As compiled by Kaitlyn Quinn
LAW AND SOCIETY ASSOCIATION
Collaborative Research Network: Punishment and Society
Organizers:
Hadar Aviram, UC Hastings College of Law, USA
Ashley Rubin, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA
RECENTLY PUBLISHED WORKS
May 2021
ARTICLES
Adorjan, Michael, Rosemary Ricciardeli, and James Gacek. 2021. “‘We’re both here to do a job and that’s all that matters’: Cisgender correctional officer recruit reflections within an unsettled correctional prison culture.” The British Journal of Criminology. Online first. [Access it here]
Reflecting on new trans prisoner placement policies within Canadian federal prisons, in light of recent changes instigated under the Canadian Liberal Trudeau government, we provide knowledge from cisgender correctional officer (CO) recruits regarding these policy changes and underscore their views of working with officers who identify as transgender. Canada’s new policies recognize the presence of trans prisoners and create new protocols accordingly, simultaneously challenging some of the foundational tenets of the carceral system. While overwhelming support exists from cisgender recruits for their trans colleagues, support among a relative minority of COs is contingent upon notions like safety and security grounded in a dominantly cisgender prison culture; a culture we situate within the wider context of an unsettled correctional prison culture.
Avila, Fernando and Máximo Sozzo. 2020. “Peculiar responsibilization? Exploring a governing strategy in an atypical prison in the Global South.” Punishment & Society. Online first. [Access it here]
Based on an ethnographic study of “Punta de Rieles” prison in Uruguay, where more than 600 prisoners coexist with increased levels of autonomy in a relatively peaceful environment, and that heavily relies on responsibilization as a strategy of governance, we seek to contribute to the analysis of the characteristics and boundaries of responsibilization in prison settings beyond the Global North. Considering the strong link between responsibilization and neoliberalism in recent prison studies, we describe the loose, lay and informal nature of responsibilization and the elements of collectivism that are present in our case study, connecting this strategy with broader political and cultural developments in this national context.
Ballucci, Dale and Garrett Lecoq. Forthcoming. “Expanding Mechanisms of Governance: Uncertainty and Risk in Police Decision Strategies in the Pursuit of Specialized Peace Bonds.” Crime & Delinquency.
Barker, Vanessa and Peter Scharff Smith. 2021. “This is Denmark: Prison Islands and the Detention of Immigrants.” British Journal of Criminology. Online first. [Access it here]
According to mainstream criminology, Nordic societies with their generous welfare states are supposed to moderate, if not restrict, penal powers. In the case of migration, we see the opposite pattern. In Denmark, we see extended use of penal institutions and penal harms to contain and remove unwanted populations from the region, including proposals for prison islands and the confinement of migrants in 19th century prisons. To make sense of these developments and interpret its social meaning, we unpack the logic of the punishment–welfare nexus and Nordic exceptionalism. We find that Denmark expands penal power to regulate non-citizens, deter migration and uphold national interests. These repressive practices are not exceptions to the rule but rather illustrate the exclusionary edge and very nature of the penal regimes in Denmark, a Nordic welfare state.
Burkhardt, Brett C. and Brian T. Connor. 2021. “Toward a Political Sociology of Privatized Punishment: Contestation, State Structures, and Stratification.” Sociology Compass. Online first. [Access it here]
Privatized punishment—in which nonstate actors carry out state‐mandated criminal punishments—has developed into a common practice since its rise in the 1980s. Many disciplines, including criminology, political science, public administration, and economics, have examined its use over the past four decades. However, privatized punishment has not garnered much attention in sociology. This is surprising, as privatized punishment touches on the key themes in sociology, and in the political sociology in particular. In this paper, we attempt to insert privatized punishment into classic and contemporary discussions in political sociology. Below, we offer an overview of privatized punishment and provide a high‐level review of how other social scientific disciplines have studied the phenomenon. Then we argue that political sociology provides a useful, if underutilized, lens for studying privatized punishment. In particular, we highlight three political sociological themes—contestation, state structures, and stratification—that can be fruitfully applied to the study of privatized punishment, and we sketch multiple lines of future research informed by these themes.
Crockett Thomas, Phil, Fergus McNeill, Lucy Cathcart Frödén, Jo Collinson Scott, Oliver Escobar, and Alison Urie. 2021. “Re-writing punishment? Songs and narrative problem-solving.” Incarceration 2(1): 1-19. [Access it here]
This article analyses findings from the Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council (ESRC/AHRC)-funded ‘Distant Voices – Coming Home’ project (ES/POO2536/1), which uses creative methods to explore crime, punishment and reintegration. Focusing on songs co-written in Scottish prisons, we argue that the songs serve to complicate and substantiate our grasp of what state punishment does to people, as well as perhaps affording their prison-based co-writers both moments and modalities of resistance to dominant narratives within criminal justice. In doing so, they creatively express and explore affective and perhaps even unconscious aspects of the self. We argue that our work contributes to a more expansive and considered treatment of narrative in criminology; one that admits and engages with a more diverse and creative range of expressions of experience and selfhood, all of them partial and some of them contradictory. By attending to diverse kinds of narratives embodied in these songs, we learn more about what criminalisation, penalisation and incarceration do to people and to their stories.
Crockett Thomas, Phil, Jo Collinson Scott, Fergus McNeill, Oliver Escobar, Lucy Cathcart Frödén, and Alison Urie. 2020. “Mediating Punishment? Prisoners’ Songs as Relational ‘Problem-Solving’ Devices.” Law Text Culture24(1/7): 1-25. [Access it here]
In this article we share some findings from the Distant Voices – Coming Home project. It is a partnership between the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and the West of Scotland, and the Glasgow-based arts charity Vox Liminis. Distant Voices aims to explore and practice re/integration after punishment through creative collaborations (primarily songwriting) and action-research. The project is complex and interdisciplinary, blurring boundaries between creative practices, community-building, research, knowledge exchange and public engagement. As such, this article does not present a synthesis of project findings, but instead discusses original music created within the project, proposing that an analysis of the ‘musical event’ (DeNora 2003) of the songwriting can tell us about punishment and re/integration.
DoCarmo, Tania, Stephen Rea, John Emery, Evan Conaway and Noopur Raval. 2021. “The Law in Computation: What Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Mean for Law & Society Scholarship.” Law & Policy. Online first. [Access it here]
Computational systems, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics, are not only inescapable parts of social life but also increasingly at issue in legal practice and processes. We propose turning more law and social science attention to new technological developments through the study of “law in computation,” that is, computational systems' integration with regulatory and administrative procedures, the sociotechnical infrastructures that support them, and their impact on how individuals and populations are interpellated through the law. We present cases for which examining law in computation illuminates how new technological processes potentially mitigate, exacerbate, or mask human biases present in legal systems, and propose future directions and methods for research. As computational systems become ever more sophisticated, understanding the law in computation is critical not only for law and social science scholarship, but also for everyday civics.
Jouet, Mugambi. Forthcoming 2021. “Foucault, Prison, and Human Rights: A Dialectic of Theory and Criminal Justice Reform.” Theoretical Criminology. [Access it here]
Michel Foucault’s advocacy toward penal reform in France differed from his theories. Although Foucault is associated with the prison abolition movement, he also proposed more humane prisons. The article reframes Foucauldian theory through a dialectic with the theories of Marc Ancel, a prominent figure in the emergence of liberal sentencing norms in France. Ancel and Foucault were contemporaries whose legacies are intertwined. Ancel defended more benevolent prisons where experts would rehabilitate offenders. This evokes exactly what “Discipline and Punish” cast as an insidious strategy of social control. In reality, Foucault and Ancel converged in intriguing ways. The dialectic offers another perspective on Foucault, whose theories have fostered skepticism about the possibility of progress. While mass incarceration’s rise in America may evoke a Foucauldian dystopia, the relative development of human rights and dignity in European punishment reflects aspirations that Foucault embraced as an activist concerned about fatalistic interpretations of his theories.
Jouet, Mugambi. Forthcoming 2022. “Revolutionary Criminal Punishments: Treason, Mercy, and the American Revolution.” American Journal of Legal History. [Access it here]
This Article focuses on the exceptional mildness of criminal punishments for alleged traitors in the wake of the American Revolution. American leaders were disinclined to inflict the death penalty on loyalists who supported British rule in the revolutionary war or on insurgents in the Shays, Whiskey, and Fries rebellions shortly after independence. In fact, the Founding Fathers and other first-generation officials commonly showed extraordinary mercy. Numerous “traitors” readily rehabilitated themselves by recognizing their faults, swearing an oath of allegiance to the new American republic, and promising to refrain from further wrongdoing. These revolutionary punishments were a striking prefiguration of modern penal practices: guilty pleas, probation sentences, and rehabilitation policies aiming to reintegrate wrongdoers into society. American revolutionary punishments were not only remarkably mild in themselves. They also were for the period. In contrast, the contemporary French Revolution led to wide-scale executions of purported traitors. Besides shedding light on historic events that criminal justice scholars have neglected, this Article’s findings are relevant to ongoing debates regarding American exceptionalism and the peculiar harshness of modern American justice. The rise of mass incarceration in the United States and its retention of the death penalty can foster cultural essentialism about how American culture traditionally lacks humanistic sensibilities. In reality, the revolutionary criminal punishments of the late eighteenth century demonstrate how America once was a trailblazer in embracing humanitarian justice.
Quirouette, Marianne. 2021. “‘The Struggle is Real’: Punitive Assessment in Community Services.” Punishment & Society. Online first. [Access it here]
Assessment tools are pivotal for the work of frontline community services providers, shaping client relationships, access to supports and producing evidence for agencies that need to allocate resources, demonstrate outcomes and secure funding. These tools are combined and used cumulatively, as marginalized individuals are cared for – but also controlled and punished - within these systems (e.g. in shelters, street outreach, mental health or re entry supports). Punishment literature has clarified that risk tools are impactful but also contested and resisted. Still, we know little about how the process is experienced and negotiated by frontline by practitioners working with people pushed through the ‘revolving doors'. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 105 interviews with community practitioners, I examine tools and practices used to ‘assess’ criminalized and marginalized individuals. I show that practitioners are producing evidence about problems occurring outside legal institutions while relying on criminal justice logics and engaging with criminal justice spaces and paces. I highlight the challenges service providers face and negotiate, focusing on three themes: the composition of tools, the process of using them, and the service context in which they are used. I argue that despite discretionary efforts and adaptations, community practitioners remain frustrated by assessment tools and practices, and particularly by their inability to meet the needs they are assessing.
Ravid, Itay. 2020. “Judging by the Cover: On the Relationship Between Media Coverage on Crime and Harshness in Sentencing.” Southern California Law Review 93(6): 1121-1188. [Access it here]
Does the mass media affect judicial decisionmaking? This first of its kind empirical study delves into this long-lasting question, and investigates the relationship between media coverage of crime and criminal sentencing. To do so, I construct a novel data set of media reports on crime, which I link to administrative state court sentencing records. The data span five years and more than forty-three thousand sentencing decisions across three jurisdictions that differ in their judicial selection models: Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. I find that crime coverage increases sentencing harshness. I also find evidence to suggest that this effect is mitigated through a state’s method of judicial selection. The findings go beyond traditional, case-study scholarship on the nexus between the media and the judiciary, offering evidence that the media can affect judicial decisionmaking in broader contexts. These findings hold significant implications for policy and judicial politics and raise questions at the core of the criminal justice system. Particularly, they call for renewed attention to the media as an important factor in the criminal process and a potential obstacle towards achieving the constitutional ideal of fair trials. The Article concludes by suggesting methods for countering such media effects.
van der Valk, Sophie, Eva Aizpurua, and Mary Rogan. 2021. “Towards a typology of prisoners’ awareness of and familiarity with prison inspection and monitoring bodies.” European Journal of Criminology. Online first. [Access it here]
Inspection and monitoring bodies have an important role in the protection of prisoners’ rights. Although these bodies are seen as widely beneficial, there is limited research examining their operations in practice. This study addresses this gap in the existing literature by identifying unique profiles of prisoners based on their familiarity with prison oversight bodies. In addition, the relationship between profiles and key factors (personal characteristics, sentence-related variables and those related to life in prison) was examined using multinomial regression. Participants were 508 males randomly selected from three prisons in Ireland. Data were collected between November 2018 and February 2019, using self-administered surveys. Latent class analysis revealed four subgroups of prisoners characterized by distinct patterns of awareness and contact with prison oversight bodies: (1) Low familiarity (44.1 percent); (2) High awareness with low contact (26.4 percent); (3) High familiarity with the Visiting Committees but low with other oversight bodies (14.2 percent); and (4) High familiarity (15.4 percent). Notably, the largest group was the low familiarity group, and few prisoners belonged to the high familiarity group. Nationality, sentence length, confidence in staff and complaint usage were linked to class membership. The results of this study point to the importance of increasing awareness of inspection and monitoring bodies among prisoners in general, and among certain groups in particular.
Williams, Monica. 2021. “Explaining public support for Body-Worn Cameras in law enforcement.” Police Practice and Research. Online first. [Access it here]
Public opinion surveys have clearly demonstrated broad support for the use of body-worn cameras (BWC’s) in law enforcement. Despite clear evidence of broad support, the factors that contribute to this support remain unclear. The current study uses data from a public opinion survey of policing in a mid-sized urban city to examine factors significantly related to public support for requiring police officers to wear cameras. Ordinal logistical regression analyses of the impacts of demographic and neighborhood factors, beliefs about whom BWC’s protect, good and bad experiences with police, and trust in the police on support for the cameras suggest that awareness of bad experiences with the police increases support for BWC’s, while believing that the cameras protect the police decreases support. These findings can inform discussions between communities and police agencies about the role of body-worn cameras in policing, particularly as they relate to the broader issues underlying the need for surveillance technologies in the first place.
BOOKS/BOOK CHAPTERS/EDITED COLLECTIONS
Barker, Vanessa. 2021. “Punishing Inequality: Notes on Social Worth from Sweden.” Pp. 222-241 in Tracing the Relationship between Inequality, Crime and Punishment: Time, Space and Politics (Proceedings of the British Academy), edited by Nicola Lacey, David Soskice, Leonidas Cheliotis, and Sappho Xenakis. Oxford University Press. [More info here]
Barker, Vanessa. 2020. “The Criminalization of Migration: A Regional Transnational Legal Order or the Rise of a Meta-TLO?” Pp. 154-175 in Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice, edited by Gregory Shaffer and Ely Aaronson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [More info here]
Hörnqvist, Magnus. 2021. The Pleasure of Punishment. Routledge. [More info here]
Based on a reading of contemporary philosophical arguments, this book accounts for how punishment has provided audiences with pleasure in different historical contexts. Watching tragedies, contemplating hell, attending executions, or imagining prisons have generated pleasure, according to contemporary observers, in ancient Greece, in medieval Catholic Europe, in the early-modern absolutist states, and in the post-1968 Western world.
The pleasure was often judged morally problematic, and raised questions about which desires were satisfied, and what the enjoyment was like. This book offers a research synthesis that ties together existing work on the pleasure of punishment. It considers how the shared joys of punishment gradually disappeared from the public view at a precise historic conjuncture, and explores whether arguments about the carnivalesque character of cruelty can provide support for the continued existence of penal pleasure. Towards the end of this book, the reader will discover, if willing to go along and follow desire to places which are full of pain and suffering, that deeply entwined with the desire for punishment, there is also the desire for social justice.
An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, philosophy and all those interested in the pleasures of punishment.
Savelsberg, Joachim. 2021. Knowing About Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. (paperback and open access online)
[More info here]
How do victims and perpetrators generate conflicting knowledge about genocide? Using a sociology of knowledge approach, the book answers this question for the Armenian genocide committed in the context of the First World War. Focusing on Armenians and Turks, it addresses strategies of silencing, denial, and acknowledgment in everyday interaction, public rituals, law, and politics. Special attention is paid to efforts to deny genocide via free speech claims in US courts and to criminalize denial through legislation in France. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic accounts, documents, and eyewitness testimony, the author illuminates the social processes that drive dueling versions of history. He reveals counterproductive consequences of denial in an age of human rights hegemony, with implications for populist disinformation campaigns against overwhelming evidence.
BOOK REVIEWS
Ben-Natan, Smadar. 2020. “Above and Beyond Denial: Incarcerated Children in Israel/Palestine.” Journal of Genocide Research. [Access it here]
PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
Annison, Harry. (ed, 2021) 2020: Crisis or Kairos? Themed double issue of the Howard League ECAN Bulletin. [Access it here]
Contributors were encouraged to reflect on 2020 – a year of crisis, and possibly of Kairos. A year in which novel issues have emerged, while other long-standing issues have re-emerged into public consciousness. COVID-19 has caused widespread death and ill health, forced dramatic changes to working practices, and concerns about ongoing wellbeing – not least in relation to those subject to, working within, or otherwise affected by the criminal justice system and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, police brutality resulting in several deaths in the US once again highlighted systemic injustice and inequality and provoked widespread and vital self-reflection when thinking about race and privilege. This also inspired worldwide and consequential demonstrations. Structural inequalities have been laid bare by violence and injustice in the criminal justice system. Recognition of a global climate crisis rumbles on in the background. No one issue stands alone.
Contributors include early career academics, practitioners and people affected directly by criminal justice institutions. Written pieces are complemented by audio contributions.
Barker, Vanessa. 2021. Discussion on US Police Killings and Racism. Foreign Bureau, Swedish Television. [Access video here]
Riley, Emily. 2021. “Youth Justice Reforms Offer Model for Ending ‘Merciless’ Punishment of Adults.” The Crime Report. [Access it here]
Review of Mugambi Jouet's forthcoming article in the Federal Sentencing Reporter: “Juveniles Are Not So Different: The Punishment of Juveniles and Adults at the Crossroads,” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3763704.
