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
March 2024
ARTICLES
Annison, Harry, Lol Burke, Nicola Carr, Mathew Millings, Gwen Robinson, and Eleanor Surridge. 2023. “Making Good? A Study of How Senior Penal Policy Makers Narrate Policy Reversal.” The British Journal of Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here, open access]
This paper provides insights into the predominant styles of political reasoning in England and Wales that inform penal policy reform. It does so in relation to a particular development that constitutes a dramatic, perhaps even unique, wholesale reversal of a previously introduced market-based criminal justice delivery model. This is the ‘unification’ of probation services in England and Wales, which unwound the consequential privatization reforms introduced less than a decade earlier. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with senior policy makers to present a narrative reconstruction of the unification of probation services in England and Wales. Analogies with desistance literature are drawn upon in order to encapsulate the tensions posed for policy makers as they sought to enact this penal policy reform.
Brangan, Louise. 2024. “States of Denial: Magdalene Laundries in twentieth-century Ireland.” Punishment & Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here, open access]
On the first day at a Magdalene Laundry, women and girls who had been sent there had their hair cut off, their names replaced, and their possessions taken. In the days and weeks that followed, everything else was stripped from them. How do we make sense of this carceral regime? The new conceived wisdom is to describe Magdalene Laundries as places of containment and confinement, as tantamount to prisons. This paper suggests that Magdalene Laundries were far worse than the prison. I argue that rather than discuss Magdalene Laundries as sites of confinement, we should instead understand them as sites of erasure. That is because the pains of this form of detention were drawn not from the loss of liberty, but the loss of self. The article is based on 33 oral history interviews with women who survived Magdalene Laundries and archival research regarding the nuns and religious, who ran these institutions. We also learn that Magdalene Laundries were important social institutions that open a window onto Irish life in the twentieth century. Magdalene Laundries operated with an undiluted formula that all Irish citizens were expected to subscribe to: a culture of conformity that prided obedience, self-denial and moral purity.
Brayne, Sarah, Sarah Lageson, and Karen Levy. 2023. “Surveillance Deputies: When Ordinary People Surveil for the State.” Law & Society Review 57(4): 462-488. [Access it here, open access]
The state has long relied on ordinary civilians to do surveillance work, but recent advances in networked technologies are expanding mechanisms for surveillance and social control. In this article, we analyze the phenomenon in which private individuals conduct surveillance on behalf of the state, often using private sector technologies to do so. We develop the concept of surveillance deputies to describe when ordinary people, rather than state actors, use their labor and economic resources to engage in such activity. Although surveillance deputies themselves are not new, their participation in everyday surveillance deputy work has rapidly increased under unique economic and technological conditions of our digital age. Drawing upon contemporary empirical examples, we hypothesize four conditions that contribute to surveillance deputization and strengthen its effects: (1) when interests between the state and civilians converge; (2) when law institutionalizes surveillance deputization or fails to clarify its boundaries; (3) when technological offerings expand personal surveillance capabilities; and (4) when unequal groups use surveillance to gain power or leverage resistance. In developing these hypotheses, we bridge research in law and society, sociology, surveillance studies, and science and technology studies and suggest avenues for future empirical investigation.
Coldsmith, Jeremiah and Ross Kleinstuber. 2023. “Fighting Crime or Needless Time? Disentangling the Reciprocal Effects of Life Without Parole and Violent Crime Using Structural Equation Models.” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 89: 109-142. [Access it here]
In recent decades, the use of capital punishment has declined, but in its place, a ‘new death penalty’ has arisen: life without parole (LWOP), which is being used far more frequently and for more crimes than capital punishment ever was. Yet, LWOP has received far less scholarly attention than the death penalty. Because of its greater scale, assessing the effects of LWOP on crime has important policy implications and is a better test of extreme penalties. Existing studies of LWOP focus on humanitarian issues and ignore its potentially reciprocal relationship with crime. Therefore, we use available LWOP data to fill these gaps in the literature, using models specifically designed to control for potential reciprocal effects. The results indicate there is no reciprocal causation between LWOP and violent crime and, at best, LWOP’s impact on crime is small, temporary, and, most importantly, no greater than the impact of life with parole.
Crewe, Ben. 2024. “‘Sedative Coping’, Contextual Maturity and Institutionalization Among Prisoners Serving Life Sentences in England and Wales.” The British Journal of Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here, open access]
Based on a longitudinal study of life-sentenced prisoners in England and Wales, this article seeks to make sense of what it characterizes as ‘sedative coping’. In doing so, it brings together analytic conclusions from the existing research literature that appear highly inconsistent, but which indicate the centrality of emotion in the experience of serving a long prison sentence. Specifically, it highlights the forms of emotion management and suppression involved in coping with the trauma of such circumstances, and the post-release impact of sustained forms of emotional self-preservation. This focus helps us better understand the connection between ‘mature coping’ in custody and the post-release difficulties that life-sentenced prisoners often describe.
Gacek, James, Jennifer Turner, Bastien Quirion, and Rosemary Ricciardelli. 2023. Mettre en lumière la lumière: L'éclairage carcéral, le travail correctionnel et le bien-être. [Translation: Shining a Light on Lighting: Prison Lighting, Correctional Officer Workspace and Well-being] Revue Criminologie 56(2): 67-92. [Access it here, open access]
In this article, we analyze the experience and concerns of Canadian federal correctional officers (COs) regarding their work environment. Drawing on prison geography, and recognizing the importance of the links between architecture, physical arrangements and the lived experience of space, we studied the effect of light (or its absence) on the work environment and the well-being of ACs. The participants whose comments are reported in this article (n = 60) were recruited as part of a large longitudinal study (Ricciardelli et al., 2021). After noting that limited access to natural light is often justified by safety considerations, we first analyzed the impact of this absence of natural light on the work experience and on health and the well-being of the ACs. We then examined alternative measures to address safety issues by using excessive light sources. These two aspects allow us to recognize the existence of a lighting problem specific to the prison environment. Although access to natural light is strictly controlled, we nevertheless note that light constitutes, by nature, a particularly difficult aspect to regulate in a prison environment. The results of this study make it possible to highlight the problems linked to the diffusion of light in the prison space and to underline the perverse effects of the prison environment on the conditions of care. We conclude this article by setting out recommendations concerning lighting arrangements and improving the conditions in which COs and prisoners find themselves.
Gibson-Light, Michael. 2023. “The Ghosts Inside: The Historic Struggle to Reclassify Prison Labor, 1967–1979.” The Prison Journal 103(4): 489-512. [Access it here]
The 1970s saw incarcerated laborers engage in an unprecedented battle to secure recognition, rights, and protections. This article traces the rise of the Prisoners Union, the largest and most prominent organization of its sort, as it endeavored to elevate the standing of captive labor. Through qualitative analysis of archival materials, this work unpacks penal laborers’ classification struggles aimed at advancing status in the penal field and rejoining the ranks of the working class. Investigating this movement's successes and failures enhances empirical knowledge of prison organizing as well as theoretical understandings of classification struggles, and helps contextualize historic penological developments.
Jiang, Jize and Apei Song. 2024. “Strong Control and Weak Service: Enforcing Drug Treatment in China.” Journal of Drug Issues. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
The proliferation of drug treatment services, crafted under harm reduction and evidence-based principles, is touted as a benevolent approach for drug offenders, foregrounding their rehabilitation and reintegration into the community, and embodying the ideal of penal welfare. Despite extant studies on the functional effectiveness on recidivism among drug offenders, little research has situated the operational significance of drug treatment programs within a broader project of the Chinese state’s efforts to govern a rapidly modernizing society. To bridge this gap, this study examines the implementation of drug treatment in the Chinese justice system by unravelling the processes and logics that assemble strong control and weak service in practice. The analysis suggests that Chinese drug treatment programs both reflect and reinforce the state-centric logic of the Chinese approach to social governance, functioning to enhance the state’s legitimacy and strengthen its capacity for social control. We contend that when state interests and political ideologies are prioritized over drug offenders’ recovery, concerns and needs of drug offenders are downplayed and the rehabilitative effectiveness of those programs is diminished. Future research and policy implications for ameliorating drug treatment programs are also addressed.
Lageson, Sarah. 2023. “Criminally Bad Data: Inaccurate Criminal Records, Data Brokers, and Algorithmic Injustice.” University of Illinois Law Review: 1771-1810 [Access it here, open access]
This Article considers a widely overlooked consequence of having a criminal record in the digital age: the spread of inaccurate or outdated criminal record information. Remarkably common, errors in criminal record data quickly multiply across digital platforms and are nearly impossible for people to manage. Error can begin in governmental sources and spread into the private sector or can be introduced by data aggregators as information across jurisdictions and agencies is compiled into databases and web content. For the subject of the record, error can pose enormous obstacles to securing employment and housing, particularly as automated decision-making and algorithmic governance transform traditional institutional processes. Yet, those who are harmed have very few rights regarding the ability to identify and remedy data error.
Part I of the Article introduces the issue of data error in criminal background checks and describes the scope of the problem. Parts II and III describe how and why criminal record data occurs and detail the specific harms through several theoretical lenses: data error as a due process and equal protection harm, as an informational privacy harm, and as a reputational harm. Part IV analyzes legal obstacles that limit remedies, with a particular focus on the practical obscurity doctrine, the Fair Credit Reporting Act, standing, and various legal immunities available to governments and the private sector. The analysis shows how regulating criminal record data has failed in a digital environment and how existing law fails to protect people from unfounded and illegal discrimination on the basis of inaccurate criminal record information. Part V argues that bad data should be conceptualized under broader critiques of racialized, algorithmic injustice and offers solutions for better regulating and using criminal records.
McNeill, Fergus. 2023. “Rehabilitation, Recognition and Misrecognition.” Kriminologia 3(2): 109-120. [Access it here, open access]
The paper is a lightly edited transcript of McNeill’s plenary address at the Finnish Society of Criminology (Suomen Kriminologinen Yhdistys ry) Conference, which took place at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu on 3-4th November 2022. It explores whether and under what circumstances rehabilitation might be seen as a form of violence reduction or, conversely, as a form of state-imposed symbolic violence.
Melossi, Dario. 2023. “Bonifica Umana: The Psychoanalysis of Human Reclamation.” The Journal of Architecture. OnlineFirst [Access it here, open access]
The concept of land reclamation has often been associated with a metaphorical meaning that extends it to the reclamation of human beings, i.e. in Italian, bonifica umana. This short essay departs from a famous statement by Sigmund Freud who, inspired by a well-known Dutch case, likened the work of psychoanalysis to that of reclaiming land from the sea. The essay then goes on to discuss the policies of reclaiming land under Fascism in Italy in the 1930s, the work of bonifica. Such work was soon called a process of bonifica integrale and finally of bonifica umana, with which it was intended as a proper programme of ‘human reclamation’, based on the eugenic ideas of medical scientist and researcher Nicola Pende as well as in the new Code of Criminal Law inaugurated by the regime in 1930. In other words, in the same way in which, according to Freud, the rational agency of the ego is supposed to emerge, with the help of psychoanalysis, from the chaos of the id, so too the programme of comprehensive and human reclamation was supposed to develop a new rational fascist society and humanity from the pre-existing ‘deadly marshes’, which would metaphorically represent the chaos of social and human life before the establishment of the new fascist regime. Finally, this essay considers the question of whether such views are inherent to the general direction of Western rationalism or are historically confined to Fascism.
Melossi, Dario. 2023. “Servitude for a Time: From the Permanent Slavery of the Unfree to the Slavery Pro Tempore of the Free.” Punishment and Society 25(5): 1207-1232. [Access it here, open access]
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.
Philips, Miray and Joachim J. Savelsberg. 2023. “Social Fields, Journalism, and Collective Memory: Reporting on the Armenian Genocide in Legal, Political, and Commemorative Field Events.” Memory Studies. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
Conflictual processes unfolding in legal and political social fields as well as commemorative events differentially shape social memories, including memories about genocides, in line with their rules of the game and institutional logics. News media subsequently process mnemonic struggles—carried out in law, politics, and commemorations—submitting them to the rules and norms of journalism before their messages reach the public. This article explores these processes for struggles pertaining to memories of the Armenian genocide. It is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 259 English language newspaper articles published in the United States that report about a court case, a legislative process, and commemorative events. Our analysis identifies distinct patterns of representations. Differences are in line with the institutional logics of the legal and political fields and the epistemic potential of commemorative rituals, even as they interact with the logic of the journalistic field that mediates those accounts.
Ravid, Itay and Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg. 2023. “Virtual Criminal Law Dualism.” University of Illinois Law Review: 1453-1472. [Access it here, open access]
Since the start of the new millennium, technological and societal changes have initiated a transition from physical to virtual spaces. This far-reaching phenomenon has extended to the law and legal institutions, including the criminal law domain. This essay coins the term “virtual criminal law dualism” to describe the dynamic relationship between the virtual and physical spaces in the criminal law sphere. We contend that the transition to virtual spaces has manifested in two distinct aspects. The first relates to formal doctrinal, procedural, and institutional changes that the mainstream criminal law and procedure have undergone due to the emergence of virtual spaces and technological developments (“changes from within”). The second relates to the transformation of criminal law and procedure that occurs under the influence of activities taking place in virtual platforms (“changes from the outside”). By exploring the simultaneous developments stemming from the transition to virtual spaces, we analyze the meaning of these developments, discuss their implications, and offer future directions regarding their potential expansion. We argue that the interplay between virtual and physical spaces is normatively neither encouraged nor discouraged in and of itself. Its value relies on the overarching objectives of the criminal legal system and its capacity to further those objectives.
Ravid, Itay and Rotem Dror. 2023. “140 Characters of Justice? The Promise and Perils of Using Social Media to Reveal Lay Punishment Perspectives.” University of Illinois Law Review: 1473-1532. [Access it here, open access]
For centuries, penal theorists have debated two key criminal justice questions: justifying state punishment power and determining proper punishment levels. Moral philosophers offered several theories to address these questions. Over time, calls emerged to move beyond theories and to consider community views on punishment rationales in criminal law and policy design, an approach that gained support alongside meaningful critique. Concurrently, social science advancements enabled empirically deepening understanding of public attitudes about punishment, largely through surveys and experiments.
One domain, however, remained untouched by those calling to assess lay intuitions of justice: social media. Such oversight is puzzling in light of social media’s potential to reveal public perceptions without scientific intervention. This Article thus engages with two main questions. First, a methodological question: whether social media discourse can be used to reflect laypeople’s attitudes about criminal culpability and punishment, and second, a normative question: should it be used for these purposes?
To answer these questions, the Article first synthesizes current scholarship about the promises and challenges of using social media data to study human behavior and applies it to the context of punishment justifications. The Article moves beyond theory, however, and utilizes recent technological developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) and Law and Natural Language Processing (“NLP”) to offer a novel empirical exploration of the potential promise of social media discourse in assessing community views on justice and punishment.
While our findings offer some support for the potentiality of using social media to assess laypeople’s attitudes regarding punishment, we also expose the complex challenges of utilizing such data, particularly for penal law and policy design. First, due to a host of methodological challenges, and second, due to normative challenges, particularly social media’s polarizing nature and the ambiguity around who’s voice is amplified through these platforms. The Article thus urges caution when leveraging social media to evaluate the public’s perceptions of justice.
Savelsberg, Joachim J. and Brooke B. Chambers. 2023. “Darfur Model, Rwanda, and the ICTR: John Hagan’s Sociology of Genocide Continued.” Law & Social Inquiry 48(4): 1232-1250. [Access it here, open access]
Core contributions from John Hagan’s scholarship on genocide are at stake in this article. First, this article examines, for the Rwandan genocide, the applicability of Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond’s multi-level causal model of genocide, developed in Darfur and the Crime of Genocide. Asking how causal factors and processes highlighted in that model play out in scholarship on the Rwandan genocide, it moves toward answering the question of external validity versus historical specificity. Second, the article examines, again with a focus on Rwanda, the relationship between social scientific explanation and judicial thought. While it highlights—in line with the first author’s previous work—how judicial narratives address or select out core factors highlighted in the Darfur model, the article focuses—in line with Hagan’s Justice in the Balkans—on the question of what knowledge social science can nevertheless gain from court proceedings. An analysis of a sample of cases processed by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda identifies overlaps with social science analyses, but it also highlights distinctions.
Soto, Michael and Joachim J. Savelsberg. 2023. “Collective Memories and Community Interventions: Peace Building in Northern Ireland.” Studies in Social Justice 17(3): 360-383. [Access it here, open access]
This paper examines the role of community interventions in post-conflict settings. The focus is on peacebuilding through the shaping of collective memories, achieved through the transformation of social ties. By addressing community interventions, this paper opens the black box between interventions by formal institutions (such as peace treaties, trials, or truth commissions) and outcomes. It is based on a study of one specific cross-community initiative in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which – in 2012 – employed a Transitional Justice Grassroots Toolkit. Document analysis is complemented by interviews with participants and organizers to reveal the role of pedagogical practices, mediated by cohort effects, in facilitating cultural transformation through group interactions. This paper suggests how community interventions can change collective memories, cultural trauma, and related identities of the conflict, away from their polarized and polarizing forms, and it explores implications for future peace and social justice.
Super, Gail. 2024. “Porous Penality and the Myth of Liberal Punishment: Lessons from South Africa.” The British Journal of Criminology 64(1): 107-123. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
Drawing on Walter Benjamin, this paper discusses the relationships between law, violence, and punishment. The main argument I make is that state punishment is BOTH a violent and logically contradictory practice and that the state’s legal right to punish often spills over into extralegal penal violence, perpetrated by a range of actors against the racialized poor. I use the term penal violence to refer to all forms of violence which are aimed at enforcing law or punishing a perceived transgression of law or norms. The paper focuses on the infliction of penal violence in South Africa on/in three different scales and jurisdictions: Makwanyane and violence in prisons; police and prosecutorial violence; and extralegal civilian violence.
Thomas, Christopher. 2024. “Racial Reckoning Protests, the Capitol Insurrection, and Asymmetric Social Facts: A Mixed-Methods Study of Public Opinion.” Journal of Experimental Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
This mixed-methods explanatory study combines national digital survey experiments and structural topic modeling of open-ended questions to examine whether news images from George Floyd protests and the Capitol insurrection affected feelings about the police differentially depending on respondents’ primary news environment. Survey experiments were conducted on 990 respondents in June 2020 and 1,174 respondents in January 2021, at the heights of the events. The study found that respondents who get their news primarily from conservative sources had substantially warmer feelings about the police after seeing Floyd protest images but not after seeing Capitol insurrection images. Topic modeling and qualitative analysis suggest this group distinctively perceived Floyd protesters as “looters” and “rioters,” discussing the Floyd protests but not the insurrection in terms of racialized chaos and anxiety. Findings suggest asymmetric affective dynamics driven by the racialized anxiety of consumers of mainly conservative news when seeing images of racial justice protests.
Tomczak, Philippa, Kaitlyn Quinn, Catherine Traynor, and Lucy Wainwright. 2023. (Re)constructing Prisoner Death Investigations: A Case Study of Suicide Investigations from England and Wales. Law & Social Inquiry. OnlineFirst. [Access it here, open access]
Because states must rebut the presumption of responsibility, all prisoner deaths must be investigated. These investigations frequently illustrate the tip of an iceberg of rights abuses and systemic hazards but have largely escaped analysis in prison-monitoring scholarship. Focusing on suicides, we assemble some of the first evidence illustrating how the staff of the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, who investigate prisoner deaths in England and Wales, seek to prevent further deaths. Ombudsman investigations are widely regarded as ineffective, yet there are competing constructions regarding why this is and what could be done to improve outcomes. As a result of organizational norms and constraints, ombudsman staff have offered narrow accounts of prisoner suicides, focusing on the failure of frontline staff to comply with prison policies. By contrast, prison staff and coroners have focused on systemic hazards or “accidents waiting to happen,” including imprisoning people with severe mental illness, illegal drugs, unsafe facilities, and inadequate staffing. These differing constructions lock penal actors into an unproductive cycle of blame shifting that contributes to high suicide numbers. We reconceptualize prisoner deaths as occurring at the intersection of systemic hazards, organizational contexts, and individual errors. We hope that this reconceptualization facilitates broader investigations that are more likely to prevent prisoner deaths.
Turner, Jennifer, Rosemary Ricciardelli, and James Gacek. 2023. “The ‘Pains of Employment’? Connecting Air and Sound Quality to Correctional Officer Experiences of Health and Wellness in Prison Space.” The Prison Journal103(5): 610-632. [Access it here]
This article highlights Canadian federal correctional officers’ (COs) sensory engagements with their workplace to reveal how, in particular, air quality and sound quality generate physical feelings that create health and wellness concerns. These “pains of employment” support calls to improve prison space. However, these sensations conflate with perceptions of space, which infer that prisoners, not infrastructure, create poor environments. Such perceptions seemingly influence COs’ approaches to prisoner management. Accordingly, the physical quality of prison air and sound not only shapes CO constructions of health and wellness, but also has the potential to influence how they discharge their role.
BOOKS/BOOK CHAPTERS/EDITED COLLECTIONS
Liao, Wenjie and Joachim J. Savelsberg. 2023. “Law.” Pp. 595-608 in Handbuch zur sozialwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung, edited by Mathias Berek, Kristina Chmelar, Oliver Dimbath, Hanna Haag, Michael Heinlein, Nina Leonhard, Valentin Rauer, and Gerd Sebald. Springer. [Access it here]
This chapter provides a critical review of literature on the intersection of law and collective memory. It synthesizes common themes, identifies gaps, and suggests future directions. Existing research reveals a dialectical relationship where law and collective memories are mutually constitutive. Future research should investigate how global, national and local contexts mediate this relationship, and how the law-memory nexus manifests itself at the micro-level of legal consciousness.
Maier, Katharina, Rosemary Ricciardelli, and Fergus McNeill. Eds. 2023. Punishment, Probation and Parole: Mapping out ‘Mass Supervision’ in International Contexts. Emerald. [More information here]
In many countries, community-based penalties such as probation, electronic monitoring and parole are the most common sanctions used in the punishment of criminalized individuals. Despite the widespread use of community-based penalties, these forms of penalization or punishment remain a less studied feature of punishment research today.
Punishment, Probation and Parole maps this lacuna in knowledge and scholarship while charting a path to fill it. Bringing together a series of key conceptual papers by leading scholars, the chapters explore the various dimensions and forms of community-based penalties as they are constructed and experienced in different times and places, producing different socio-penal effects. Addressing pressing debates and emerging concepts, this much-needed collection serves to chart directions for future researchers to explore in the field of community-based penalties.
Rubio Arnal, Alejandro and Fergus McNeill. 2023. “Exploring Social Re/habilitation and Developing a New Conceptualisation of Re/integration” in Social Rehabilitation and Criminal Justice, edited by Federica Coppola and Adriano Martufi. Routledge. [Access it here]
One of us has previously argued that the personal, legal, social and moral aspects of re/habilitation are often inter-dependent. More generally, theory and research on desistance, resettlement, rehabilitation, reentry and re/integration all refer to the salience of social reaction for life after punishment. In this chapter, relying on findings from a recent participative study of men’s post-prison re/integration in Glasgow, we further develop understandings of the importance of social reaction in processes of rehabilitation and re/integration. We do so primarily by exploring two specific and contrasting local examples of social reaction to returning prisoners in Glasgow, Scotland. The first concerns the stigmatising, degrading and inefficient process of seeking support from a Community Homeless Service. The second concerns the re/integrative, empowering and supportive process of entering, becoming part of and contributing to a community called ‘A Place to Change’. Our exploration of these two contrasting examples reveals how the ways in which these services engage with punished people is shaped by and affects other domains of their re/integration, such as the material, the judicial-legal, the personal, the civic-political and the moral. From this analysis, we develop and propose a six-form model of re/integration that supports but extends current models, highlighting the interactive and temporal character of this phenomenon.
Savelsberg. Joachim J. 2023. “Media and Transitional Justice.” In The Oxford Handbook of Transitional Justice, edited by Lawrence Douglas, Alexander Hinton, and Jens Meierhenrich. Oxford University Press. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
Using a field theory approach, this chapter explores journalism’s work for, against, and as transitional justice (TJ). Seeking to spread delegitimizing representations of atrocities and repression, TJ institutions depend on media communication. Journalism’s objectivity rule aids TJ institutions, but the juridification of journalistic products may lead to a literal and uncritical transmission of TJ narratives, buying into the institutional logic and other constraints of TJ justice mechanisms. Other features of the media field work against TJ. They include market orientation and the resulting striving for attention-grabbing stories; constraining features of journalistic genres, limiting depth and contributing to a flattening of accounts; tensions between journalistic and judicial habitus; cognitive and spatial disconnects between journalists and TJ institutions; and national filters that impede the transmission of global TJ scripts to national and local levels. When authoritarian regimes follow periods of mass violence, regimes are likely to instrumentalize (politicize) media reporting. Finally, the media may work as TJ when they engage in public shaming of those deemed guilty and reawaken collective memories of past abuses. They may even (re-)ignite interventions by formal TJ institutions. Finally, in all three scenarios of the media for, against, and as TJ, informal social contexts, communities, and opinion leaders filter media messages before they settle in the minds of recipients: a three-step flow of communication.
PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
Brangan, Louise. 2023. “New ‘Healing’ Prison in Ireland Points to Long History of Progressive Penal Reform.” The Conversation. [Access it here]
Is there only one kind of progressive prison? In the 1970s, the Irish Prison Division thought the prison was the problem, not the prisoners.
Lageson, Sarah and Rob Stewart. 2023. “Faulty background checks are violating privacy and ruining lives.” The Hill. September 28. [Access it here]
