Members' Publications: December Edition

 As compiled by Dr. Kaitlyn Quinn

LAW AND SOCIETY ASSOCIATION

Collaborative Research Network: Punishment and Society

Organizers:

Ashley Rubin, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, USA

Natalie Pifer, University of Rhode Island

 

RECENTLY PUBLISHED WORKS

December 2022

ARTICLES

Annison, Harry and Rachel Condry. 2022. “The Pains of Hope: Families of indeterminate sentenced prisoners and political campaigning by lay citizens.” British Journal of Criminology 62(5): 1252-1269. [Access it here]

This paper examines the politics of crime and insecurity as experienced ‘from below’. We draw on in-depth interviews with families of indeterminate-sentenced prisoners, and policy participants, in order to understand families’ experiences of their relative’s imprisonment under the discredited English Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence and their public campaigning against it. We situate these experiences within broader structural trends, which we conceptualise as penal-familial assemblages. We argue that the experiences cause ‘pains of hope’ for families through a double liminality: first, due to the uncertainties caused by the indeterminate sentence, which brings neither closure nor release. Second, meaningful state action on campaigners’ demands remained elusive, with moments when change appeared close but ultimately remained just out of reach. In conclusion, we draw out the lessons from our study for analysing penal politics. We argue, in particular, for a humanistic recognition of the centrality, and the pains, of lay citizens’ efforts to seek to achieve progressive penal policy change.

Annison, Harry and Thomas Guiney. 2022. “Populism, Conservatism and the Politics of Parole in England and Wales.” Political Quarterly 93(3) 416-423. [Access it here]

Reform of the parole system has emerged as the cause célèbre of a resurgent law and order politics. Successive governments have seized upon the symbolic power of parole to demonstrate ‘toughness’ with respect to violent and sexual offending, to express solidarity with the victims of crime and reaffirm a populist credo that purportedly stands in opposition to an unaccountable and out of touch penal elite. Published in March 2022, the Ministry of Justice Root and Branch Review of the Parole System represents a continuation of this well-rehearsed political strategy, but arguably goes further than ever before in its willingness to dispense with established norms, rules and practices. This article surveys the contemporary politics of parole in England and Wales and reflects upon what these developments reveal about the shifting contours of a creeping authoritarian conservatism premised upon nostalgia, nationalism and the projection of a strong, centralised state.

Dal Santo, Luiz. 2022. “Brazilian prisons in times of mass incarceration: Ambivalent transformations.” The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

Most of the scholarship on the ‘punitive turn’ has claimed that there have been two main trends in punishment since the 1970s: the rise of incarceration rates (quantitative dimension) and the worsening of prison conditions (qualitative dimension). Scholars argue that, in parallel with the rise of mass incarceration, there has been a fall of the rehabilitative ideal. In this view, prisons in core countries have basically operated as a warehouse, working towards neutralisation and incapacitation. Both trends are also viewed as reflecting a global convergence of penal policies. The analysis of the Brazilian case challenges this supposed universality. Drawing on official prison data, reports from non-governmental organisations, and secondary data, I argue that mass incarceration has not been accompanied by the same qualitative changes to prisons in ‘Western countries’ and Brazil. First, features of the so-called warehouse prison, such as low levels of prison activities, have always been present in Brazilian prisons, and are not an effect of mass incarceration. Furthermore, the consequences of mass incarceration in Brazilian prisons have, in fact, been ambivalent and, in some cases, may have alleviated inmates’ suffering, rather than intensifying experiences of confinement. Finally, instead of neutralising and controlling criminals, Brazilian prisons under mass incarceration have contributed to the emergence, empowerment, recruitment and organisation of gangs, whose powers now transcend the physical barriers of prison walls.

DeCaro, Joanne B., Kelci Straka, Nadia Malek, and Alyson K. Zalta. 2022. “Sentenced to Shame: Moral Injury Exposure in Former Lifers.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

Objective: A significant increase in the release of individuals who served life sentences (i.e., lifers) in California has created the opportunity to study aspects of their psychological wellness for the first time. Moral injury may be a particularly relevant factor to consider in this population, but has not been previously studied. This study is the first to explore the concept of moral injury within a currently or formerly incarcerated population. 

Method: Former lifers currently in reentry in California (N = 41) completed a survey that measured their moral injury exposure (MIE), MIE-related guilt, MIE-related shame, MIE-related rumination, religiosity, attempts at making amends, and flourishing. 

Results: As expected, a high rate of lifetime MIEs was endorsed (97.6%). Events linked to life sentence crimes (75.6%) and time in prison (56.1%) were very common. Lower levels of MIE-related shame (r = -.58, p < 0.01) and higher levels of religiosity (r = .35, p < 0.05) were significantly associated with greater flourishing. By contrast, degree of MIE exposure, MIE-related guilt, and MIE-related rumination, and making amends were all weakly associated with flourishing. 

Conclusion: Our results highlight that MIE is pervasive in this population and extends beyond life sentence crimes. Moreover, our findings suggest that it is lifers’ self-concept following MIEs that appears to affect well-being upon release, rather than the extent and nature of moral injury exposure. Further research exploring moral injury in incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations is needed to improve their well-being and chances of successful re-entry.

Garland, David. 2022. “The Current Crisis of American Criminal Justice: A structural analysis.” Annual Review of Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

This review situates the recent, radical challenges to American criminal justice—calls to end mass incarceration, defund the police, and dismantle systemic racism—within the broader social and economic arrangements that make the US system so distinctive and so problematic. It describes the social structures, institutions, and processes that give rise to America's extraordinary penal state—as well as to its extraordinarily high rates of homicide and social disorder—and considers what these portend for the prospect of radical change. It does so by locating American crime and punishment in the structural context of America's (always-already racialized) political economy—a distinctive set of social structures and institutional legacies that render the United States more violent, more disorderly, and more reliant on penal control than any other developed nation. Drawing on a broad range of social science research findings, it argues that this peculiar political economy—a form of capitalism and democratic governance forged on the anvils of slavery and racial segregation and rendered increasingly insecure and exclusionary in the decades following deindustrialization—generates high levels of social disorganization and criminal violence and predisposes state authorities to adopt penal control as the preferred policy response.

Golembeski, Cynthia, Matthew Bakko, Shayla Wilson, and Twyla Carter. 2022. “U.S. Bail, Pretrial Justice, and Charitable Bail Organizations: Strengthening Social Equity and Advancing Politics and Public Ethics of Care.” Public Integrity. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

The U.S. criminal legal system contributes to the oppression and harm of marginalized groups, calling into question ethical governance. The front end of this system, specifically bail and pretrial justice, exploits opportunities for resource generation and social control as a major driver of incarceration, yet receives limited attention in public administration or ethics. Disproportionate punishment and collateral penalties associated with bail and pretrial justice are causes and consequences of structural racism and administrative dysfunction. Excessive bail as a poverty penalty incurs risks to health, safety, financial security, and constitutional presumptions and protections. In light of civil and constitutional rights concerns, bail and pretrial-associated philanthropic solutions have proliferated. This article provides background on bail and pretrial justice policies and politics; outlines evidence of related consequences; describes select reform efforts and philanthropic tools, including the charitable bail organization The Bail Project; and contextualizes bail and pretrial justice within a public values framework, which centers social equity and incorporates critical race theory alongside politics and public ethics of care. Upholding the Constitution and the law, strengthening social equity, and ensuring procedural due process are core tenets of good governance, yet anathema to the current bail and pretrial justice system, which is a critical public ethics concern.

Gurusami, Susila, Rocío R. García, and Diya Bose. 2022. “Abolishing Carceral Distractions: Refusing the Discursive Punishment of Latinxs.” Journal of Criminal Justice Education. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

LatCrim scholars and LatCrim scholarship are concerned with working towards racial justice, particularly with and for Latinxs ensnared by the criminal-legal system. To support existing and future work in this area, we conduct a discursive analysis of existing research, public policy, and responses to policies at the nexus of crimmigration scholarship and Latinx sexualities to examine how the figure of “the criminal” drives scholarship on racial justice. We develop the concept of carceral distractions as a type of white distraction that orient us toward accepting carceral fate and consequences as an inevitable marker of state care, protection, and remedy for harm. Carceral distractions make it difficult to recognize the possibilities beyond and outside carceral formations and ideologies. We develop this article as an abolition feminist tool to help identify and understand carceral distractions. To do so, we pose three central questions when asking whether proposed interventions, approaches, or solutions are carceral distractions: (1) What are we oriented towards?; (2) What are we distracted from?; and (3) Who do we leave behind? Ultimately, we demonstrate how carceral distractions strengthen white supremacy by legitimizing carceral logics.

Iverson, Justin. 2022. “Surveilling Potential Uses and Abuses of Artificial Intelligence in Correctional Spaces.” Lincoln Memorial University Law Review 9(3): 1-36. [Access it here]

While individuals likely have different understandings of what constitutes artificial intelligence (AI), the truth is we have been using it for decades to greater or lesser degrees. Recent polling indicates Americans are somewhat aware of this fact, though fear about the potential harms posed by widescale AI adoption remains high. One area in which Americans favor using AI technology—and a focus of this paper—is in the apprehension, monitoring, and management of criminals.

The American public associates AI—as we do in so many areas of our lives—with popular culture depictions, including Data, R2-D2, Cylons, VIKI, and Brainiac, to name a few. The characters and plotlines our artists create are both reflective of current scientific theory and influential on scientists developing future technology. Looking toward full AI integration in these stories helps us envision how AI can improve our quality of life and informs us of the potential risks associated with careless development and monitoring measures.

In section II, this paper will begin with an analysis of the development of AI, noting famous examples and establishing a baseline definition as a lens for the rest of this discussion. This paper will assess aspects of AI and machine learning to the extent it furthers our understanding of AI’s ability to collect data and make decisions. Some popular culture references will be brought into focus here to recognize storytelling’s ability to inspire and influence real-world scientific pursuits. Of preliminary importance, the AI we have both dreamed of and feared are certainly kept in mind as technology advances through sentience milestones.

Section III will discuss emerging technologies in the correctional space, including automated inmate communications monitoring services and related privacy and safety implications. Such technologies are designed to be objective and non-biased, though human involvement will necessarily entail subjectivity at each stage of development and implementation. The problem of encroaching AI is thus balanced between its own sophistication and that of its human collaborators.
In section IV, this paper will discuss the now-widescale adoption of correctional tablets in jails and prisons across the country. Persons experiencing incarceration have expectations about traditional monitoring areas, such as phone calls, mail, and video surveillance. However, allocating so many correctional services to a single device necessitates a new analysis of how governments, and the private contractors providing and maintaining their tablets, impact data collection and algorithm development practices.

Finally, in section V, the pieces come together as this paper argues for responsible data analysis and algorithm development. The drumbeat march of AI into detention spaces shows no sign of halting but there is time yet to steer its development to productive and humane purpose. In the end, this paper aims to increase awareness of the potential benefits and pitfalls of AI integration in the correctional space and provide a framework to understand tradeoffs in this sector.

As a tool, AI can supplement or entirely replace human involvement in nearly every arena but humans will determine the amount of deference given to this tool. And that amount will change in quantity and type without end. But those in jails and prisons, as a vulnerable population, do not have the luxury of providing substantive input in the way those decisions are made, and thus, we as interested observers must monitor the monitors on their behalf.

Jones, Nikki, Kenly Brown, Eduardo Bautista Duran, Kaily Heitz, Jasmine Kelekay, Gil Rothschild Elyassi, and Geoffrey Raymond. 2022. “‘Other than the Projects, You Stay Professional’: ‘Colorblind’ Cops and the Enactment of Spatial Racism in Routine Policing.” City & Community. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

In this article, we show how routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism in urban settings through an intersecting set of macro-level processes and micro-interactional practices. Our analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with over 40 police officers during 20 ride-alongs in the Western United States identifies person- and place-specific heuristic classifications that police officers rely on to manage routine encounters. We find that officers use membership categorization devices to sort people and places in the city into distinct categories (e.g., nice places, normal people, the projects, and people in the projects), which, in turn, prefigure different orientations to action at the start of and throughout their encounters with the public. Our findings provide an empirical basis for thinking of professional police knowledge as encoding systemic racism in routine policing, rather than being a break from it.

Kupchik, Aaron. 2022. “Rethinking School Suspensions.” Contexts 21(1): 14-19. [Access it here]

When used too frequently, exclusionary school punishment like out-of-school suspensions are ineffective and harmful. The harms to students are clear, though excessive use of school suspensions also impacts entire schools, students’ families, and communities. Because youth of color are at greater risk of school punishments, these harms disproportionately limit their life opportunities and exacerbate racial inequality. To better understand how and why we punish students the way we do, sociologists need to understand school punishment as rooted in a historical legacy of racial oppression and denial of educational opportunities to Black children.

Kupchik, Aaron and Felicia Henry. 2022. “Generations of Criminalization: Resistance to Desegregation and School Punishment.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

Objectives: In this paper we refocus discussions of criminalization of students on structural racial inequality. We help explain racially disproportionate school punishments, while demonstrating the necessity for criminologists to examine how a historic legacy of racial oppression shapes contemporary punishments. More specifically, we explore the extent to which contemporary school punishment reflects a legacy of racial oppression and educational exclusion of Black students. 

Methods: Using nationwide data from multiple sources, we analyze how resistance to school desegregation, measured by the number of court cases contesting school segregation from 1952 − 2002, relates to suspensions from school and days missed due to suspension. 

Results: Our analyses show that schools in districts marked by resistance to school desegregation have significantly and substantially higher rates of suspensions for Black students and days missed by Black students due to suspension. 

Conclusions: Contemporary school suspension is shaped by a legacy of racial oppression and educational exclusion. Our results confirm the importance of using a racialized social systems approach to understand and begin to remedy the criminalization of Black students.

Manikis, Marie. 2022. “Recognising State Blame in Sentencing: A Communicative and Relational Framework.” Cambridge Law Journal 81(2): 294-322. [Access it here]

Censure, blame and harms are central concepts in sentencing that have evolved over the years to take into account social context and experiential knowledge. Flexibility, however, remains limited as the current analysis in sentencing focuses on the offender while failing to engage with the state's contribution in creating wrongs and harms. This risks giving rise to defective practices of responsibility since the state can also contribute to their production. The following article presents a complementary and additional framework within sentencing to account for state censure, blame and harms. The framework is rooted in communicative theories of punishment that integrate a responsive understanding of censure and a relational account of responsibility.

Manikis, Marie. 2022. “The Principle of Proportionality in Sentencing: A Dynamic Evolution and Multiplication of Conceptions.” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 59(3): 587-628. [Access it here]

This article examines the theoretical foundations and developments of the concept of proportionality in common law sentencing. It traces its evolution within its two main underlying frameworks: desert-based and consequentialist theories of punishment. It specifically examines the Canadian context and demonstrates that this concept was primarily rooted in a desert-based framework but has increasingly been infused with consequentialist rationales. It is argued that this multiplication of underpinnings has led to a conceptual muddling of proportionality, risking voiding the concept of its meaning and usefulness to decision-makers at sentencing. The article therefore proposes a nuanced framework, similar to the one in England and Wales, rooted in a dynamic understanding of just deserts that allows for the incorporation of relevant consequentialist aims in a principled fashion.

Melossi, Dario. 2022. “Servitude for a time: From the permanent slavery of the unfree to the slavery pro tempore of the free.” Punishment & Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

I consider the forms of control, which went “untreated” by 1970s “revisionist” penality literature (in other words, I wonder whether the categories of human beings who are (mostly) not found in prisons have something in common). I take as starting point that the “temporary slavery” which is the punishment of imprisonment, emerged historically as related to the “free” condition of those punished. Forms of control instead for the “unfree” are not to be included in “(penal) imprisonment” and could be understood as “domestic” forms of control expressed, originally, in the idea of “Pater Familias.” This form of control is not punishment but is a permanent condition deemed appropriate for given categories of human beings, such as “children,” “women,” “slaves,” and what I call “the mad and other non-persons.” I first examine how imprisonment (as punishment) emerged, after the end of servitude in Europe, as a sort of “memory of slavery,” to enforce a principle of subordination dedicated to “the free.” Then, I look at the mechanisms of social control for those who are not socially perceived as “free.” Finally, I attempt at sketching the process of expansion of mechanisms of subordination—for the free and the unfree—beyond European borders.

Piehowski, Victoria and Michelle Phelps. 2022. “Strong-arm Sobriety: Addressing Precarity through Probation.” Law & Social Inquiry. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

Over the past half-century, the US welfare and penal systems have become increasingly fused modes of poverty governance. At the center of the welfare-penal continuum sits probation, a form of community supervision that operates as a central hub, directing people to both services and incarceration. Drawing on interviews with 166 adults on probation in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in 2019, we argue that the coercive care of probation is structured by the broader project of controlling alcohol and drug use among the poor. Developing the concept of strong-arm sobriety, we show how the “criminal addict” trope undergirds the central processes of probation: treatment, testing, and revocation. We argue that strong-arm sobriety misreads structural precarity as the result, rather than the cause, of individuals’ choices. In doing so, strong-arm sobriety fails to address the circumstances that engender substance use and produces future subjects for coercive care.

Quinn, Kaitlyn and Philip Goodman. 2022. “Shaping the road to reentry: Organizational variation and narrative labor in the penal voluntary sector.” Punishment & Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

Financial austerity, welfare state retrenchment, and the movement towards evidence-based interventions have intensified the pressures on penal voluntary sector (PVS) organizations. The result is an increasingly competitive field of social service provision in which organizations must differentiate themselves in the struggle over funding, contracts, symbolic authority, and potential clients. We explore this struggle by examining the distinct roads to reentry constructed at four PVS organizations in Ontario, Canada. Our analysis initiates a dialogue between individual narratives and organizational discourses, contending that the road to reentry is coauthored among organizations and criminalized individuals—albeit on unequal terms. Our findings reveal that there are significant pressures for criminalized individuals to perform narrative labor to align themselves with organizational understandings of reentry. Such pressures include: the denial of services or social assistance payments, threats of being returned to prison for “inadequate” participation in rehabilitation, and risks of not being considered for coveted “professional ex” positions at PVS organizations. In light of these empirical findings, we also offer a conceptual reflection on the challenges criminalized individuals likely face accessing services from multiple organizations with differing roads to reentry, suggesting that navigating these diverse roads not only requires narrative labor, but also narrative dexterity.

Santos, Maria-Fátima. 2022. “Modernizing Leviathan: Carceral Reform and the Struggle for Legitimacy in Brazil’s Espírito Santo State.” American Sociological Review 87(5): 889-918. [Access it here]

Incarceration has become naturalized as a primary mode of punishment within the penal systems of modern states across the globe. This study examines how states develop the capacity to execute incarceration as a routine state function. I argue that rationalization and bureaucratization are key for transforming carceral enclosures into a naturalized feature of states’ routine exercise of coercion. I develop this argument through analysis of a dynamic case of carceral modernization in the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo (2003 to 2014). I analyze the significance of coordinated violence and performative strategies for rulers to extend administrative capacity to incarceration and transform confinement into a legitimate and legitimizing instrument of state power. Findings demonstrate how coercive practices and other modes of violence that state authorities come to narrate as illegitimate are not antithetical to modernization. Rather, they become constitutive of the very process of consolidating and legitimizing rational-legal modes of administration that routinely exercise violence while more effectively being misrecognized as such. By extending inquiry to how states develop the administrative capacity to exercise penal power, this analysis makes several contributions to the political sociology of punishment and theories of state-building.

Singh, Shawn and James Gacek. 2022. “Erasure and Erosion: Exploring Federal Government Efforts to Complicate Socio-Legal and Environmental Obligations owed to Indigenous People.” Manitoba Law Journal 45(4): 1-38. [Access it here]

The Canadian federal government has fallen short of its reconciliatory objectives with Indigenous peoples and preventing anthropogenic climate change. In recognizing these issues, the Government of Canada implemented several policy initiatives to realign industrial production and consumption at the national level, as well as to grow Indigenous participation in capitalist production as a means of approaching a form of self-government. As part of this policy agenda, the state targets Indigenous communities as leaders who hold the potential to implement more sustainable methods of energy production to encourage them to become Canada’s environmental stewards. However, we contend that such policy initiatives also erode the socio-legal and environmental obligations owed to Indigenous peoples by the Canadian federal government. To articulate the impact of these policies on the interests of Indigenous communities, we explore certain efforts of the Canadian state, through the lens of neoliberal settler colonialism, to identify its striking consistency with past approaches of dislocating colonized populations and reclaiming power bases that are still within settler state control. We recommend the arrest of the Canadian settler state’s modern approach to eroding its obligations to Indigenous peoples, while also proposing further measures be taken to recognize and strengthen Indigenous and environmental rights.

 

BOOKS/BOOK CHAPTERS/EDITED COLLECTIONS

Crewe, Ben, Andrew Goldsmith, and Mark Halsey (Eds.). 2022. Power and Pain in the Modern Prison: The Society of Captives Revisited. Oxford University Press. [More information here]

Sykes’ The Society of Captives has stood as a classic of modern penology for nearly 60 years. However, the continued relevance of Sykes’ seminal publication often passes unremarked by many contemporary scholars working in the very field that such works helped to define. This book combines a series of timely reflections on authority, power and governance in modern prison institutions as well as a reflection on the enduring relevance of the work of Gresham Sykes. With chapters from many of the most influential scholars undertaking prison research today, the contributions discuss such matters as the pains of imprisonment, penal order, staff-prisoner relationships and the everyday world of the prison, drawing on and critiquing Sykes’s theories and insights, and placing them in their historic and contemporary context.

Gacek, James. 2022. Portable Prisons: Electronic Monitoring and the Creation of Carceral Territory. McGill-Queen’s University Press. [More information here]

The pervasiveness of surveillance, punishment, and control within and outside of spaces such as jails, prisons, and detention centres suggests that the carceral is becoming an increasingly prevalent presence in our lives, going beyond historical standards. The contemporary use of electronic monitoring extends carceral territory beyond prison walls, into people’s homes and everyday lives.

Empirically and empathetically driven, Portable Prisons is a telling exploration of the electronic monitoring of offenders based on an ethnographic case study from Scotland. Electronic monitoring must be understood - in both intent and effect - as a carceral practice, an expression of the carceral state and its overreaching punitive capabilities. James Gacek demonstrates that various people experience punishment by means of restrictions around mobility, space, and time in ways that strongly overlap with the reported experiences of interviewed prisoners. Drawing attention to how the neoliberal state outsources the labour of punishment to private corporations and the punished themselves, he also rejects the idea that “soft” punishment is in any way related to the movement for decarceration.

Offering an original contribution to our understanding of the geography of incarceration, Portable Prisons is a sophisticated account of electronic monitoring, underlining the growing significance of this field.

Gacek, James and Richard Jochelson (Eds.). 2022. Green Criminology and the Law. Palgrave Macmillan. [More information here]

This edited collection is grounded in a green criminological approach to understand whether the law, both in effect and implications, reflects, refracts, or sublimates the social, political and ecological conditions of our times. Since its initial proposal in the 1990s, green criminology has focused the criminological gaze on a wide array of harms and crimes affecting humans, animals other than humans, ecological systems, and the planet as a whole. As a continuously blossoming field of criminological inquiry, green criminology recognizes and examines behaviours that are both illegal and legal (yet detrimental), and in varying ways has made great efforts to provide insight into harms in a more fulsome manner. At the same time, there have been many significant legal instances, domestic, and international, including case law, legislation, regulation, treaties, agreements and executive directives which have troubled the law’s understanding of green harms, illegal and legal activity, pushing legal boundaries in the process. Recognizing that humanity and nature are inextricably integrated, Green Criminology and the Law reflects the range and depth of high-quality research and scholarship, combining contributions from established scholars willing to explore new topics and recent entrants who are breaking new scholarly ground.

Garland, David. 2022. “What is Penal Populism? Public Opinion, Expert Knowledge and Penal Policy Formation in Democratic Societies.” Pp. 249-272 in Crime, Justice and Social Order: Essays in Honour of A. E. Bottoms, edited by Alison Liebling, Joanna Shapland, Richard Sparks, and Justice Tankebe. Oxford University Press. [More information here]

Gibson-Light, Michael. 2022. Orange-Collar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison. Oxford University Press. [More information here]

The United States is home to the most expansive prison system on Earth. In addition to holding nearly a quarter of the world's legal captives, this nation puts them to work. Close to two-thirds of those held in U.S. state prisons hold some sort of job while incarcerated. For these imprisoned people, the carceral institution is not only a place of punishment, but a workplace as well. Yet, very little is known about the world of work behind bars. In order to illuminate the "black box" that is modern prison labor, this book marshals 18 months of ethnographic observations within one of America's medium-security prisons as well as 82 interviews with currently-incarcerated men and the institutional staff members tasked with overseeing them. Pulling together these accounts, it paints a picture of daily labors on the inside, showing that not all prison jobs are the same, nor are all imprisoned workers treated equally. While some find value and purpose in higher-paying, more desirable jobs, others struggle against monotony and hardship in lower-paying, deskilled work assignments. The result is a stratified prison employment system in which race, ethnicity, nationality, and social class help determine one's position in the labor hierarchy and, as a result, their experiences of incarceration and ability to prepare for release. Through insightful first-hand perspectives and rich ethnographic detail, Orange-Collar Labor takes the reader inside the prison workplace, illustrating the formal prison economy as well as the informal black market on which many rely to survive. Highlighting moments of struggle and suffering, as well as hard work, cooperation, resistance, and dignity in harsh environments, it documents the lives of America's working prisoners so often obscured from view.

McNeill, Fergus, Phil Crockett Thomas, Lucy Cathcart Frödén, Jo Collinson Scott, Oliver Escobar, and Alison Urie. 2022. “Time After Time: Imprisonment, reentry and enduring temporariness.” Pp. 171-201 in Time and Punishment: New Contexts and Perspectives, edited by Nicola Carr and Gwen Robinson. Palgrave Macmillan. [More information here]

This chapter aims to address the scant attention that has been paid to time and temporalities in re-entry and re/integration research. Drawing on data from the ‘Distant Voices—Coming Home’ project, which used creative methods to explore re/integration after punishment—we illustrate and analyse three ‘travails’ of penal time. We use the term travails here to stress the significant, difficult and active work involved in addressing these temporal challenges. Respectively, these travails concern the struggles caused by ‘de-synchrony’ between time inside and outside of prison and the problems of ‘re-synchrony’ that it creates; the contestation of ‘readiness’ for progression and release; and the problem of living with the paradox of ‘enduring temporariness’. In our conclusion, we argue that tackling these three challenges requires people re-entering society to travel not just through spaces and to places but also through time, both backwards and forwards. These journeys are fraught with both difficulty and danger.

 

PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP

Lageson, Sarah. November 13, 2022. “Formerly Incarcerated Job Seekers Need More Than Training.” Wired. [Access it here]

Reentry programs help, but tech companies must also modify their hiring systems.

Members' Publications: September Edition

As compiled by Dr. Kaitlyn Quinn

 LAW AND SOCIETY ASSOCIATION

Collaborative Research Network: Punishment and Society

Organizers:

Ashley Rubin, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, USA

Natalie Pifer, University of Rhode Island

 

RECENTLY PUBLISHED WORKS

September 2022

ARTICLES

Aaronson, Ely and Gil Rothschild-Elyassi. 2021. “The symbiotic tensions of the regulatory–carceral state: The case of cannabis legalization.” Regulation & Governance 15(S1): S23-S39. [Access it here]

Recent scholarship has emphasized the need to develop a polymorphic conceptualization of the regulatory state. This article contributes to this theory-building project by outlining a research agenda for exploring the symbiotic interactions and tensions between the regulatory and carceral morphs of the state. Using the case study of cannabis legalization reforms in the United States, we argue that the legitimation deficits of the carceral state stimulate the proliferation of new regulatory frameworks for governing social problems that were traditionally handled by the criminal justice system. We demonstrate how the polymorphic approach illuminates the ways in which the regulatory and carceral morphs of the state compete for influence over shared policy domains, but also complement and reinforce one another. Thus, rather than precipitating the demise of the carceral state, cannabis legalization reforms sustain a bifurcated governance structure perpetuating long-standing patterns of using drug law as a means for racialized social control.

Aviram, Hadar. 2022. “The House Always Wins: Doctrine and Animus in California’s COVID-19 Prison Litigation.” Case Western Reserve Law Review 72(3): 565-630. [Access it here]

Bardelli Tommaso, Zach Gillespie, and Thuy Linh Tu. 2022. “Surviving austerity: Commissary stores, inequality and punishment in the contemporary American prison.” Punishment & Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

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.

Belt, Rabia. 2022. “The Fat Prisoners’ Dilemma: Slow Violence, Intersectionality, and a Disability Rights Framework for the Future.” Georgetown Law Journal 110(4): 785-833. [Access it here]

Law has ignored the problems of fatness in prisons and jails and regularly fails to address much-needed accommodations for fat incarcerated people due to flaws in incarceration law and applications of disability law.

The dilemma of fat incarcerated people extends beyond litigation difficulties, however. It is a heuristic that illustrates the depth of the harm of mass incarceration and the need to take disability seriously—and how complicated taking disability seriously is. Attention to the social inequities that produce and maintain the population of fat people in prisons exposes a profound tension in disability scholarship and activism. Typically, disability scholarship and advocacy seek to unite a disability community of people with varying bodily impairments by focusing on stigma and stereotyping. While people’s bodies are different, all disabled people experience ableism. This Article contends that disability scholars and advocates can and should augment their focus on stigma and stereo- typing to emphasize the social inequities such as environmental poisoning, racism, poverty, and violence that produce many debilitating impairments. This proposal is an uncomfortable proposition for disability scholarship and advocacy wary of eugenic treatment and “cures.” Reducing social inequities would reduce the population of disabled people, and advocacy to improve the environmental predecessors to impairment could be viewed as a condemnation of the state of disability itself. 

However, proper attention to intersectional injustice in conjunction with respect for disabled people requires thoughtful consideration of the production of impairments. Although not all disabilities are the result of social injustice, knitting together social inequality and disability would reorient the field on those who are most marginalized, redirect it toward a greater reliance on intersectional principles, and link it to other political and legal campaigns that challenge injustice.

Burkhardt, Brett C. and Scott Akins. 2022. “How Should Police Respond to Homelessness? Results from a Survey Experiment in Portland, Oregon.” Criminal Justice Studies. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

Recent years have seen increases in citizen complaints and legislation about homelessness. Police are often tasked with responding to these complaints and violations. This paper asks: What do people want the police to do when they encounter visible homelessness, and how are these preferences related to characteristics of observers and of individuals who are homeless? It presents findings from a survey experiment delivered to residents of Portland, Oregon, USA. Respondents were given a series of vignettes involving a hypothetical homeless man whose race (Black or White) and background characteristics (substance abuse, mental illness, combat veteran, or control) were randomly assigned. Respondents were then asked to endorse an aggressive (‘arrest’), therapeutic (‘help’), or hands-off (‘ignore’) response by police. Results reveal support for a therapeutic response to visible homelessness, though this was mediated somewhat by the race of the homeless person. The findings contribute to research on public perceptions of police actions.

Carter, TaLisa J. and Miltonette O. Craig. 2022. “It Could Be Us: Black Faculty as ‘Threats’ on the Path to Tenure.” Race and Justice 12(3): 569-587. [Access it here]

Racial disparities in tenure and promotion outcomes are well known in the existing research literature. Scholarship establishes that Black and Brown faculty experience unique challenges when navigating the tenure and promotion process, such as lack of diverse mentorship, biased student/peer evaluations, and disproportionately high service demands. However, the public has entered this discourse due to recent media attention involving the tenure cases of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Cornel West, and this has prompted minoritized faculty nationwide to reflect on the implications of these incidents on their own careers. This study relies on theoretical and conceptual literature to discuss the professional realities Black faculty face on the job. We make the theoretical claim that the racial threat hypothesis can facilitate understanding of how Black faculty pursuing tenure is a political threat to white hegemony in the academy resulting in an increase of social control. We conclude with concrete recommendations on how Black scholars can wield the label of “threat” to successfully navigate the academy.

Jiang, Jize and Zhifeng Chen. 2022. “Victim Welfare, Social Harmony, and State Interests: Implementing Restorative Justice in Chinese Environmental Criminal Justice.” Asian Journal of Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

While there have been abundant studies on restorative justice (RJ) in China and across the globe, research has paid scant attention to the increasing incorporation of RJ into the framework of Chinese environmental criminal justice (ECJ) and its mounting prominence in handling ECJ cases. To broaden our understanding of RJ in China, this study empirically examines the forms, functions, and foundations of RJ ideals and practices manifested in contemporary Chinese legal responses to environmental crime. Drawing on various sources of qualitative data, we find that RJ in ECJ uses a state-led-and-coordinated network of community organizations and residents (including groups of environmental victims) to account for victim welfare, offenders’ new responsibilization, and public engagement. Furthermore, we argue, as a peculiar form of law’s responsiveness in the wake of China’s swift transition to modernity, RJ in Chinese ECJ works to reinforce the declining legitimacy of the authoritarian state and enhance decreasing trust in the state’s ability to govern. Implications for better understanding and implementing RJ within the ECJ field are also presented and discussed.

Miltonette O. Craig and Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill. 2022. “Understanding Police Agencies’ Explanations for Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality in Vehicle Stops.” Crime & Delinquency. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

Extant literature on traffic stops indicates that disparate enforcement of traffic laws is pervasive, violative of individuals’ constitutional liberties, and can have a lasting impact on the psyches of those subjected to it. This issue takes center stage in Missouri, a state that has often been alleged to engage in racial profiling, because disproportionality has persisted despite legislation to address it. To this point, several quantitative investigations of Missouri traffic stop data have answered many important questions regarding the existence and prevalence of disparities. However, there is a dearth of qualitative research that focuses on police agencies’ reactions to the data outcomes. The current study addresses this gap by analyzing written responses from Missouri agencies submitted with stop statistics. Findings reveal that agencies use responses to provide several types of justifications, excuses, and mitigating circumstances to explain existing disparities.

Miltonette O. Craig, Jonathan C. Reid and Kelsey L. Kramer. 2022. “Vehicle Stops and Group Position: How Missouri Agencies Use Place and Race to Explain Disparities.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

Missouri has been a part of the national discussion on racial profiling for several years—most recently with the NAACP’s issuance of a statewide travel advisory warning Black motorists of high disproportionality in vehicle stops. In their annual reports of stop data, agencies can submit a response to explain their numerical data. This study inductively analyzes the content of these written responses (N = 806), which were submitted between 2001 and 2019. Findings indicate that agency responses contain rationales in accordance with a sense of group position, with explanations for stops, searches, and arrests of motorists of color framed in terms of outsiders as a problematic influx upon insider spaces. The responses also show that the explanations are more about policing place than a legitimate effort at maintaining safety of the jurisdiction. The results of this study have several important implications for research, theory, and policy.

Crewe, Ben, Corentin Duran, Manon Veaudor, and Valérie Icard. 2022. “‘Penal Power, Then, Exercises a Grip That Has Become Tighter and More Demanding, Even If in Many Respects Its Form Has Softened’: Interview With Ben Crewe.” Champ Pénal/Penal Field 25. [Access it here]

 

Hamilton, Claire and Lynsey Black. 2021. “‘Strikingly and Stubbornly High’: Investigating the Paradox of Public Confidence in the Irish Police.” European Journal of Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

While levels of public confidence in the police have declined internationally, the Republic of Ireland appears to have bucked this trend with confidence levels that remain ‘strikingly and stubbornly high’ ( Mulcahy, 2016: 275). This situation appears all the more puzzling given the wave of scandals to have hit the force in recent decades, ranging from police corruption in Donegal in the late 1990s to a more recent whistleblower scandal that has resulted in the resignation of a slew of Ministers and high-ranking officials. Such developments beg important questions as to the factors sustaining public confidence over this tumultuous period. Drawing on international and domestic data, this article aims to probe this ‘paradox’ of public confidence in the Irish police. It argues that, although confidence is high, there is more to the dynamics of confidence in the police in Ireland than this initial appraisal suggests. Indeed, it advances the Irish case as an illustration both of the dimensionality of the public confidence concept and the complexity of the pathways to trust in the police.

Jefferis, Danielle C. forthcoming 2022. “Carceral Intent.” Michigan Journal of Race & Law 27. [Access it here]

For decades, scholars across disciplines have examined the stark injustice of American carceralism. Among that body of work are analyses of the various intent requirements embedded in the constitutional doctrine that governs the state’s power to incarcerate. These intent requirements include the “deliberate indifference” standard of the Eighth Amendment, which regulates prison conditions, and the “punitive intent” standard of due process jurisprudence, which regulates the scope of confinement. This Article coins the term “carceral intent” to refer collectively to those legal intent requirements and examines critically the role of carceral intent in shaping and maintaining the deep-rooted structural racism and sweeping harms of America’s system of confinement.

This Article begins by tracing the origins of American carceralism, focusing on the modern prison’s relationship to white supremacy and the post-Emancipation period in U.S. history. The Article then turns to the constitutional doctrine of incarceration, synthesizing and categorizing the law of carceral intent. Then, drawing upon critical race scholarship that examines anti-discrimination doctrine and the concept of “white innocence,” the Article compares the law’s reliance on carceral intent with the law’s reliance on discriminatory intent in equal protection jurisprudence. Critical race theorists have long critiqued the intent-focused anti-discrimination doctrine as incapable of remedying structural racism and inequities. The same can be said of the doctrine of incarceration. The law’s preoccupation with an alleged wrongdoer’s “bad intent” in challenges to the scope and conditions of incarceration makes it ill-suited to remedying the U.S. prison system’s profoundly unjust and harmful features. A curative approach, this Article asserts, is one in which the law focuses on carceral effect rather than carceral intent, as others have argued in the context of equal protection.

Jouet, Mugambi. 2021. “Revolutionary Criminal Punishments: Treason, Mercy, and the American Revolution.” American Journal of Legal History 61(2): 139-176. [Access it here]

*Mugambi Jouet won the Brophy Prize for this article. The Alfred L. Brophy Prize is awarded annually to the article or other contribution in theAmerican Journal of Legal History that most significantly breaks new ground and adds new insights to the study and understanding of United States legal history.

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 remarkable 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. While American revolutionary punishments comprised stark racial inequities and did not constitute a lost utopia, they were particularly mild 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, the article’s findings are relevant to ongoing debates about American exceptionalism and the peculiar harshness of modern American justice, including originalist and non-originalist interpretations of the Eighth Amendment. 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 was once a trailblazer in embracing humane conceptions of justice.

Kurwa, Rahim and Susila Gurusami (equal first authors). 2022. “Carceral Migrations: Reframing Race, Space, and Punishment.” Social Service Review 96(2):353-388. [Access it here]

We theorize state governance through population spatial trajectories to capture how seemingly disparate systems of punishment employ the same set of punishment logics and technologies to spatially regulate populations of color, which produces and reifies racial projects. Advancing a theoretical framework called carceral migrations, we argue that governments use legal punishment to force, re- strict, and prevent movement as a racializing project of settler empire and anti- Blackness. Carceral migrations extend understandings of mass incarceration beyond confinement and holding by articulating three major points. First, the state’s regu- lation of populations’ spatial trajectories is punishment by design. Second, these spatially-oriented punishments operate as race-making and reinforcing technologies by producing punitive and recognizable spatial trajectories (or nontrajectories) for groups of people of color. Third, despite appearing race neutral in language, the development and application of legal codes and policies have disparate impacts on the spatial trajectories of people of color.

Leon, Chrysanthi S. and Ashley J. Kilmer. 2022. “‘Secondary registrants’: A new conceptualization of the spread of community control.” Punishment & Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

U.S. policies influence worldwide responses to sexual offending and community control. Individuals in the U.S. convicted of sex offenses experience surveillance and control beyond their sentences, including public registries and residency restrictions. While the targets are the convicted individuals, many registrants have romantic partners, children, and other family members also navigating these restrictions. Findings from a qualitative study using written and interview responses from a hard-to-reach group—family members of registrants (n  =  58)—reveal legal and extra-legal surveillance and control beyond the intended target. We argue that family members are “secondary registrants” enduring both the reach of sex offense policies into their personal lives and targeted harms because of their relationship with a convicted individual, including vigilantism and a “sex offender surcharge.” Family members engage in advocacy work to ameliorate sex offense restrictions to counteract their own stigmatization and social exclusion. Conceptually, secondary registration captures the unique and expansive reach of policy, state surveillance, and coercion on registrant family members and raises new concerns about spillover harm. Secondary registration demonstrates an understudied example of the neoliberal penal practice of de-centering the state but with the addition of deep stigmatization and the spread of sovereign and vigilante violence onto families.

Malone Gonzalez, Shannon and Faith M. Deckard. 2022. ’We Got Witnesses’: Black Women Navigating Police Violence and Legal Estrangement.” Social Problems. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

Police violence shapes the lives of racial and ethnic minorities, and while much has been written about strategic responses to police, missing is an examination of how black women navigate interactions with officers. Based on 32 interviews with black women, we find that they use witnessing, or the mobilization of others as observers to police encounters. Research demonstrates the rising role of videos and smartphones in documenting encounters with officers. We find that black women adapt witnessing techniques based on their surroundings, available resources, and network contacts. Three forms of witnessing are observed: physical witnessing, mobilizing others in close proximity to interactions with officers; virtual witnessing, using cellphone or social media technology to contact others or record interactions with officers; and institutional witnessing, leveraging police or other institutional contacts as interveners to interactions with officers. Black women mobilize witnessing to deescalate violence, gather evidence, and promote accountability. Attuned to both the interactional and structural dynamics of police encounters, black women conceptualize witnessing as a way to survive police encounters and navigate their legal estrangement within the carceral system. We theorize black women’s witnessing as a form of resistance as they work to reconfigure short- and long-term power relations between themselves, their communities, and police.

Mamet, Elliot. 2022. “‘This Unfortunate Development’: Incarceration and Democracy in W.E.B. Du Bois.” Political Theory. [Access it here]

Incarceration served as a primary apparatus by which abolition democracy was defeated after Reconstruction. Carceral institutions—such as the penitentiary, the convict-lease system, and the chain gang—functioned to demarcate the racial limits of citizenship and to impede equal political power. This article turns to W. E. B. Du Bois to argue that incarceration constrains democratic political equality. Turning to Du Bois’s treatment of crime and imprisonment in works including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), “The Spawn of Slavery” (1901), and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), alongside archival material, I situate incarceration in Du Bois’s democratic thought. According to Du Bois, carceral institutions bounded ideas of full citizenship, fueled panic over Black “criminality,” fomented feelings of inferiority, and hampered the possibility for abolition democracy, a multiracial, multiclass movement committed to worker democracy and a future rid of slavery and subjugation. Du Bois shows us how carceral institutions run into tension with democratic ideals.

Peirce, Jennifer. 2022. “‘It was supposed to be fair here’: Human rights and recourse mechanisms in the Dominican Republic’s prison reform process.” Journal of Human Rights 21(1): 91-109. [Access it here]

This article analyzes prisoners’ accounts of human rights violations and protections in two types of prisons in the Dominican Republic: “new” prisons that uphold goals of rights and rehabilitation and “old” prisons that mostly warehouse people. This mixed-methods study finds that prisoners experience significant violence, mostly by other prisoners in old facilities and mostly by corrections staff in new facilities, with different rationales and possible responses. I consider three types of recourse mechanisms: top-down (courts or external commissions), bottom-up (advocacy), and internal institutional (grievance processes and human rights training). I argue that each of these carries constraints, and prisoners perceive official channels to favor the institution. The prevalence of rights violations and the narrow recourse options generate cynicism and frustration among prisoners and their families, which can undermine the legitimacy gained through other important improvements in the reform process.

Rothschild-Elyassi, Gil. 2022. “The Datafication of Law: How Technology Encodes Carceral Power and Affects Judicial Practice in the United States.” Law & Social Inquiry 47(1): 55-94. [Access it here]

This inquiry explores how data analyses about US Federal sentences have transformed sentencing practice beginning in the mid-1980s. I consider this inquiry an early case of the datafication of law, a pervasive process that translates legal practice into data and embeds it in digital networks so it can be tracked and analyzed in real time. To explore datafication historically and in relation to legal practice and power, I consider it not as an objective and passive undertaking but, rather, as an ideological and performative process that encodes and enacts normative presumptions and desirable futures. The empirical inquiry traverses “levels of analysis” and thus bridges prominent perspectives in sociolegal research. In so doing, I identify four mechanisms that mediate “large-scale” processes and “local” practices: field assembly, symbolic projection, material inscription, and boundaries spanning. Substantively, I show how datafication has not simply described, but also transformed, sentencing practice according to a colorblind-carceral imaginary that strives to fix the present in place. By relentlessly translating decisions into data forms that derive from this carceral imaginary, datafication affects judicial action and partakes in sustaining legacies of oppression. Yet, like other technologies, datafication also reveals dialectic dimensions in opening up to new actors and subjecting its ideological underpinnings to contestation and change.

Rowen, Jamie, Scott Blinder, and Rebecca Hamlin. 2022. “Victim, perpetrator, neither: Attitudes on deservingness and culpability in immigration law.” Law & Society Review 56(3): 369-397. [Access it here]

This study examines whether there is popular support for a restrictive immigration policy aimed at denying safe haven to human rights abusers and those affiliated with terrorism. We designed a public opinion survey experiment that asks respondents to evaluate whether low level or high level Taliban members who otherwise qualify for refugee status deserve immigration benefits. We found that a majority of respondents did not immediately deny a visa to low level worker. Looking at respondents’ explanations for their decision, we find two distinct clusters of reasons that we classify as either circumstantial – focused on the particularities of the case – or categorical – focused on general attributes of the applicant. Many respondents using circumstantial reasoning saw a distinction between the jobs potential immigrants have done in their pasts and what they actually believe, underscoring the fraught dynamics of armed conflict in which people may be swept up in violence they do not support.

 

Sandoval, Juan R. and Sarah E. Lageson. 2022. “Patchwork disclosure: Divergent public access and personal privacy across criminal record disclosure policy in the United States.” Law & Policy 44(3): 255-277. [Access it here]

Scholars have paid minimal attention to state statutory guidance that allows criminal justice agencies to disclose records that contain personal information about arrestees, defendants, and incarcerated people. We analyze US state policy for police, courts, prisons, and record repositories (N = 200). Most states restrict access to compiled criminal histories, but nearly all allow broad public access to agency records. Divergent policy guidance accounts for these differences, where transparency laws govern agency records while state criminal codes regulate records of arrest and prosecution, otherwise known as RAP sheets. These policy differences contribute to widespread disclosures of non-conviction records, raising questions about due process and inequality in the big data age.

Simes, Jessica T., Bruce Western, and Angela Lee. 2022. “Mental Health Disparities in Solitary Confinement.” Criminology 60(3): 538-575. [Access it here]

Harsh prison conditions have been widely examined for their effects on the mental health of incarcerated people, but few studies have examined whether mental health status exposes individuals to harsh treatment in the penal system. With prisoners confined to their cells for up to 23 hours each day, often being denied visitors or phone calls, solitary confinement is an important case for studying harsh treatment in prisons. Routinely used as punishment for prison infractions, solitary confinement may be subject to the same forces that criminalize the mentally ill in community settings. Analyzing a large administrative data set showing admissions to solitary confinement in state prison, we find high rates of punitive isolation among those with serious mental illness. Disparities by mental health status result from the cumulative effects of prison misconduct charges and disciplinary hearings. We estimate that those with serious mental illness spend three times longer in solitary confinement than similar incarcerated people with no mental health problems. The evidence suggests the stigma of dangerousness follows people into prison, and the criminalization of mental illness accompanies greater severity of incarceration.

Velazquez, Marisela, Theresa L. Petray, and Debra Miles. 2022. “The Impacts of Drug and Alcohol use on Sentencing for First Nations and Non-Indigenous Defendants.” Race and Justice. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

This paper examines the ways personal use of illicit substances and alcohol are constructed as either mitigating or aggravating factors to explain offending. We consider the differential constructions of these factors for people who appear in supreme and district courts in northern Queensland, Australia, for offences involving illicit substance use, alcohol use, drug-related offences, and violence. Qualitative analysis of courtroom observations is understood through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Our findings reveal that personal use of illicit substances was primarily constructed by legal practitioners as an indicator of disadvantaged circumstances when discussing non-Indigenous defendants. In these cases, drug use was connected to other disadvantages such as poor mental health, physical pain, and trauma. In contrast, alcohol use was primarily raised as an aggravating factor for First Nations defendants, constructed by legal practitioners as a personal flaw linked to violent offending, and overshadowed the interrelated disadvantages that many First Nations defendants experience. This reflects social attitudes about First Nations people, reinforces individualistic explanations for offending patterns, and points to the institutional racism embedded in the structural processes of Queensland's higher courts that continues to profoundly impact First Nations people.

Webster, Elizabeth, Kathleen Powell, Sarah E. Lageson, and Valerio Baćak. 2022. “‘Satan’s Minions’ and ‘True Believers’: How Criminal Defense Attorneys Employ Quasi-Religious Rhetoric and What It Suggests about Lawyering Culture.” Justice System Journal 43(1): 53-67. [Access it here]

The notion of law as sacred, and lawyers as righteous saviors, may seem anachronistic in the current context of heavy caseloads and expedited processing in the criminal justice system. Nevertheless, language reflecting these ideals still permeates defense attorneys’ descriptions of their roles, their legal practice, and their relationships to their colleagues and adversaries. We examine this language – specifically, attorneys’ quasi-religious rhetoric – to better understand courtroom dynamics: how attorneys see themselves, their work, their colleagues, and their legal adversaries. In this analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 defense attorneys, we find that attorneys use of quasi-religious rhetoric manifests as a cultural practice that helps to establish and maintain professional identities, boundaries, and relationships. Our findings also suggest that young and novice public defenders are likely to express especially zealous views, which may compromise their efforts to collaborate within the adversarial system, as well as contribute to burnout.

Werth, Robert. 2022. “More than monsters: Penal imaginaries and the specter of the dangerous sex offender.” Punishment & Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

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.

Wozniak, Kevin H., Justin T. Pickett, and Elizabeth K. Brown. 2022. “Judging hardworking robbers and lazy thieves: An experimental test of act- vs. person-centered punitiveness and perceived redeemability.” Justice Quarterly. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]

This study explores whether Americans’ punitiveness and perceptions of redeemability are shaped more by the type of crime committed or by judgements about an offender’s moral character. Guided by theories of neoliberalism, we focus on laziness as an indicator of flawed character that is independent of criminality. A sentencing vignette experiment administered to a national sample of the U.S. population tested the effects of crime type and a defendant’s employment status, work ethic, and race on respondents’ preferred punishment and perceptions of the defendant’s redeemability. Both crime type and work ethic significantly affect perceived (ir)redeemability and sentencing preferences, but the effects are not identical. Work ethic exerts the largest effect on perceived (ir)redeemability, whereas crime type most strongly influences sentencing preferences. We discuss the implications of our findings for act- vs. person-centered theories of punishment, as well as the role of laziness stigma in social responses to lawbreakers.

 

BOOKS/BOOK CHAPTERS/EDITED COLLECTIONS

Black, Lynsey. 2022. Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64. Manchester University Press. [More information here]

Gender and punishment in Ireland explores women's lethal violence in Ireland. Drawing on comprehensive archival research, including government documents, press reporting, the remnants of public opinion and the voices of the women themselves, the book contributes to the burgeoning literature on gender and punishment and women who kill. Engaging with concepts such as 'double deviance', chivalry, paternalism and 'coercive confinement', the work explores the penal landscape for offending women in postcolonial Ireland, examining in particular the role of the Catholic Church in responses to female deviance. The book is an extensive interdisciplinary treatment of women who kill in Ireland and will be useful to scholars of gender, criminology and history.

Black, Lynsey, Louise Brangan, and Deirdre Healy (Eds.). 2022. Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland: Perspectives from a Periphery. Emerald Publishing. (Perspectives on Crime, Law and Justice in the Global South series) [More information here]

As a peripheral state within English-speaking criminology, Ireland is often overlooked in mainstream Anglophone theories of punitiveness and penal transformation. This edited collection addresses this deficit by bringing together leading scholars on Irish penal history and theory to make a case for Ireland’s wider theoretical relevance.

Together, these chapters show in rich detail the trends and debates that have surround patterns of punishment in Ireland since the formation of the State in 1922. However, by being about twentieth century Irish penal history, the volume inherently foregrounds often absent perspectives in criminology and punishment, such as gender, postcoloniality, religion, rurality, and carcerality beyond the criminal justice system. This is more than a collection of Irish criminology, therefore; the social analysis of Irish penal history is undertaken as a contribution towards southernising criminology. The authors each seek to engage criminology in a wider epistemological re-imagining of what is meant by punitiveness, penal culture, and 'Anglophone' penal history.

Opening up new avenues of exploration and collaboration, and showing how researchers might look beyond the usual problems, refine the mainstream trends, and rework the obvious questions, this collection demonstrates how the Irish perspective remains relevant for international researchers interested in punishment and history.

Johns, Diana, Catherine Flynn, Maggie Hall, Claire Spivakovsky, and Shelley Turner. 2022. Co-production and Criminal Justice. Routledge. [More information here]

This book explores practical examples of co-production in criminal justice research and practice. Through a series of seven case studies, the authors examine what people do when they co-produce knowledge in criminal justice contexts: in prisons and youth detention centres; with criminalised women; from practitioners’ perspectives; and with First Nations communities.

Co-production holds a promise: that people whose lives are entangled in the criminal justice system can be valued as participants and partners, helping to shape how the system works. But how realistic is it to imagine criminal justice "service users" participating, partnering, and sharing genuine decision-making power with those explicitly holding power over them?

Taking a sophisticated yet accessible theoretical approach, the authors consider issues of power, hierarchy, and different ways of knowing to understand the perils and possibilities of co-production under the shadow of "justice". In exploring these complexities, this book brings cautious optimism to co-production partners and project leaders.

Kleinstuber, Ross, Jeremiah Coldsmith, Margaret E. Leigey, and Sandra Joy. 2022. Life Without Parole: Worse Than Death? Routledge. [More information here]

This book is an in-depth critical examination of all pertinent aspects of life without parole (LWOP). Empirically assessing key arguments that advance LWOP, including as an alternative to the death penalty, it reveals that not only is the punishment cruel while not providing any societal benefits, it is actually detrimental to society.

Over the last 30 years, LWOP has exploded in the United States. While the use of capital punishment over that same time period has declined, it must be recognized that LWOP is, in fact, a hidden death sentence. It is, however, implemented in a way that allows society to largely ignore this truth. While capital punishment has rightfully been subject to intense debate and scholarship, LWOP has mostly escaped such scrutiny. In fact, LWOP has been touted by both death penalty abolitionists and tough-on-crime conservatives, which has allowed it to flourish under the radar. Specifically, abolitionists have advanced LWOP as a palatable alternative to capital punishment, which they perceive as inhumane, error-prone, costly, and racially biased. Conservatives, meanwhile, advocate for LWOP as an effective means of fighting crime, a just form of retribution, and necessary tool for managing incorrigible offenders. This book seeks to tap into and help inform this growing debate by subjecting these key arguments to empirical scrutiny. The results of those analyses fail to produce any evidence in support of any of those various justifications and therefore suggest that LWOP should be abolished and replaced with life sentences that come with parole eligibility after a maximum of 25 years.

The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology and criminal justice and will also have crossover appeal into the fields of law, political science, and sociology. It will also appeal to criminal justice professionals, lawmakers, activists, and attorneys, as well as death penalty abolitionists, opponents of mass incarceration, advocates for sentencing reform, and supporters of prisoners’ rights.

Miller, Esmorie. 2022. Race, Recognition and Retribution in Contemporary Youth Justice: The Intractability Malleability Thesis. Routledge. [More information here]

Race, Recognition and Retribution in Contemporary Youth Justice provides a cross-national, sociohistorical investigation of the legacy of racial discrimination, which informs contemporary youth justice practice in Canada and England. The book links racial disparities in youth justice, especially exclusion from ideologies of care and notions of future citizenship, with historical practices of exclusion.

Sozzo, Máximo (Ed.). 2022. Prisons, Inmates and Governance in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan. [More information here]

This edited collection addresses the topic of prison governance which is crucial to our understanding of contemporary prisons in Latin America. It presents social research from Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay and Argentina to examine the practices of governance by the prisoners themselves in each unique setting in detail. High levels of variation in the governance practices are found to exist, not only between countries but also within the same country, between prisons and within the same prison, and between different areas. The chapters make important contributions to the theoretical concepts and arguments that can be used to interpret the emergence, dynamics and effects of these practices in the institutions of confinement of the region. The book also addresses the complex task of explaining why these types of practices of governance happen in Latin American prisons as some of them appear to be a legacy of a remote past but others have arisen more recently. It makes a vital contribution to the fundamental debate for prison policies in Latin America about the alternatives that can be promoted.

 

PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP

Lageson, Sarah. July 18, 2022. “‘Clean Slate’ Justice Laws Offer a Second Chance—Only to Some.” WIRED. [Access it here]

States are trying to automate criminal record clearance. But what if they end up amplifying racial disparities?