{"title":"Making sense of penal difference: Political cultures and comparative penology","authors":"Louise Brangan","doi":"10.1177/14624745221117521","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221117521","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I argue that if we are to make sense of why punishment differs between jurisdictions, then we should focus on the political cultures that shape penal practices. Political culture is conceived of here as a ‘practical consciousness’, made up of implicit and express cultural values and political commitments. Using the comparative case studies of Ireland and Scotland (from 1970–1990s), the paper tries to show that by taking the time to recover and interpret the beliefs and ideas that frame penal policymaking, we will be better able to illuminate and make sense of cross-national penal patterns. And using the leverage of cross-national contrast and analysis, we can also better understand punishment and its place in each society.","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"25 1","pages":"934 - 954"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47112652","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"More than monsters: Penal imaginaries and the specter of the dangerous sex offender","authors":"Robert Werth","doi":"10.1177/14624745221118883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221118883","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing from ethnographic data, this article examines parole personnel's imaginaries of dangerous sex offenders: individuals perceived as especially aberrant, predatory and irredeemable. While the dangerous sex offender is perceived as a monster, this article contends that we also need to attend to the spectral characteristics ascribed to this subject. For parole personnel, the dangerous sex offender is a monster, but this is a monster that haunts; a monster that represents a spectral figure. The spectrality of this figure manifests in two overlapping ways. First, parole personnel perceive the dangerous sex offender – as a person – as a ghostly figure: a mobile, roving, nearly omnipresent individual that is difficult to locate or contain. Second, they perceive the threat posed by this subject – the commission of future sex crimes – as a pervasive absent presence. Even when it is not occurring, recidivism is imagined as an emergent, already unfolding event. In this way, dangerous sex offenders and their presumptive reoffending represent haunting figures that trouble the distinctions between absence/presence, visible/invisible and knowable/unknowable. Through tracing the convergence of monstrosity and spectrality, this article shows how parole personnel's imaginaries undergird the extremely exclusionary ways that they govern dangerous sex offenders.","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"25 1","pages":"977 - 997"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45771420","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What does Lawfare mean in Latin America? A new framework for understanding the criminalization of progressive political leaders","authors":"Valeria Vegh Weis","doi":"10.1177/14624745221116348","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221116348","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the origins of the term lawfare, as well as different definitions developed in the Global North and the Global South while proposing a conceptualization linked to the particularities of this socio-legal phenomenon in Latin America. Focusing on the cases of Brazil and Argentina the article deploys the notions of phycological, judicial and media warfare to analyze the different dimensions that an analysis of lawfare opens in relation to democracy, the penal system, and mainstream media. The article also explores different dimensions of lawfare and a notion in Spanish with the potential to replace the anglicism: dripping coup (golpe por goteo). Finally, the article proposes different measures to counteract lawfare in the judicial, educational, media, and social spheres. In particular, the conclusions refer to the relevance of social movements in what can be conceptualized as a “cautionary popular criminology”.","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"25 1","pages":"909 - 933"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46197949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Surviving austerity: Commissary stores, inequality and punishment in the contemporary American prison","authors":"Tommaso Bardelli, Zach Gillespie, T. L. Tu","doi":"10.1177/14624745221118345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221118345","url":null,"abstract":"Privatization and austerity measures have turned US prisons and jails into sites of financial extraction. As corrections systems have slashed budgets for essential services, incarcerated individuals are increasingly expected to cover the costs of their institutionalization, including amounts for administrative fees and legal support, and for covering basic necessities during incarceration. This article focuses on the commissary system as a central yet understudied institution of the American neo-liberal prison. It conceptualizes commissary as a double-edged institution: on the one hand, prison commissary stores—where people can purchase a wide variety of items, from extra food to small appliances—constitute a crucial mechanism for extending financial extraction inside carceral institutions, siphoning millions of dollars each year from impoverished households. At the same time, we argue, shopping at commissary allows incarcerated persons to mitigate against the punitive frugality imposed by the prison and to limit the reach of disciplinary power. Drawing on qualitative research with sixty formerly incarcerated men in New York State, and on the personal experiences of one of the authors with the New York penal system, this article reconstructs how access to economic capital functions as a mediating structure in contemporary US prisons, enabling some prisoners to negotiate carceral punishment, while leaving others fully exposed to its harmful consequences.","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"25 1","pages":"955 - 976"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46761474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: African penal histories in global perspective","authors":"Erin E. Braatz, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, S. Hynd","doi":"10.1177/14624745221109542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221109542","url":null,"abstract":"It has been over twenty years since the publication of Florence Bernault’s edited volume Enfermement, prison et châtiments en Afrique: du 19e siècle à nos jours (1999), a first of its kind collection that helped establish the field of African penal history. Since then, this field has greatly expanded (see Alexander and Kynoch, 2011; Roberts 2013; Waller, 2017) with innovative research on topics such as capital and corporal punishment (Anderson, 2005; Hynd, 2008; Gendry, 2018; Pierce, 2001; Ocobock, 2012), colonial and postcolonial prisons (Thioub, 1999; Branch 2005; Diallo 2005; Braatz 2015; Hynd 2015b; Brunet-La Ruche 2016; Konaté 2018; Machava 2019; Bruce-Lockhart 2022), prison protests (Filippi, 2012), forced and penal labour (Sene, 2004; Hynd, 2015a; Tiquet 2018), indigenous forms of punishment (Braatz 2015; Balakrishnan, 2020), political imprisonment (Alexander 2012; Branche 2014; Munochiveyi 2014; Deslaurier 2019), detention without trial (Lobban, 2021), detention, re-education or concentration camps (Elkins, 2005; McCracken, 2011; Cruz and Curto 2017, Machava, 2019), and the relationship between penal reform and prison violence (Sarkin, 2008; Gillespie, 2011). Such studies have highlighted the significant of race and ethnicity to African penal regimes, but also their gendered (Zimudzi, 2004; Bruce-Lockhart, 2014), generational (Fourchard 2011; Hynd 2018) and economic/capitalist dynamics. This scholarship has not only provided a clearer picture of penal ideas and institutions on the African continent but has also offered insights into wider questions on the relationship","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"24 1","pages":"759 - 770"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44381677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Radical right populism and the sociology of punishment: Towards a research agenda","authors":"C. Hamilton","doi":"10.1177/14624745221114802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221114802","url":null,"abstract":"The recent populist ‘explosion’ in the US, UK and Europe has pushed radical right populist movements to the centre of western politics. Given criminology's long experience of penal populism in the 1980s and subsequent decades, these developments raise important questions as to the role of sociology of punishment, and the wider discipline of criminology, in responding to far-right populism. This article aims to takes stock of the existing literature on this phenomenon with a view to proposing a tentative criminological research agenda that may contribute to our understanding of the recent rise of authoritarian politics in Europe, the UK and US. While highlighting the continued salience of the emotions in contemporary ‘security populism’, the article cautions against what has been described as a ‘pathologising’ approach to research in this area. Building on this, the paper advances an argument for a criminological research agenda based on a post-dualistic understanding of political affects that seeks to move the analytic focus beyond negativity.","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"25 1","pages":"888 - 908"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45750986","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Something in the air: Toxic pollution in and around U.S. prisons","authors":"E. Toman","doi":"10.1177/14624745221114826","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221114826","url":null,"abstract":"Toxic chemicals are released into land, air, and waterways daily. Exposure to such chemicals, however, is not equally distributed across the U.S. It is well documented that communities without agency and capital, typically economically and socially disadvantaged, are those that suffer the brunt of the impacts of a polluted environment. These impacts can have both acute and chronic health consequences, leading to lower life expectancy, higher cancer rates, and compromised immune systems. Emerging qualitative work indicates that incarcerated persons – individuals who have no agency to leave their environment – are disproportionately affected by our polluting practices. This study argues that environmental regulations across the country allow polluting industries to poison confined populations. Nationwide data from the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory is used to examine if industries geographically closer to correctional facilities emit greater amounts of toxic chemicals. Regional differences are examined as well. Results identify a pattern of harm – incarcerated persons who already have compromised health are also exposed to high levels of toxic chemicals.","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"25 1","pages":"867 - 887"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48013622","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Louise Brangan, The Politics of Punishment: A comparative study of imprisonment and political culture","authors":"John Todd Kvam","doi":"10.1177/14624745221112169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221112169","url":null,"abstract":"who cause the deaths of their foetuses or newborns?’ Milne provides some suggestions, for example, the removal of concealment of birth from the statute books and the decriminalisation of abortion. Untouched upon in the text, yet raised in my mind, was how should acts carried out by a pregnant woman, which result in the death of her foetus or newborn, be punished – if at all? Such a knotty question extends beyond socio-legal thought and is imbued with bioethical overtones pertaining to the moral status and personhood of the foetus and newborn. In short, whilst the book’s subject area may appear niche, it is situated within a much broader and timely discussion on women’s reproductive rights. It contributes to a sociological understanding of ‘good’ mother ideals and how these social norms impact real women’s lives. Ultimately, this is a feminist text and Milne is clearly advocating for improved social structures and better judicial understanding regarding crisis pregnancies. However, as she concedes, a general reordering of patriarchal society is not going to happen any time soon. Until then, Milne’s text serves to illuminate a dark corner of society in which tragedy, sexism, vulnerability and criminalisation collide.","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"25 1","pages":"1165 - 1167"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49579694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Malleable detention: The restructuring of carceral space within U.S. immigration detention","authors":"Luis A. Romero","doi":"10.1177/14624745221109539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221109539","url":null,"abstract":"The expansion of immigration detention in the United States has been attributed to policy, privatization, and anti-immigrant racialization. This research extends understandings of immigration detention's growth by focusing on how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintains the necessary space to detain migrants during this expansion. In this article, I introduce the concept of “malleable detention:” the flexible strategies and methods used to restructure space within immigration detention. I base this concept on findings from an analysis of the T. Don Hutto Detention Center - a detention site that has remained open despite various abuses, protests, and closures. Using statements from ICE officials, intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs) between ICE and local governments, government reports, nongovernmental reports, and newspaper accounts, I find that the Hutto site displayed three forms of malleable detention. Detention was made malleable through repurposing non-detention space into detention space, maintaining flexibility in the detained populations, and reconfiguring contracts that helped keep detention open. Beyond the Hutto case, the malleable detention concept extends to detention sites throughout the U.S. This provides evidence into how ICE is able to sustain enough detention space that makes the U.S. the largest detainer of immigrants in the world.","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"25 1","pages":"848 - 866"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48565228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Managing inclusion or preparing for exclusion? A critical examination of gender-responsive management of female Central and Eastern European prisoners in England and Wales","authors":"M. Tomaszewska, K. Bullock, Jon Garland","doi":"10.1177/14624745221108444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221108444","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines practitioner understandings and implementation of gender-responsive support within female prisons in England and Wales in the context of a growing emphasis on effective deportation of foreign national prisoners. Drawing on a case study of female prisoners from Central and Eastern states of the European Union (EU), we argue that the aims of gender-responsivity, designed to address women's gendered vulnerabilities to support their re-entry in the UK, are pragmatically re-shaped to accommodate the uncertainty surrounding their immigration status. We show how in practice, gender-responsive support functions at best to ‘manage’ gendered needs of women who are ‘not of interest’ to immigration authorities, and at worst to legitimate exclusion by side-lining vulnerabilities of women deemed as having ‘no right to remain’ in the UK. This occurs in the context of limited access to legal redress to challenge deportation decisions, unevenly spread resources in the female prison estate, and practitioners’ occupational cultures which emphasise paternalistic valuations of female foreign national prisoners’ femininity. We locate the findings in criminological debates about ‘gendering of borders’ and conclude with a reflection on the implications for advocacy at the time of increasingly restrictive immigration controls following the UK's exit from the EU.","PeriodicalId":47626,"journal":{"name":"Punishment & Society-International Journal of Penology","volume":"25 1","pages":"827 - 847"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2022-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42731484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}