Punishment & Society recent issues

Risk, responsibility and reconfiguration: Penal adaptation and misadaptation

McNeill, F., Burns, N., Halliday, S., Hutton, N., Tata, C. — 2009-08-14

This article draws on the findings of an ethnographic study of social enquiry and sentencing in the Scottish courts. It explores the nature of the practice of social enquiry (that is, of social workers preparing reports to assist sentencers) and explores the extent to which this practice is being reconfigured in line with the recent accounts of penal transformation. In so doing, we problematize and explore what we term the ‘governmentality gap’; meaning, a lacuna in the existing penological scholarship which concerns the contingent relationships between changing governmental rationalities and technologies on the one hand and the construction of penality-in-practice on the other. The findings suggest that although policy discourses have, in many respects, changed in the way that these accounts elucidate and anticipate, evidence of changes in penal discourses and practices is much more partial. Drawing on Bourdieu, we suggest that this may be best understood not as a counter-example to accounts of penal transformation but as evidence of an incompleteness in their analyses which reflects the ‘governmentality gap’ and requires the development of more fully cultural penology drawing on ethnographies of penality.

The political economy of risk and the new governance of youth crime

Gray, P. — 2009-08-14

Despite heated debate over levels of convergence and diversity, risk assessment and behaviour management have become central themes of international youth justice strategies in several jurisdictions. However such strategies represent more than a new formula for the governance of delinquent youth as they also offer a novel framework for articulating class discipline within the context of a reconfigured style of socio-political and economic leadership. Postmodern social theory has rendered old-fashioned any attempts to meta-theorize about class in criminological research and it is therefore not intended to rekindle the grand narratives generated form orthodox Marxism. Nevertheless, class inequalities, along with those generated by other social forces, continue to structure many social relations and this article will explore the complex micro-processes by which class interests are articulated in youth justice relations through the twin processes of the individualization of risk and the responsibilization of young offenders. The argument is illustrated through research on the outcomes of government sponsored education, training and employment programmes for young offenders in England and Wales.

The relevance of inmate race/ethnicity versus population composition for understanding prison rule violations

Steiner, B., Wooldredge, J. — 2009-08-14

The importance of order maintenance in prisons has generated numerous studies of the correlates to inmate misconduct. Very few of these studies, however, have focused specifically on the correlations between inmates’ race/ethnicity and prison rule breaking. Race and ethnicity could be relevant to an understanding of prison rule breaking if inmates bring their ecologically structured beliefs regarding legal authority, crime and deviance into the institutional environment. Using data from two nationally representative samples of males incarcerated in state facilities, we examined the individual-level effects of an inmate’s race and ethnicity on his likelihood of engaging in various forms of misconduct during incarceration, as well as the contextual effects of the racial/ethnic composition of inmate and correctional staff populations on levels of rule breaking. Findings reveal that the effects of an inmate’s race and ethnicity differ by offense type, and the racial/ethnic composition of inmates and correctional staff have both main and conditioning effects on levels of misconduct. Implications of these results are discussed within a social control framework.

Constructing crime, framing disaster: Routines of criminalization and crisis in Hurricane Katrina

Berger, D. — 2009-08-14

This article argues that the media frames utilized in the first month after Hurricane Katrina legitimated punishment as disaster policy through lurid reports of individual crime. The application of prevailing state policies led to a quick embrace of punitive policing and incarceration, and journalistic routines ended up supporting this process. Although journalists openly expressed their disgust with state neglect, news conventions nonetheless criminalized much of the New Orleans population and suggested militarized policing and imprisonment as fundamental to restore order. Lacking credible sources, reporters relied on rumors and helped create a racialized ‘looter class’ that aided state efforts to regain control through existing policies of mass incarceration rather than mutual aid or state welfare. Even though various media outlets recanted the more extreme elements of this coverage, the tropes they employed created a lasting effect. Building off Stuart Hall et al.’s (1978) analysis of a moral panic over mugging in 1970s England, this article examines both the conventions and consequences of this crisis coverage. The result, I argue, bolstered the existing crisis of incarceration.

Book review: Crime, social control and human rights: From moral panics to states of denial: Essays in honour of Stanley Cohen, David Downes, Paul Rock, Christine Chinkin and Conor Gearty (eds). Cullompton: Willan, 2007. xxviii + 452 pp. {pound}65.00. ISBN 9781843922285

O'Malley, P. — 2009-08-14

Things are tough all over: Race, ethnicity, class and school discipline

Kupchik, A. — 2009-06-17

Across the USA, schools have dramatically altered how they respond to school crime in recent decades, with a growing police presence and increased levels of punishments. Based on a cultural reproduction approach to understanding how students are socialized within schools, one would expect that these increasingly law-and-order-centered shifts would be disproportionately focused in schools with mostly racial and ethnic minorities and low-income youth, relative to schools with mostly white middle-class youth. To address this issue, I consider data from observations and interviews at four high schools with varying student demographics in two states. I find that although there certainly are discrepancies between schools that a cultural reproduction approach would lead one to predict, there are also substantial similarities. Students at all four schools are exposed to punitive, rule-based policies, though the effects of these similar policies are unequally distributed. Practices that were once reserved primarily for schools hosting poor students and students of color are now implemented in mostly white middle-class schools as well.

When is an offender not an offender?: Power, the client and shifting penal subjectivities

Donohue, E., Moore, D. — 2009-06-17

Despite the torrent of the punitive state, people in conflict with the law are made up as `clients' of criminal justice. This article looks curiously upon the figure of the client, positioning her as a translation of the offender who flags particular relationships of justice. While the client is nowhere to be found on the public face of punishment, she emerges in the most unlikely of places (prisons, courts) when looking at punishment's inner workings. The client, we argue, is born of the elision of managerial and consumerist discourses in order to recruit people in conflict with the law and justice workers into contemporary penal project. The subject positions of criminal justice actors (offenders and workers) are reframed such that they are all active agents in the practice of social service delivery. These translations reveal the fluidity of identities and relationships within the criminal justice system and teach us about the political strategies underlying differing argots of punishment.

Executing Charles Starkweather: Lethal punishment in an age of rehabilitation

Lachance, D. — 2009-06-17

In the 1950s, the use and popularity of the death penalty declined as penal welfarism pervaded political and academic approaches to crime control. Analysis of responses to the 1958 crimes and 1959 execution of teenage serial killer Charles Starkweather reveals, however, that the integrity of penal welfarism was badly shaken by a conflict between the political and intellectual commitments required for its maintenance. As a result, Starkweather's crime and the responses it elicited called into question the core assumptions upon which 1950s penology was based: a belief that the world was a knowable, controllable place and that a competent state could use social science to maximize social harmony. Starkweather's case ultimately reveals one impetus for the return of retributive responses to crime in political and academic circles and the re-emergence of the death penalty in the last three decades of the 20th century.

Policing after the crisis: Crime, safety and the vulnerable public

Waiton, S. — 2009-06-17

The growth of laws, surveillance and policing across British society can be linked back to changes under the Conservative governments of the 1970s and 1980s. However, despite some `authoritarian' developments at this time, it was not until Margaret Thatcher's demise, that there was a quantitative and qualitative shift in governing towards a form of `governing through crime'. Many of these developments have been associated with the rise of a right wing, or neo-liberal dynamic in society. However, this article argues that the obsession with crime, antisocial behaviour and the regulation of everyday life did not emerge as part of an aggressive form of neo-liberalism. Rather than their being an energetic politics behind these developments, it is more accurate to see the growth in law and the more direct regulation of society as a consequence of the collapse of politics on both the left and the right. Rather than competing for the conflicting political subject in society, the role of politicians now became to act as advocates for a diminished subject — the crime victim and the vulnerable public. Crime expanded as a field of governance due both to the political elite's sense of diminished capacity and control over society, and with the construction of a more fragile subject that needed ever more protections.

Explanations of American punishment policies: A national history

Tonry, M. — 2009-06-17

None of the conventional explanations why American penal policies became so severe — rising crime rates, harsh public attitudes and cynical electoral politics — are persuasive. Nor are various `conditions of late modernity' such as the limited capacities of governments, increasing population diversity or increasing insecurity and risk aversion. All these things characterized every developed country in much of the period 1975—2000 and most did not adopt drastically harsher policies. Nor are such amorphous and over-generalized notions as `populist punitiveness', `penal populism' and neo-liberalism of much use. Some things do have explanatory power cross-nationally. Moderate penal policies and low imprisonment rates are associated with low levels of income inequality, high levels of trust and legitimacy, strong welfare states, professionalized as opposed to politicized criminal justice systems and consensual rather than conflictual political cultures. For each of those factors, the United States falls at the wrong end of the distribution. The question is, Why? Four answers stand out: the `paranoid style' in American politics; a Manichean moralism associated with fundamentalist religious views; the obsolescence of the American constitution; and the history of race relations in the USA.

Should we reform punishment or discard it?: Rethinking imprisonment, Richard L. Lippke. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. The problem of punishment, David Boonin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Reiman, J. — 2009-06-17

Book review: Releasing prisoners, redeeming communities: Reentry, race, and politics, Anthony C. Thompson. New York: New York University Press, 2008. 262 pp. (including index) (hbk). ISBN 978--0--8147--8303--0

Binnall, J. — 2009-06-17

Book Review: Doing time together: Love and family in the shadow of the prison, Megan Comfort. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 256pp

Codd, H. — 2009-06-17

Book Review: Imprisoning resistance: Life and death in an Australian Supermax, Bree Carlton. Sydney: Institute of Criminology Press, 2007. 284 pp. $45.00. ISBN 978--0--97519--675--5

Minogue, C. W.J. — 2009-06-17

Book Review: Beyond the wire: Former prisoners and conflict transformation in Northern Ireland, Peter Shirlow and Kieran McEvoy. London: Pluto Press, 2008. 185 pp. (including bibliography and index). {pound}16.99 (pbk). ISBN 978--0--7453--2631--3

O'Donnell, I. — 2009-06-17

Is a conservative just a liberal who has been mugged?: Exploring the origins of punitive views

King, A., Maruna, S. — 2009-04-03

As in the adage that `a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged', many presume that punitive public attitudes are derived from the direct experience of crime and victimization. People become `fed up' with criminality and seek to strike back at lawbreakers. Social theories of punitiveness, on the other hand, typically portray punitiveness as a form of scape-goating in which offenders are just a stand-in population, masking more abstract anxieties. This survey was designed to explore both of these hypotheses with a sample (N = 940) of the British public. A multivariate analysis of survey responses finds that factors such as concerns about the economy and the state of `the youth today' account for a substantial proportion of the effect of actual crime concerns on punitiveness. Crime-related factors, such as victimization experiences or anxieties about crime, on the other hand, do not appear to be strong predictors of punitiveness in this sample.

The subjects of criminal identification

Pavlich, G. — 2009-04-03

This article analyses two late 19th-century technologies that sought to identify criminals with scientific accuracy: Alphonse Bertillon's techniques for measuring bodies and Francis Galton's composite portraits of criminal types. It analyzes the regulatory environment in England in which their ideas achieved considerable prominence, emphasizing crucial differences in the visions of `science' embraced by the two men. By highlighting their different claims to science, this article outlines their respective legacies in criminal identification arenas, and isolates unique dangers associated with each. Those dangers variously alert us to the importance of questioning a persistent, if often implicit, sentiment within much criminal justice thinking; namely, by identifying individual criminals, or criminal types, justice systems effectively address the problem of crime. Against this approach, and resonant with a critical criminology in search of less exclusionary ways to govern, the following analysis considers criminal identification not as a discovery but a creation. In so doing, it seeks to re-politicize current practices of criminalization, challenge claims to the purported scientific impartiality of criminal identification and embrace the possibility of justice beyond a dominant reflex to create criminals.

Heuristic influences over offense seriousness calculations: A multilevel investigation of racial disparity under sentencing guidelines

Kautt, P. — 2009-04-03

Discretionary decisions are integral to the Criminal Justice System, regardless of branch or stage. Often, structured interventions are introduced in an effort to control or guide discretion use. In the USA, grid-based sentencing guidelines are commonly used to channel sentencing discretion. However, despite their presence, research consistently shows that, net of legally relevant factors, significant racial disparity persists in sentencing outcomes under guideline structures. Although judicial and prosecutorial-based explanations for this abound, how the structural components of these guidelines (such as the offense seriousness axis) and the discretionary decisions related to them might contribute to this disparity have seldom been explored. Using federal sentencing data, a data-partitioning strategy and multilevel multivariate analyses, this study examines whether there are significant differences in the federal offense seriousness calculations for black and white defendants. The results suggest that Federal Probation Officers (FPO), in an effort to meet their diverse responsibilities in the time allotted, use heuristics when making offense seriousness determinations. This furnishes a previously neglected explanation for the persisting differential effects and highlights the utility of heuristic mechanisms in explaining both discretionary decisions and apparent disparate treatment by race or ethnicity in the criminal justice system.

Sex offender as homo sacer

Spencer, D. — 2009-04-03

The political and legal theory of Giorgio Agamben, specifically his concept of homo sacer, can be usefully deployed to understand the regulation and treatment of sex offenders. It is argued that the sex offender can be conceived of as a non-citizen or bare life — the homo sacer — and that this elucidates the degrees of violence and forms of abjection visited upon sex offenders in western societies. Through the institution of laws aimed at protecting communities from sex offenders, specifically community notification and civil commitment laws, there is the production of a ban, whereby the sex offender is displaced into a lawless space — a camp. In this `camp', the sex offender is subjected to GPS electronic monitoring, surgical/chemical castration and various other forms of sovereign violence at the hands of professionals and anti-paedophile vigilante groups. This article shows that in the exertion of sovereign power, where the sex offender is placed in the ambiguous terrain of the camp, there is a restoration of order and maintenance of the sacred.

Ice cream and incarceration: On appetites for security and punishment

Loader, I. — 2009-04-03

In this article, I set out a theoretical framework for investigating the relationship between contemporary consumer desires and practices and public demands for security and punishment. My organizing suggestion is that punishment-centred public responses to crime, social disorder and terrorist threats (what has been termed penal excess) are today bound up with other, widespread social practices of excess. The article outlines the questions that need to be posed, and the practices that can usefully be investigated, in a bid to advance empirical enquiry into this way of understanding contemporary penality. In so doing, it proceeds as follows: I begin with a discussion of how the concept of excess (and its close cousins) has been and might potentially be applied to the social analysis of crime and crime control. I then make a case for understanding demands for security and punishment as an appetite and consider how we might examine the coupling of such appetites with identity, the market and the State in ways that can shed new light on the emergence of excessive, insecurity-reproducing penal practices. I conclude with some brief reflections on corrosive, self-defeating effects of such practices and how one may seek to moderate or counteract them.

A culturalist theory of punishment?: Punishment and culture, Philip Smith. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 183 pp. $19.00 (pbk). ISBN 9780226766102

Garland, D. — 2009-04-03

Book review: Amnesty, human rights and political transitions: Bridging the peace and justice divide, Louise Mallinder. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008

Braithwaite, J. — 2009-04-03

Book review: Big prisons big dreams: Crime and the failure of America's penal system, Michael J. Lynch. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 257 pp. (including index). ISBN 978--0--8135--4186--0

De Giorgi, A. — 2009-04-03

Book review: Punishing persistent offenders: Exploring community and offender perspectives, Julian V. Roberts. Clarendon Studies in Criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xix + 273 pp

Hutton, N. — 2009-04-03

Book review: Governing through globalised crime: Futures for international criminal justice, Mark Findlay. Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2008

Karstedt, S. — 2009-04-03

Book review: The death penalty: A worldwide perspective, Roger Hood and Carolyn Hoyle. Oxford University Press, 2008. 504 pp. $120 cloth. ISBN--10: 0199228469

Zimring, F. E. — 2009-04-03

Book review: Race, gender, & punishment: From colonialism to the war on terror, Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin (eds). New Brunswick, NJ & London: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 232 pp. (including index). $24.95 (pbk). ISBN 0--8135--3904--8

Lucas, A. M. — 2009-04-03

Governing through crime as commonsense racism: Race, space, and death penalty `reform' in Delaware

Fleury-Steiner, B. D., Dunn, K., Fleury-Steiner, R. — 2009-01-21

This article explores momentous changes to Delaware's death penalty statute in 1991, reforms that made it one of the USA's premier killing states. Reflecting on media coverage of a high profile crime and the legislative debates that led to the law change sheds light on how static conceptions of spaces (i.e. `the dangerous city') and persons (i.e. `non-white invaders from Philadelphia') reveal lawmakers' commonsense racism as inextricably bound to such momentous legislative action. By situating the decision in the context of the intense urgency to act set in motion by a high profile racially charged crime and a taken-for-granted compliance to an aggressive pro-death legal formalism, lawmakers appeared to act in a manner that was racially neutral. However and perhaps most strikingly, the debate lacked any dissenting voices of representatives from racially aggrieved communities long neglected by the state. Such a racially insensitive rush to appear `tough on crime' reveals how Delaware lawmakers acted according to a commonsense of racialized persons, places, and channels that enforced racial hierarchy (i.e. actions that hurt minorities and favor whites). More broadly, we argue that Haney-Lopez's (2003) theory of commonsense racism helps to clarify Simon's (2007) theory of governing through crime as it applies to the `toughening' of already punitive criminal laws at the state level, if not especially the death penalty.

Punitive attitudes toward criminals: Exploring the relevance of crime salience and economic insecurity

Costelloe, M. T., Chiricos, T., Gertz, M. — 2009-01-21

This article examines whether and in what ways punitive attitudes toward criminals can be understood as having roots in two hypothesized sources of anxiety in western society. The first is the danger of crime and its salience and the second is economic insecurity. Both have been seen as sources of growing perceptions that the State is failing in its responsibility to provide for citizen's physical safety and economic security. Punitiveness toward criminals is hypothesized by some to be a way to act decisively in a time of relative uncertainty. It also serves to distinguish between the `undeserving poor' and those who are economically insecure. Interviews with 2250 randomly selected Florida residents provide the data for this study. Our results indicate that crime salience, especially fear and concern about crime consistently predict punitiveness. When economic insecurity is measured in terms of expected circumstances in the near future, it is significantly linked to punitive attitudes among white males, particularly those who are less well educated and earn less income. The results are consistent with some aspects of an `angry white male' phenomenon, particularly to the extent that those negative sentiments have a racial focus.

Anger about crime and support for punitive criminal justice policies

Johnson, D. — 2009-01-21

Previous research on the sources of punitive attitudes has largely focused on the cognitive and demographic factors associated with the desire to punish criminals harshly. This study focuses on the link between affect and punitiveness by examining the relationship between anger about crime and support for punitive criminal penalties. Using national survey data from the USA, this research shows that anger about crime is a significant predictor of punitive attitudes, after controlling for other factors such as racial prejudice, fear of crime, causal attributions for criminal behavior, and political ideology. The findings indicate the need for more research on the relationship between emotions and punitiveness.

Theorizing fines

O'Malley, P. — 2009-01-21

Given their central place as a sanction in criminal justice, the virtual absence of a theoretical literature on fines is a serious deficit. The article reviews the principal contributions to date, and argues that they suffer from a misleading conviction that sanctions are driven by production relations. To begin with, this seriously underestimates the impact of penal discourses and practice, which can better account for variations in the rise, uneven distribution and recent decline in fines' dominance as a punishment. Equally important is the failure to consider the nexus between the rise of the modern regulatory fine (for example `on the spot' fines) and the rise of consumer societies.

Accountable to what?: Professional orientations towards accountability-based juvenile justice

Ward, G., Kupchik, A. — 2009-01-21

Formal philosophical and procedural aspects of American juvenile justice have been transformed over the past half-century by `accountability' movements. Yet the meaning of accountability in juvenile justice — specifically who is to be held accountable and to whom — has varied over time making its present application unclear. In this article, we first describe two models of accountability ideals and how each developed. We discuss how traditional rehabilitative ideals were first displaced by `system accountability' reforms emphasizing fairness and youths' rights, followed by `juvenile accountability' reforms emphasizing punishment and victims' interests. We then explore how juvenile court judges, lawyers and probations officers in four states prioritize these accountability principles. While decision makers in our sample prioritize a system accountability perspective, especially as this relates to rehabilitative ideals, there is considerable diversity in orientation. Professional roles and racial identities of decision makers significantly shape their prioritization of various accountability goals.

The transfer of sentenced persons in Europe: Much ado about reintegration

De Wree, E., Vander Beken, T., Vermeulen, G. — 2009-01-21

In recent years new instruments have been developed in Europe that allow sentenced persons to be transferred to their country of nationality/origin or permanent residence, where the sentence is then carried out. The most commonly referred to ratio legis for these regulations is the reintegration or rehabilitation of offenders. But is the optimization of offender reintegration really the objective and the result of these transfers? Reintegration features in many theories on the goals of punishment, and since Martinson proclaimed in the 1970s that `Nothing Works' a steady flow of publications has demonstrated that there are interventions that can reintegrate offenders successfully. The theoretical and empirical framework of rehabilitation is well developed, and it is therefore possible to explore which components of reintegration feature in regulations surrounding the transfer of prisoners. Rehabilitation can be divided in a number of components: orientation towards change, room for subjectivity in decisions on the length and type of sanction, the subsidiarity of the prison sentence, and attention to societal bonds. A critical evaluation of the intended goals of the transfer instruments in terms of whether they are reflected in the policies' implementation and application finds that some of these components appear to be present in the regulations, to some extent, but others are completely absent. Therefore the actual impact of transfer regulations may not be what the legislators intended.

Book review: Prisoner resettlement: Policy and practice, Anthea Hucklesby and Lystra Hagley-Dickinson (eds). Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2007. 306 pp. (including index). ISBN 978--1--84392--253--7

Farrant, F. — 2009-01-21

Book review: Ladies of lost causes: Rehabilitation, women offenders and the voluntary sector, Judith Rumgay. Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2007. 264 pp. (including index). {pound}25.99. ISBN 978--1--84392--298--8

Hucklesby, A. — 2009-01-21

Book review: Terrorism, rights and the rule of law: Negotiating justice in Ireland, Barry Vaughan and Shane Kilcommins. Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2008. 240 pp. (including index). {pound}17.99. ISBN 1--843922--64--9

Lea, J. — 2009-01-21

Book review: When children kill children: Penal populism and political culture, David A. Green. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008. 328 pp. (including index). ISBN 978--019--923096--9

Pratt, J. — 2009-01-21

Book review: Governing through crime, Jonathan Simon. Oxford University Press, 2007. 344 pp. $29.95 (hbk). ISBN 13: 9780195181081

Melossi, D. — 2009-01-21