crafts festival, commemorated in museum exhibits, and discussed in prisoner writings. My analysis reveals the contested nature of Angola’s history and the place of slavery (and racial inequality more generally) in it. In an act of racial violence, the administration tells a story of progress that disregards slavery along with its parallels to the present. On the other hand, some prisoners resist this narrative and evoke memories of slavery in protest of their current circumstances. I conclude with a discussion of what this struggle over Angola’s, and the nation’s, history might mean for the prospect of penal reform.
This article examines the everyday operation and politics of Indigenous patrols, community-run initiatives with formal agendas that focus on keeping young people safe and preventing contact between young people and the state police. Specifically, it presents fieldwork findings and interview data conducted over three years on various patrols across New South Wales, Australia. In this article, patrols are used as a lens through which to critically examine contemporary issues in the policing of Indigenous Australian communities and as a way of exploring what it means to decolonize the institutions and activities of policing. The research findings demonstrate the complexity of processes of decolonization and raise broader questions concerning how knowledge is produced about Indigenous communities, both by governments and within academia.
The concept of the ‘million dollar block’ refers to the spatially concentrated urban origins of the US prison population, most of whom come from a handful of neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. Visualized through a series of maps charting home addresses alongside financial costs of imprisonment, the million dollar block has emerged as a powerful rhetorical umbrella for bipartisan collaboration on prison reform. This article critically tracks the way the million dollar block, as both a cartography and a discursive formation, has travelled politically over the past decade. Finding parallels with the ‘neighborhood effects’ discourse within urban studies, I suggest the million dollar block similarly functions to cast poor and racialized urban spaces primarily in terms of criminogenic risk. I describe how the discursive cartography of the million dollar block, despite its reformist intentions, serves a neoliberal model of prison reform, rationalizing increased carceral state intervention in urban space.
The phrase proof of life describes visual evidence meant to prove a kidnap victim or prisoner of war is alive. As developed here, proof of death describes a similar technique of seizure and display practiced by hunters, native warriors, soldiers and narco-traffickers meant to denote hunting prowess, domination and death. This article elaborates upon these representational practices, extending them to "police trophy shots", the police practice of displaying large sums of money, illicit drugs, weapons and other seized materials. In the context of precarious late-capitalist economies, trophy shots as proof of death usefully reveal how police are actively involved in seizing the means of subsistence and administering, displaying and celebrating everyday domination and death.
Prior research consistently documents that prisons are emotionally fraught places where successful adaptation depends, in part, on prisoners’ abilities to calibrate their emotional expressions and display strategies. Yet these accounts have largely overlooked theoretical insights from the psychological literature on emotion which can develop our understanding of exactly how and why prisoners regulate their emotions. By combining Gross and Thompson’s component model of emotion regulation with recent interview data (N = 16) from a medium security men’s prison (HMP Moorland), this research draws three conclusions. First, prisoners manage emotion by attending to different components of the emotion model (i.e. through situation selection, attention deployment and response strategies). Second, attempts to regulate emotion are often hampered by the unique challenges of close confinement and prison rules. Finally, emotion management may be influenced by both ‘hedonistic’ and ‘utilitarian’ goals: the latter may explain situations where prisoners harness ‘negative’ emotions (such as anger and fear) to achieve long-term aims such as health and social conformity. The implications of this research are twofold: it offers a way beyond dramaturgical models of prison life, while also offering suggestions which could promote the emotional health of prisoners.
On any shift a police officer might be filmed by some combination of public or private surveillance cameras, including the cameras of individual citizens, activists, journalists, businesses, and a range of police-controlled cameras. This loosely coordinated camera infrastructure is part of the broader transformation of policing from a historically "low visibility" to an increasingly ‘high visibility’ occupation. This article reports on the findings of a participant-observation study of how police officers understand and respond to this transformation. We identify three distinct orientations, and highlight the multifaceted and contradictory relationship between police officers and cameras. The study raises questions about the extent to which camera technologies represent a straightforward way to "police the police".
For Loïc Wacquant ‘neoliberal penality’ is epitomized by the ‘penal state’ in the USA. As a decentring of this assumption, this article examines the 2003 ‘cult’ memoir Marching Powder, Rusty Young and Thomas Mcfadden’s account of the five years that Mcfadden, a British cocaine smuggler, spent in San Pedro prison La Paz in the late 1990s, where he became famous for organizing ‘prison tours’ for foreign backpackers. Marching Powder offers a vision of the extreme end of neoliberal penal logic whereby Bolivia displaces the USA as the site of a possible neoliberal ‘extreme’ as San Pedro becomes a synecdoche for an alternative neoliberal penal order. Drawing on debates from critical criminology and tourism studies, I suggest that as the correlate of the prison tours which it continues to promote, Marching Powder feeds the touristic desire for the spectacle of punishment.
Trafficking natural objects and trafficking cultural objects have been treated separately both in regulatory policy and in criminological discussion. The former is generally taken to be ‘wildlife crime’ while the latter has come to be considered under the auspices of a debate on ‘illicit art and antiquities’. In this article we study the narrative discourse of high-end collectors of orchids and antiquities. The illicit parts of these global trades are subject to this analytical divide between wildlife trafficking and art trafficking, and this has resulted in quite different regulatory structures for each of these markets. However, the trafficking routines, the types and levels of harm involved, and the supply–demand dynamics in the trafficking of orchids and antiquities are actually quite similar, and in this study we find those structural similarities reflected in substantial common ground in the way collectors talk about their role in each market. Collectors of rare and precious orchids and antiquities valorize their participation in markets that are known to be in quite considerable degree illicit, appealing to ‘higher loyalties’ such as preservation, appreciation of aesthetic beauty and cultural edification. These higher loyalties, along with other techniques of neutralization, deplete the force of law as a guide to appropriate action. We propose that the appeal to higher loyalties is difficult to categorize as a technique of neutralization in this study as it appears to be a motivational explanation for the collectors involved. The other classic techniques of neutralization are deflective, guilt and critique reducing narrative mechanisms, while higher loyalties drives illicit behaviour in collecting markets for orchids and antiquities in ways that go significantly beyond the normal definition of neutralization.
This article develops an analytical framework for analysing the legitimacy of law enforcement responses towards rule-breaking ‘global elites’, in particular multi-national corporations implicated in transnational corporate bribery. While international anti-bribery laws and norms converge cross-jurisdictionally, enforcement contexts and responses can diverge formally creating dilemmas over how to establish the relative legitimacy of different enforcement frameworks. This article draws on a threefold framework proposed by David Beetham for understanding legitimacy (i.e. legality, normative validity, legitimation) which it considers in relation to the contingent cultural contexts of enforcement of two jurisdictions, Germany and the UK, before identifying key necessary minimum requirements of legitimate enforcement that can inform cross-cultural analysis. The article suggests the proposed framework provides an alternative to current evaluative measures used by international anti-corruption organizations.
Management fraud is often explained through wealth-maximization paradigms. This article invokes a different approach, namely a behavioural one, and argues that fraud may happen as a consequence of failures in the decision-making process. Relying on extensive evidence in the case of Parmalat, it maintains that this fraud was not brought about by the desire of the CEO, chairman and founder to maximize his economic goals, but was rather a consequence of his failure to produce an objective description of reality. This was induced by a number of behavioural mechanisms such as self-deception, managerial hubris, emotions and the ‘endowment effect’. This article also contributes to a broader debate on the rationality of economic actors and its limits, and sheds light on the seeds of potential crises contained within genuine Schumpeterian entrepreneurs.
School shootings and other attacks that indiscriminately target victims pose special challenges for explanation. Their rarity, enigmatic psychology, and media appeal make it difficult to define the phenomena-to-be-explained in ways well suited for discovering persuasive etiological processes. Here theory in criminology has an especially valuable role to play. Working from general principles for interactively defining the problem to be explained and for developing explanatory hypotheses, I offer an explanation of ‘intimate massacres’ as the upshot of three contingencies: the pursuit of a point of no return; a project of destroying one’s personification in a given place; and a compelling desire to transform emotional chaos into a crystallized line of irresistible action. Once the motivation in the foreground of intimate massacres is understood, the relationship of these events to biographical and social ecological background factors will be comprehended in ways that contest the associations often suggested by folk sociology.
The aim of this article is to stimulate a critical dialogue about the implications of northern criminologists working to promote their research abroad. It accounts for why attempts to generate impact on an international scale may prove problematic and illustrates potential pitfalls by analysing the content and discourses featured in a toolkit for evidence-based crime prevention developed for the Inter-American Development Bank in 2012. The example prompts important and timely questions about the practical and discursive implications of northern attempts to influence policy and practice in the South. The article concludes by accounting for the importance of reflexivity as a strategy for limiting this harm-generating potential and for fostering discursively representative policy deliberations.
Research on the role of narrative and identity in desistance from crime tends to rely on interview methods. This article argues research and theory on desistance and interventions for addressing offending would be enriched by the qualitative analysis of interactions between criminal justice practitioners and service users. This approach is illustrated by applying discourse analysis and conversation analysis to video recordings of a groupwork programme for addressing offending behaviour. The analysis shows that: (1) service users may exhibit ambivalence to pro-social identities; (2) practitioners may orient to this resistance and encourage positive change; (3) other group members’ change narratives constitute resources to support desistance. This illustrates how an interactional approach to desistance can enhance understandings of practice and change processes.
The Federal Sentencing Guidelines, developed by the United States Sentencing Commission in the 1980s, appear to exemplify the turn from individualization toward aggregated, rationalized risk management that ostensibly became hegemonic in the late 20th century. In this article, we challenge that presumption by building on Harcourt’s (2007) argument that penal actuarialism emerged as part of the individualization project rather than as a repudiation of it. We trace how ‘criminal history’ came to be the primary mode for capturing defendant characteristics in the Guidelines formula, and delineate how time became the unit of quantification to transform criminal history into ordinal measures of current culpability. We draw three lessons from this case study: about the durability of old practices and logics; about how the individual penal subject lives on in sentencing regimes like the federal Guidelines system; and about the metrics of time and history as ways of knowing the juridical subject.
In contrast to much of the literature in this field, rather than focusing on the nature and aetiology of riots, in this article I investigate why riots do not happen. During times of widespread disorder there are some locations that do not fall prey to rioting themselves despite apparently sharing many of the features of the places where significant disorder is found. Why? Focusing on the 2011 England riots—though the arguments developed here have international application – I use two case studies involving semi-structured interviews with key informants in two such locations to reflect on why riots do not happen. Initially drawing on Waddington’s ‘flashpoints’ model, I argue that it was primarily matters at an interactional level that appear to have been crucial in the absence of riots in these particular cases. In order to facilitate a more detailed analysis at this level in particular, I propose some elaboration of the flashpoints approach, using Reicher’s ‘social identity’ model, as the basis for understanding the nature of police–crowd and police–community interaction.
This article explores the psychoanalytic construct of annihilation anxiety in order to develop a more thoroughgoing engagement between criminological theory and contemporary psychoanalysis. Though a few criminologists have commented on crime, scapegoating and retribution using classic psychoanalytic ideas, we bring Hurvich’s current empirical work on annihilation anxiety to the discourse. Beginning with his definition of annihilation anxiety as ‘fears of being overwhelmed, merged, penetrated, fragmented, and destroyed’, we apply Hurvich’s measures to reactions to crime and insecurity and interpersonal, collective and international crime. We discuss doing criminology interpretively, applied to the dynamic connections between crime and reactions to it, including political and policy responses. We conclude that criminologists could and should help distinguish between potential and imminent threats, to advance a post-positivist approach to crime and other security threats. We argue that such an approach moves criminology toward a social science more humane and pragmatic for its conscious engagement with unconscious fears harboured amidst the purportedly rational calculi of justice.
Current criminological interest in the boundaries of penality has done much to shed light on the definition and meaning of punishment. Even the central case of punishment, its aims and purposes are contested, so it should not surprise that the boundaries are also disputed. As states seek to evade the criminal process and its protections by resort to civil and administrative measures, the line between formal and informal criminal penalties blurs. In Europe, the courts have sought to reassert the protections of the criminal process by looking behind the labels to insist on substance over form in deciding what is a punishment. In so doing, they have re-affirmed the boundaries of penality as a vital means of providing protection against arbitrary government. Examining these turf wars reveals a constitutional struggle over the very authority of the state to punish.
Law has become a principal axis of racialization amidst the neoliberal restructuring of urban spaces. This article tracks how processes of racialization materialize through practices of civic activism related to crime and urban danger in a gentrifying neighbourhood of Chicago. Focused on a neighbourhood weblog used to share information about the security of the area, this article tracks how neighbourly practices of textual production and circulation, which are facilitated by the blog, engender racial relations of observation, surveillance and displacement across the virtual and material spaces of the neighbourhood. This article illustrates how racial concerns about crime play a critical role in reconstituting and delimiting the public dimensions of urban spaces.
This paper explores the meanings and motivations of self-injury practices as disclosed in interviews with a small group of female former prisoners in England. In considering their testimonies through a feminist perspective, I seek to illuminate aspects of their experiences of imprisonment that go beyond the ‘pains of imprisonment’ literature. Specifically, I examine their accounts of self-injury with a focus on the embodied aspects of their experiences. In so doing, I highlight the materiality of the emotional harms of their prison experiences. I suggest that the pains of imprisonment are still very much inscribed on and expressed through the prisoner’s body. This paper advances a more theoretically situated, interdisciplinary critique of punishment drawn from medical-sociological, phenomenological and feminist scholarship.
This article examines the ways in which sustainability discourses intersect with carceral policies. Building new prisons to ‘green’ industry standards; making existing prison buildings less environmentally harmful; incorporating processes such as renewable energy initiatives; offering ‘green-collar’ work and training to prisoners; and providing ‘green care’ in an effort to reduce recidivism are all provided as evidence of ‘green’ strategies that shape the experience of prisoners, prison staff and the communities in which prisons are located. Although usually portrayed positively, this article proposes an alternative, potentially more contentious, interpretation of the green prison. In the context of mounting costs of incarceration, we suggest that green discourses perversely are fast becoming symbolic and material structures that frame and support mass imprisonment. Consequently, we argue, it may be the penal complex, rather than the environment, which is being ‘sustained’. Moreover, we suggest this is a topic worthy of attention from ‘green criminologists’.
Theories of desistance increasingly acknowledge the need to engage with political and economic discourses beyond the criminal justice system. This article turns to the critical theory of Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser and others to explore the relevance to criminology of the concepts of recognition and redistribution. Interview data from a Scottish study of youth offending and desistance illustrate the potential of these ideas in promoting desistance among young people in transition. The article concludes that desistance requires the restructuring of wider economic and social policy to ensure social justice for marginalised young people.
The advent of ‘Big Data’ and machine learning algorithms is predicted to transform how we work and think. Specifically, it is said that the capacity of Big Data analytics to move from sampling to census, its ability to deal with messy data and the demonstrated utility of moving from causality to correlation have fundamentally changed the practice of social sciences. Some have even predicted the end of theory—where the question why is replaced by what—and an enduring challenge to disciplinary expertise. This article critically reviews the available literature against such claims and draws on the example of predictive policing to discuss the likely impact of Big Data analytics on criminological research and policy.
This article presents a theoretical examination of victims’ (N = 28) experiences when trying to rebuild a victimization-free identity after having experienced multiple years of severe intimate partner violence (IPV). Narratives reveal experiences of victim-blaming attitudes when seeking help from informal and general formal support sources, which suggest that victims of IPV do not meet the criteria of the ‘ideal’, innocent victim worthy of ongoing formal and informal support. Drawing on criminological theories of redemption and desistance, in combination with victimological theories around social stigma and construction of the ‘ideal victim’, the study finds that victims often feel they have to redeem themselves as worthy of empathy in order to access ongoing support. These misplaced expectations of ‘desistance’ with the victim rather than the perpetrator highlight that the social stigma associated with IPV goes beyond the private nature of this type of violence and extends to victim behavior and decision making.
This article examines how fear of crime and safekeeping are constituted as part of the same dispositif of control which subjectifies (produces a specific form of self) and which perpetrates spatial and social injustice. Problematizing how imperatives for safekeeping are constituted, this article outlines the role of the abject and anxiety about pollution and disorder in the production of knowledge about public spaces, of the self, and of the other. I draw on data collected from qualitative interviews with young women aged 17 in the UK about their experiences of fear of crime, safety, belonging, exclusion and well-being in public spaces. By conducting discourse analysis on their talk, this article posits that exclusionary notions of class, race and gender construct part of how some young women produce knowledge about fear of crime and safety. This research has implications for better understanding the social cost of contemporary knowledge about what is safe and what is fearsome in public space.
Restorative justice has been the subject of much theoretical criminological debate and policy innovation. However, little consideration has been given explicitly to issues of temporality and the challenges they raise. Yet, at its heart, restorative justice provides a rearticulated understanding of the relationship between the past and future; one that seeks to marry otherwise tense and ambiguous dynamics of instrumental and moral reasoning, along with risk-based and punitive logics. This article explores a number of dimensions in which questions of time, timing and time-consciousness are implicated in conceptions and practices of restorative justice. It highlights the social, plural and contested nature of time and temporalizations with relevance to restorative justice. It points to new lines of enquiry and analysis with inferences for the implementation of restorative values and conceptions of justice. It concludes with reflections on the multiple temporalities inferred in shifts of scale in the application of restorative justice.
Communications technologies are being used in varying ways to perpetrate and extend the harm of sexual violence and harassment against women and girls. Yet little scholarship has explored the uses of communications technologies, to support reporting, investigation and prosecution of sexual assault, nor indeed less formal mechanisms of justice. In this article, I contend that communications technologies are not simply new tools for conventional formal justice, but rather that these technologies are mediating new mechanisms of informal justice outside of the state, in turn challenging meanings of justice in western liberal democracies. In so doing I employ concepts of technosocial practices operating in counter-public online spaces, to explore the potential (and limits) of communications technologies as mediators of rape justice.
This article examines the enduring ways that racial politics are masked by discourses of place and family in the history of juvenile justice in the USA. The tropes of place and family have been invoked since the inception of the USA’s juvenile justice system and have influenced the processes of policing, removal, and return, even as the latest incarnation of reforms focus on building juvenile justice facilities and alternatives to incarceration within urban areas. By pointing to recent manifestations of this rhetoric in New York, the article identifies the thread that links these claims together: the desire by social control agents for submission by the primarily impoverished and young people of color who defy legal authority.
This article brings the concept of incorporation as used in studies of citizenship into the analysis of the reception of ex-prisoners by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I introduce the concept of ‘prisoner incorporation’ to illustrate the ways in which NGOs, tasked with reentry work through devolution policies, include ex-prisoners as citizens. I use data from policy and organizational documents, interviews with staff at 18 NGOs, and program observations to demonstrate that incorporation varies by religious and political orientation and the receipt of Department of Corrections (DOC) funding. I distinguish between NGOs focused on ‘classic reentry’, which emphasizes treatment and work-focused economic incorporation, and those focused on ‘broader incorporation’, in which domestic labor, culture, religion, and politics warrant the inclusion of ex-prisoners as citizens in particular communities. Based on the results, I reconsider arguments that NGOs have a limited ability to shape the citizenship of criminalized people.
Expressions of masculinity in prison are most often characterized as being structured in response to an environment that encourages displays of stoicism, bravery, physical prowess and violence/aggression. However, we found that the antagonistic, precarious and risk-prone environment of the prison shapes prisoners’ behaviours and the constitution of ‘normative’ and hegemonic masculinities in more nuanced ways than prior research suggests. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 56 male parolees, we explored how these men perceived and responded to risk while incarcerated, as well as how prison masculinities are linked with experiences and management of risk to their personal (legal, physical and emotional) safety. In this article, we focus on how prisoners mobilized and negotiated their masculine subjectivities to handle the uncertainty of imprisonment and the various risks they encountered in prison. We argue that penal risks and prison masculinities are mutually constitutive; risk is linked to perceptions of physical and emotional vulnerability, which shape prisoners’ masculine embodiment. Simultaneously, prisoners try to respond to uncertainty and perceived risk in ways that present their masculinity as empowered rather than submissive. Our findings advance the conceptualization of prison and hegemonic masculinities, penal environments and risk/uncertainty.
To date, much of the analytical scholarship on policing in Africa has centred on non-state actors. In doing so, it risks neglecting state actors and statehood, which must be understood on their own terms as well as through the eyes of the people they supposedly serve. This article seeks to develop our theoretical and empirical understanding in this respect by exploring the contexts in which citizens seek to engage state police in Nigeria and South Africa. In doing so it highlights three particularly important uses that police contact may serve, that are currently being overlooked. State police can permit, authorize or limit crime control performed by others through informal regulatory intervention. They can exercise a unique bureaucratic power by opening a case which is valued as a record of right and wrongs to be used in the negotiation of everyday life, not simply as a means to legal prosecution. And finally, taking action ‘off the books’, the police can exercise a coercive power that can be termed ‘police vigilantism’, which citizens may try to harness for their own ends. We therefore argue that we should recognize the continued high public demand for the services of state police forces even in contexts where they fall short of expectations, and more closely analyse the ways in which people utilize and help to reproduce the police forces they condemn.
Increasingly, state crime scholarship frames criminality as a social property that attaches to particular illegitimate state practices through a mediated process of struggle from below. Building on this foundation, the following article presents a comparative study of two cases—using a range of primary materials—where sabotage was deployed by social movements to stigmatize, dramatically, illegitimate state–corporate conduct. In order to understand the symbolic and practical significance of this exchange, a theory of indifference will be developed. It will be argued that in the cases observed sabotage acted as a device which social movements could employ to impose a sense of consequence on organizational actors otherwise indifferent to, and alienated from, the significant harms their operations’ produced.
Scholarship focusing on barriers to the employment of ex-prisoners has paid little attention to the linkages between mass incarceration and the structural conditions of low wage labor. In contrast, this article considers how decisions to hire ex-prisoners occur in the context of a highly segregated labor market. The research is based upon interviews with employers who are willing to hire persons exiting prisons. These employers were queried about their motivations for hiring, perceptions of their employees with criminal records, and their beliefs about fairness and justice. The interviews show that a strong motivating factor for hiring was finding a "good worker to do a bad job", but also that decisions were influenced by employers’ common sense norms derived from surviving at the bottom of the economy. Despite the willingness of employers to offer "second chances" and make small allowances, these factors were insufficient to counteract the obstacles to sustainable employment.
For the concept of moral panic to avoid approaching its expiration date, it is essential to include novel approaches and perspectives. This article aims to augment the under-developed theoretical grounding of the sociology of moral panic by expanding on Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory. It begins by offering a critical appraisal of recent developments in moral panic studies and explains how Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and hysteresis might help overcome the inherent weaknesses of moral panic research. This novel approach is put into empirical work to exploring the rise of a moral panic about the dangers humanitarian aid workers face in the post-Cold War era. It shows that, while today’s threats do not radically differ from those of the past, the widespread sense of concern and anxiety about humanitarian insecurity is a response to effects of hysteresis inside the field of humanitarian aid.
The 2010 BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill was one of the worst environmental disasters in the United States. The deviant actions of state and corporate actors involved in the Gulf of Mexico spill are not unique, but instead are symptomatic of a problem rooted much deeper in the US oil and gas industry. Building on Michalowski and Kramer’s Integrated Theoretical Model of State–Corporate Crime, this article explores the industry as a level of analysis. Early studies of white-collar crime that examined criminality within industries tended to approach the problem from the individual level and failed to consider the role of government in shaping the structural conditions of an industry. This article introduces the concept of "criminogenic industry structures" and examines the historical role of the federal government in shaping the criminogenic conditions of the offshore oil drilling industry that resulted in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
In this article we revisit one of the classic works of the 1960s on crime and delinquency in poor communities: Kenneth B Clark’s Dark Ghetto. Our exploration reveals its insights to be extremely relevant today both in understanding the roots of the self-destructive violence that tears at those communities and in thinking about how to combat the structural conditions and individual mentalities that generate it. Beyond the specific theoretical and methodological lessons that can be gleaned from Dark Ghetto, Clark’s work serves as a much-needed illustration of how theoretical insights derived from intensive qualitative research that is attuned to political, historical, and economic realities—and their human consequences—can enhance criminological theory, and align with progressive movements for social change.
The politicization of crime challenges theoretical and empirical criminology, while drawing the discipline into politics of criminal social control. This complication and complicity is considered in the case of state organized race crime, and especially its "slow violence", where victimization is attritional, dispersed, and hidden. Criminology is not merely compromised here—or limited in theoretical and empirical reach—but complicit, contributing to under-regulated racial violence rationalized in large part by the criminalization of race. The discipline might contribute to increased understanding of state organized race crime, and lessen its role therein, with greater commitments to critical race research and teaching.
Bringing together insights from macro-level theory about "mass imprisonment" and micro-level case studies of contemporary punishment, this article presents a mid-level agonistic perspective on penal change in the USA. Using the case of the "rise and fall" of the rehabilitative ideal in California, we spotlight struggle as a central mechanism that intensifies the variegated (and sometimes contradictory) nature of punishment and drives penal development. The agonistic perspective posits that penal development is fueled by ongoing, low-level struggle among actors with varying amounts and types of resources. Like plate tectonics, friction among those with a stake in punishment periodically escalates to seismic events and long-term shifts in penal orientations, pushing one perspective or another to the fore over time. These conflicts do not occur in a vacuum; rather, large-scale trends in the economy, politics, social sentiments, inter-group relations, demographics, and crime affect—but do not fully determine—struggles over punishment and penal outcomes.
This article explores gendered narratives of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in apartment buildings. Drawing on primary data from a study with a diversity of women in Toronto, Canada, the authors foreground women’s experiences with apartment living and situate it as a profoundly feminized domestic arrangement. Consideration of the workings of CCTV in apartment buildings troubles both security and surveillance studies, especially in the context of the dominant legal and ideological configuration of ‘the home’. The apartment is at once ‘the home’ and neighbourhood; it is simultaneously a private space that must be secured from external threats and a public space that inhabitants have little power to secure.
In this article I apply Richard Rorty’s view of pragmatism to contemporary criminology through the lens of ontology and criminological theory, epistemology and methodological decision making, and irony in the neo-liberal academy. Although pragmatism in criminology is often used to refer to practical criminal justice suggestions drawn from conservative theories of criminology, in this article I argue that this singular use is an affront to pragmatism’s philosophical pedigree. Consonant with pragmatism, this article includes practical suggestions about how Rorty’s approach can be adapted to teach criminological theory, advance mixed methods research, and acknowledge the dangers inherent in careerist criminology.
Scholars examining prisoners’ "secondary adjustments" have often emphasized prisoners’ "resistance" to the prison regime, particularly their agentic acts that frustrate the prison’s rules, goals, or functions. While these agency-centered accounts offer an important corrective to the understanding of prisons as totalizing institutions, they may go too far. I argue that scholars have overused (and misused) the term "resistance" to describe certain prisoner behaviors, creating both analytical and normative consequences. Instead, I suggest the concept of "friction" more accurately describes the reactive behaviors that occur when people find themselves in highly controlled environments.
This article argues that police studies should draw on the sociology of punishment to better understand state pain-delivery. Whereas penal theorists commonly assess the pain and punishment of inmates in relation to wider social sentiments, police theory has yet to regard police violence and harm in the same fashion. As a result, police scholars often fail to address why the damage caused by public constabularies, even when widely publicized, is accommodated and accepted. Adapting the idea of ‘punitiveness’ from penal theory allows some explanation of how the public views injury and suffering caused by the police by illuminating the emotions and sentiments their actions generate.
Resilience describes the capacity of an individual, community or ecosystem to mitigate the impact of a shock or disturbance and then to recover in its aftermath. In recent years, resilience has become the favoured solution for a range of contemporary policy problems including natural disasters, mental health issues and terrorism. However, the concept is understood far less in criminology and counter-terrorism than in other fields such as psychology and natural hazards studies. This article compares resilience-building measures in the Prepare and Prevent strands of CONTEST, the UK government’s national strategy for countering terrorism. Its aim is to explore the benefits and dangers of resilience according to how the concept is defined and applied across different contexts.
Although the falling crime rates in the 1990s surprised criminologists, it was not the first time crime had declined. There was a ‘crime drop’ in England in the 1920s. When crime did not rise as expected following the Great War, the government closed half the prisons, and Edwin Sutherland came to investigate ‘England’s empty prisons’. To conduct his analysis, Sutherland relied on work by SK Ruck, and between them, they came up with most of the leading explanations now used by criminologists. They considered the police and prisons, the economy and household security. They also discussed the psychological conditions of low-crime societies, the ‘sense of security’. Drawing on their unpublished material from archives in New York and London, the discussion here examines what can be learned about contemporary analyses of the crime drop of the 1990s. Overall, this article argues for the importance of theory in analysing the statistics of falling crime and how historical studies of crime trends can be useful in developing this theory.
Despite growing interest in cybercrime, the Internet still poses significant challenges for criminological understanding. Its penetration of everyday life is relevant to many crime types, not just cybercrimes. This article examines the ways in which criminal commitments form using the Internet and related communication technologies that empower the individual relative to the group (gang, mafia, etc.). We argue this occurs in two ways. First, it allows individuals to limit involvement in particular associations or networks. The concept of digital drift is used to explore this element. Second, it allows them to commit crimes more autonomously through facilitating self-instruction. Drawing on Goffman, the importance of studying the encounter as the basic unit of a criminal interaction order is proposed.
This article seeks to sketch out alternatives to neoliberal penality by seeking to undermine the four institutional logics of neoliberalism as identified by Loïc Wacquant (2009). It begins by critically analysing the potential value of public criminology as an exit strategy, suggesting that whilst this approach has much value, popular versions of it are in fact rather limited on account of their exclusion of offenders themselves from the debate and their optimism about the capacity of existing institutions to challenge the current punitive consensus. It suggests that a genuinely ‘public’ criminology should be informed by an abolitionist stance to both current penal policies and the neoliberal system as a whole. This may be the best means of truly democratizing penal politics.
In this article we draw upon our recent research into security consumption to answer two questions: first, under what conditions do people experience the buying and selling of security goods and services as morally troubling? Second, what are the theoretical implications of understanding private security as, in certain respects, tainted trade? We begin by drawing on two bodies of work on morality and markets (one found in political theory, the other in cultural sociology) in order to develop what we call a moral economy of security. We then use this theoretical resource to conduct an anatomy of the modes of ambivalence and unease that the trade in security generates. Three categories organize the analysis: blocked exchange; corrosive exchange; and intangible exchange. In conclusion, we briefly spell out the wider significance of our claim that the buying and selling of security is a morally charged and contested practice of governance.
This article repositions sovereignty on the basis of a study of recent regulatory approaches to organized crime and money laundering. The spread of techniques across administrative domains is traced through organizational documents and interviews with practitioners, and related to an observed trend toward integration between policing research and regulation research. The same trend, however, assigns sovereignty to the periphery. A richer notion of sovereignty is recovered through a reading of the classical theorists, and used to tease out the articulation of sovereignty in current state strategies. Theorizing ‘sovereignty at the center’ as opposed to ‘sovereignty at the periphery’ challenges basic assumptions about the relationship between the state and economic activity, and in particular about the utility-oriented character of state violence.
In May 2012, police shot Rudy Eugene, a black man of Haitian decent, dead as he ‘ate the face’ of a homeless man on a deserted Miami causeway. Because of the strange gruesomeness of the attack and other similar violent acts, some in the media declared that a terrifying pandemic—the ‘zombie apocalypse’—had arrived. While this particular case may be yet another instance of mediated panic, we suggest cries of ‘zombies’ and ‘cannibals’ should not be dismissed as simply sensationalistic, irresponsible journalism. Rather, we see this case as a powerful example of the cultural production of a spectral sort of monstrosity that obscures and justifies police violence and state killing. As such, we argue that all of the contemporary ‘zombie talk’, usefully reveals how the logics of security, state violence and punitive disposability are imagined and reproduced as livable parts of late-capitalism.
There is as much diversity within the private security industry as there are differences between public and private security providers. Whereas comparisons of the two modes of delivery have kept criminologists and economists fairly busy over the years, internal variations have not attracted the same level of interest. In the current environment, binary classifications such as the public/private security dichotomy might be too generic to capture the broad spectrum of unique security arrangements being adopted by various organizations. The aim of this article is therefore to offer an alternative conceptual framework that can account for the broad range of mechanisms responsible for the diversity of private security arrangements observed in late modern societies. The term ‘security regime’ defines the convergence of internal forces and environmental constraints that determine the conditions under which security is produced and exchanged by an organization. The four key dimensions (focus, risks, utility and constraints) that characterize a specific security regime were identified from interviews conducted with more than 50 security managers. The security regime approach should expand our knowledge of the various causes that facilitate, empower or hinder public–private relationships.
The growth in US incarcerated populations has produced unintended negative consequences for other justice system agencies. The community corrections field is faced with two related problems stemming from prison growth: (1) significant growth in populations under supervision and (2) populations with higher needs for service. I apply a theoretical framework adapted from organizational sociological research to address change and stasis as isomorphic processes. Criminologists rarely situate the community corrections field within broader theoretical perspectives. Instead, correctional researchers have studied the emergence, adjustment, and use of prisons in modern society, with community supervision considered a part of institutional corrections. I argue that contemporary explanations for correction policies need to be refined to account for specific trends within the community corrections field.
In 2011, Rio Tinto Alcan, one of the world’s largest producers of aluminium, announced the closure of the smelter at Lynemouth, Northumberland, north-east England. The plant, a major local employer, finally closed in March 2013. This article examines global concerns about environmental emission standards and the costs of compliance. This plant’s closure is a success in green terms. However, where closure is officially considered a compliance option, costs to deprived communities are high. From a (green) victimological perspective, the article contemplates the hidden costs of closure on already deprived local and regional communities. The discussion focuses on how green crime and green compliance creates victimization and reflects on the moral and ethical challenges this presents for a green criminology.
Qualitative research is published in criminology journals at a frequency far smaller than that of quantitative research. The question is ‘Why?’ After reviewing existing theories of the discrepancy, this article draws on the paradigm of Blackian sociology, Jacques and colleagues’ theory of method, and Black’s theory of ideas to propose a new theory: compared to quantitative research-based ideas, qualitative ones are evaluated as less important—and therefore published less often in journals—because they place the subject closer in cultural distance to the source and audience, though for that same reason they are also evaluated as being more attractive. Implications for criminology are discussed.
There is a growing body of research concerned with the prevalence, antecedents and impacts of interpersonal workplace violence which causes significant psycho-social injuries. Contributions have been made by sociologists, psychologists, organizational behaviourists and management functionalists. However there has been a paucity of attention by criminological theorists or empiricists despite the well-documented costs for victims, bystanders, employers and the public purse. Drawing from key themes within existing literature, this article applies constructive criminology principles and normalization theory to extend the understanding of interpersonal violence within the workplace and challenges to prevention. This is not an argument for greater application of criminal law but rather an argument that such violence and consequent psycho-social injuries be recognized as a source of victimization and a matter of justice.
This article presents a cultural analysis of HBO’s drama series, The Wire. It is argued here that, as a cultural text, The Wire forms a site of both containment and resistance, of hegemony and change with recourse to the regulation of illicit drug markets. In this sense The Wire constitutes an important cultural paradigm of drug policy debates, one that has significant heuristic implications regarding both the present consequences and future directions of illicit drug policy. Ultimately, it is demonstrated below that through its representations of the tensions and antagonisms characteristic of drug control systems, The Wire reveals larger predicaments of governance faced by neoliberal democracies today.
This article examines demand for guns for personal protection in the USA, South Africa, and India. To make sense of pro-gun sentiment across these different contexts, I argue that gun owners and carriers who arm themselves for personal protection represent a particular kind of ‘responsibilized’ subject. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of sovereign power and governmentality, I develop a theory of the ‘sovereign subject’. This is a political rationality marked by private individuals’ capacity and desire to perform sovereign functions that the state has typically monopolized, specifically the exercise of legitimate, lethal violence. I conclude the article by suggesting four characteristics (historically precarious state monopoly on sovereign power; legality of civilian use of guns; preponderance of criminal guns; and US influence) that may encourage demand for guns in high-crime societies.
Based on the understanding that traditional forms of justice are characterized by ‘affective authoritarianism’, Lawrence W Sherman has argued that a new system of emotionally intelligent justice is needed to nurture the expression of positive, beneficial emotions; and to control negative, detrimental ones. The policy approach advocated to advance this progressive agenda of penal reform involves critical theory, institutional innovation and empirical research focused primarily on the alternative paradigm of restorative justice. Irrespective of the ‘truth’ or ‘fairness’ of emotionally intelligent justice, this article argues that, because emotions are constructed through socio-cultural circumstances and are integral to ethical judgements which legitimize traditional forms of justice in contemporary public life, managing emotions in criminal justice settings requires reform that is not only critical and experimental, but also public and popular.
There is a significant conceptual divide between criminological theories that treat offenders as rational agents who freely choose their actions and those that portray offenders as individuals whose behaviour is determined by external forces. Recently, research into desistance from crime has produced a more complex and nuanced account of crime causation which acknowledges the interplay between agency and structure. Yet, while the concept of agency is frequently invoked in contemporary discourse, the variety of definitions and measures employed by researchers makes it difficult to establish a clear and consistent picture of its role. This article attempts to address this deficit by evaluating the contributions of agency-centred theories of desistance. An integrated framework, which aims to consolidate existing knowledge about agency and provide additional insights into its role in desistance, is then proposed.
The corporate fraud narrative suggests that misleading and inaccurate accounts engender misplaced confidence that robs creditors and investors alike. Yet, this view underplays nested ambiguities in business accounts first in the (im)possibility of accuracy in a set of accounts and second in the constituent figures themselves as embodying uncertain monetary value. This article analyses these phenomena and argues that confidence, nurtured by governments through their regulatory practices, is essential to maintaining perceived integrity to both in spite of continuing ambiguity. This management of confidence is engendered through the interdependent yet contested relationships between government, business and professional elites. Corporate fraud is embedded within these relationships and hence difficult to dislodge without threatening the productiveness that business promises and government craves. Criminalization of corporate fraud deflects attention to one of these actors, the business and its directors, without clear recognition of the role played by government itself.
This article examines the motivations, techniques and potential consequences of the governance of teenage sexting. I examine the over-representation of white, middle-class, heterosexual, female sexters, and abstinence from sexting discourses in the ‘Respect Yourself’ child protection/crime prevention initiative. This campaign, I suggest, exploits slut shaming in an effort to responsibilize teenage girls for preventing the purported harms that may flow from sexting—including humiliation, sexual violations and criminalization—for both themselves and their peers. I examine this responsibilization effort through the lens of critical whiteness, queer, girlhood/young feminist and porn studies’ theorizations of the politics of sexual respectability and sexual subjectification and argue that this campaign simultaneously: reveals anxieties about the decline of the moral authority of the white, middle-class, heterosexual nuclear family; constitutes certain teenage girls’ unintelligibility as sexual subjects; and, undermines teenage girls’ ability to challenge a normative sexual order in which they are often blamed extra/legally for their sexual victimization.
Accounts of prison life consistently describe a culture of mutual mistrust, fear, aggression and barely submerged violence. Often too, they explain how prisoners adapt to this environment—in men’s prisons, at least—by putting on emotional ‘masks’ or ‘fronts’ of masculine bravado which hide their vulnerabilities and deter the aggression of their peers. This article does not contest the truth of such descriptions, but argues that they provide a partial account of the prison’s emotional world. Most importantly, for current purposes, they fail to describe the way in which prisons have a distinctive kind of emotional geography, with zones in which certain kinds of emotional feelings and displays are more or less acceptable. In this article, we argue that these ‘emotion zones’, which cannot be characterized either as ‘frontstage’ or ‘backstage’ domains, enable the display of a wider range of feelings than elsewhere in the prison. Their existence represents a challenge to depictions of prisons as environments that are unwaveringly sterile, unfailingly aggressive or emotionally undifferentiated.
One of the primary components of state stability and order is that citizens consider those in power just and legitimate. Citizens who perceive the state as legitimate are likely to consider its institutions a valid source of morality and social control. Theoretically, legitimacy should play an important role in criminal offending across countries. This link between state power and citizens—that is, legitimacy—has the potential to be an important social mechanism connecting state actions to individual criminal behaviours. With this in mind, this article explores how political legitimacy might affect levels of crime and violence across countries. A lack of legitimacy may lead citizens to (1) reject the monopoly of physical force to employ self-help and/or (2) withdraw commitment from institutions, breaking down social control.
This article examines the symbolic function of hate crime law. By challenging the norms that sustain and promote prejudice, hate crime law seeks to contribute to claims for social justice on behalf of victim groups. This symbolic function cannot be achieved by legal rules alone. Drawing upon theories of emotional thinking, the article argues that the moral work of hate crime laws is dependent upon the capacity of victim groups to engender compassionate thinking that helps reconfigure perceptions of them as dangerous, illegitimate or inferior Others. This analysis seeks to contribute to our understanding of the processes through which some minority communities fall short of the image of ideal victims capable of contributing to the moral claim embedded in hate crime law.
Based on fieldwork conducted in a cognitive-treatment setting for young men in jail, this article argues that contemporary rehabilitation efforts not only manifest theories of disciplinary and risk society, but also embody ideologies of the self and economic relations that are consistent with neoliberal capitalism. Drawing from Marxist theories of penality, we show that correctional officers seek to reconfigure the subjectivity of young incarcerated men in ways that adjust them to economic inequalities. For instance, they frequently portray labor markets as accessible and readily offering stable employment opportunities. When correctional officers acknowledge structural limitations and racial inequality, they are likely to dismiss such concerns by insisting upon the power of individual choice to overcome social barriers. We consider why correctional officers embrace neoliberal ideologies and note some implications for future research.
This article engages with the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence of the UK Criminal Justice Act 2003, a prominent measure against ‘dangerous offenders’, in a ‘substantively political light’ (O’Malley, 1999). It provides an interpretation based on policymakers’ beliefs and traditions. I argue that the perceived need for the IPP sentence and its ultimate form was the result of New Labour ministers’ reliance on the Third Way political ideology and its implications for criminal justice policy. In addition, in terms of the policymaking process, I suggest that the ‘Westminster tradition’ conditioned policymakers’ actions in relation to the IPP sentence, in ways that were crucial to its outcome. The article concludes with an examination of the moral significance of these beliefs and traditions by reference to Bauman’s discussion of the dangers of a modern ‘garden culture’.
In this article we take stock of a recent moment in penal history in Victoria, Australia, where agencies have implemented gender responsive policies to address the disproportionate growth in women’s prison numbers, and in particular the overrepresentation of women constructed as ‘culturally diverse’. We draw upon abolitionist and intersectional frames to provide a theoretical critique of this political event. Our analysis extends beyond the unitary frame of gender, which has until recently dominated critiques in this area, to highlight the ways in which racializing logics are reproduced through such policies and practices. We explore the implications of the adoption of the criminological notion of pathways through the language of liberal feminist reform, which signifies a reinvestment in the myth of individual rehabilitation. The consequences of these discursive practices include the reproduction of pathologizing and risk-focused practices that can only yield more racializing, interventionist and expansionist responses within correctional spaces.
Youth justice in England and Wales is delivered by multi-agency Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) which are expected to work in partnership with social welfare agencies to provide ‘holistic’ support that targets the interrelated personal and social needs of young offenders associated with their risk of reoffending. This article engages with criminological debates which attempt to interpret the hybrid assemblages of penal governance that have characterized late modernity in order to theorize why these partnerships have had only limited success in addressing the social context of youth crime. It will be argued, evidenced by an analysis of research data on YOT partnerships in action, that these assemblages are ‘classed’ in so much as they act as conduits for strategic elements which articulate powerful class interests (along with those of other social forces) to be translated into practice. Such strategic elements sustain class inequality and deny social justice to young people in conflict with the law.
While the surveillance practices of the private security industry have become a central preoccupation of scholarship, the surveillance power of the state has been greatly enhanced through multiple procedures of information gathering to support practices of control and management. In this article, we draw upon two different research projects to examine the surveillance work of the police and other public sector groups working in partnership, as well as the activities of police officers operating covertly. In so doing, we expose the often unintended, but nevertheless invasive and comprehensive power of state agencies to gather details of individuals in the residual working class, within mundane and innocuous policing practices. Our central argument is that these developments have occurred alongside a displacement of social policy through crime control, and represent both an acceleration and intensification of existing state approaches to the surveillance of the problematic individual. This extensive project of targeted surveillance, we contend, also calls into question current claims that the state is moving towards a system of managing deviant populations.
This article contributes to recent discussions around intersectionality, a framework that captures how two or more axes of subordination overlap in practice, and its utility for criminology. Even though intersectionality offers an analytic through which to account for discursive dimensions of marginalization, feminist criticisms of intersectionality’s proliferation across disciplines suggests that the concept needs to be revisited. After contextualizing intersectionality’s tenets, we trace how feminists have addressed related issues through a transnational lens and then consider how these adaptations can help inform future criminological inquiry. We conclude with the argument that a critical re-reading of intersectionality not only enables a focused critique of mainstream criminology, but also encourages an innovative feminist praxis within the discipline.
Drawing on David Garland’s (1996, 2001) observations about the ‘limits of the sovereign state’, we seek in this article to develop a critical understanding of the recent response in the USA to ‘notario fraud’—an unlawful act committed when a non-lawyer poses as an immigration attorney. While efforts to protect immigrants from fraud on their surface represent a counter to recent anti-immigrant policies, our analysis of materials distributed by what we term an anti-notario fraud apparatus suggests that such activity amounts to neoliberal governance. Specifically, we study immigrant advocacy groups’ discourse around the issue and argue that anti-notario efforts are akin to responsibilization. We also study how law enforcement officials discuss the issue and theorize how a one-dimensional framing of notarios as villains supports the neoliberal regime by protecting the state’s sovereignty to manufacture what Nicholas De Genova (2002) has called ‘deportability’.
This article investigates the power/knowledge relations between contemporary penal government and criminological theory. Based on an analysis of the strategic case of the Netherlands, the emergence of what can be called neoliberal communitarianism is discussed. In relation to the ‘penal welfarism’ it succeeds, neoliberal communitarianism provides a rationale of governing that allows a greater amount of complexity precisely because it consists of a paradoxical set of doctrines, discourses and techniques. This involves an emphasis on both ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘community’, protecting market and community by tightening social control, law and order and the production of rational self-controlling individuals while excluding the cultural and biological ‘risk citizen’. The article illustrates the incorporation of criminological theories as policy underpinnings, and it explicates how criminological theories can be placed in the discursive space of neoliberal communitarianism.
Recent interest in the securitization of immigration has highlighted a significant shift in immigration enforcement, from border regulation to the control of territorially present populations. Emphasis has focused on the production of migrant illegality and strategies that criminalize undocumented workers. In this article, we shift the focus of analysis to examine how legal residents convicted of non-immigration-related criminal offences are also actively produced as deportable subjects. Drawing on research examining records of appeal cases involving Jamaican nationals in removal proceedings consequent to a criminal conviction, we illustrate how deportability is produced by the deportation process itself, through legal practices that assert migrant criminality and alienage. We suggest ‘criminality’ not only comes to represent migrant subjectivity, at the expense of other forms of subjectivity based on belonging and territorial presences, but acts as affirmation of alienage.
This article explores selective drug law enforcement practices in a single municipality, San Francisco, where racial disproportionality in drug arrest rates is among the highest in the United States. We situate this work in the vein of recent case-study examinations done in Seattle, Cleveland, and New York to help build a more nuanced picture of how the local geography of policing drugs produces racialized outcomes. Within this, we examine how historically embedded local politics shape the varied styles and structures of policing that result in racially discriminatory enforcement patterns. Our goal is to begin sketching out a robust framework of ‘place’ as an orientation for examining discretionary local policing practices, especially as they impact marginalized groups and communities of color.
This article engages the dynamic role of the crime image and more specifically the mug shot, in a contemporary anti-methamphetamine media campaign known as ‘Faces of Meth’. Understood here as a pedagogical policing program, Faces of Meth attempts to deter methamphetamine use through graphic ‘before meth’ and ‘after meth’ images of the faces of white meth users. Our objective is not to evaluate the actual effectiveness of these fear appeals. Rather we discuss how the photographs are largely structured by and embedded within already existing cultural anxieties about the figure of ‘white trash’, reflecting both the dominance and precariousness of white social position.
Contemporary scholarship on punishment, politics and society generally treats democratic politics and crime policy as a dangerous mix. In this view, when crime comes onto democratic political agendas, it generates perverse political incentives that result in politicians pandering to and/or manipulating mass publics bent on harsh punishment. In this article, I argue that an examination of violent victimization complicates this conventional wisdom. Using violence as a framework, I challenge three fundamental assumptions about the relationship between democracy and crime. From there, I suggest how different democratic institutional arrangements might facilitate broader public participation in crime politics, and how that participation can lead to promoting less, rather than more punishment.
A new punitive approach in the French prison sector has emerged as a result of the European Court of Human Rights and the French administrative courts exerting pressure on prison governors in response to the complaints made by prisoners’ families, the demands of human rights groups and the requirements of human rights protection bodies. By publicizing cases of suicide and using strategic litigation based on the right to life, human rights groups and barristers have put the prison administration under pressure. The resultant risk management policy and death-avoidance approach are not linked to the decline of the welfare state, as claimed by new penology scholars, but rather to a shared risk management thinking between the prison administration and human rights groups.