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
May 2025
ARTICLES
Burkhardt, Brett C. 2024. “From Private Prisons to Private Detention: Visualizing the Business of Immigration Enforcement.” Socius 10. [Access it here]
The United States runs the largest immigrant detention system in the world, and it relies on private companies to do so. This visualization considers how private prison companies have made immigrant detention a central part of their business. I compile and report 20 years of revenues for the two dominant private prison firms in the United States. The revenues are disaggregated by customer and presented as proportional stacked area graphs, which show changes in the composition of companies’ revenues. The graphs reveal that revenues from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have increased, respectively, fourfold and sevenfold for CoreCivic and The GEO Group, and they now account for 30 percent and 43 percent, respectively, of corporate revenues. These firms’ growing reliance on ICE revenue coupled with ICE’s reliance on private contractors raises questions about democracy, governance, and punishment.
Corda, Alessandro. 2025. “The Legitimacy of Criminal Law and the Performance Crises of Penality.” Criminal Law Forum. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
The legitimacy of state punishment has long been debated to justify the extreme form of government-authorized coercion that is criminal law. Rather than focusing on the abstract legitimacy of criminal law, this article examines another dimension of the debate: the legitimacy (or lack thereof) arising from the dynamics of substantive criminalization. Specifically, it addresses the “performance crises” of penality—enforcement-related failures in the implementation of the criminal law. The article identifies and discusses three distinct typologies of crisis in the deployment and enforcement of penal statutes: crises of hyper-intensity, crises of hyper-selectivity, and crises arising from sentence opacity, each undermining the legitimacy of criminal law in different ways. By addressing this gap in the theoretical literature, the article highlights the critical role of enforcement in shaping normative and policy discussions on substantive criminalization and its impact on the legitimacy of criminal law as a whole. From this perspective, penal legitimacy should be informed by the notion of “penal adequacy”, grounded—depending on the specific type of crisis—in moderation, non-discrimination, and transparency, and, across all cases, in sustainability. This concept highlights a balanced and fair exercise of the state’s penal power—one that is measured, non-discriminatory, clearly communicated, and, overall, capable of achieving its objectives in a sustainable manner.
Crewe, Ben. 2025. “The Depth of Imprisonment Revisited.” Incarceration 6. [Access it here]
Drawing on a range of studies and research literature, this article reflects on and develops the concept of the ‘depth of imprisonment. Its aim is to clarify some of the complexities and co-ordinates of depth, set out how experiences of different forms of depth can vary, illustrate how subjective experiences of depth do not always correspond with objective levels of depth, and offer some suggestions for further exploration of this aspect of imprisonment.
Durand, Corentin. 2025. “The Shadow of the Law: Adversarial Formalism in Prisoner-Staff Relations.” Law & Social Inquiry. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
The law is commonly described as one of the major forces shaping contemporary correctional institutions. However, we still lack a satisfactory understanding of how it has affected power relations behind bars. Drawing from two ethnographies of French correctional facilities, this article finds that changes to the material environment where incarcerated people and correctional staff interact have altered the relational economy of prisons and jails more than legal actions have. To avoid litigation, prison administrators design and use countless graphic artifacts, which has further reshaped the adversarial nature of social relations in prisons and jails. This bureaucratic approach has introduced the form of the law into the most banal of everyday communications between prisoners and authorities, replacing the informal asymmetrical interpersonal negotiations that have traditionally maintained order. Building on Robert Kagan’s typology of modes of policy making and dispute resolution, I re-examine power relations in contemporary French prisons and jails as a tension between formal and informal framings as well as hierarchical and participatory organizations of authority. I call this hybrid relational economy, where the force of the law lies mostly in its formal shadow, adversarial formalism.
Garland, David. 2025. “America’s Extraordinary Penal State: A Structural Explanation.” Punishment & Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
Americans, above all poor Black Americans, are subject to extraordinary levels of police violence, incarceration, and penal control—levels that exist nowhere else in the developed world. This article outlines a comparative, structural explanation of America’s extraordinary penal state, pointing to the structural arrangements and historical processes that created it and keep it in place; describing how these political and economic structures differ from those of other nations; and indicating how the macro-structures of political economy interact with community-level processes of social ordering and informal social control to shape street-level practices of crime, policing, and punishment. The article goes beyond the existing “political economy and punishment” literature by broadening the explicandum to include America’s extraordinary levels of criminal and police violence; by describing the interaction of social and penal controls; by detailing the negative social indicators associated with America’s peculiar political economy; and by highlighting causal factors such as social control deficits, state capacity limitations, and the effect of neighborhood disorganization and danger on the actions of criminal justice officials.
Hallett, Michael. 2024. “The New Prison God Pods: Religious Neoliberalism and Evangelical ‘Inmate Field Ministry.’” Punishment & Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
Recent exponential growth in immersive God Pod units operating in US prisons has engendered many new but still unexamined practices. Loosely-modeled off a Christian seminary planted inside Louisiana State Penitentiary, newer programs deploy privately-funded religious educators for the credentialing and training of “inmate field ministers” assigned religious work duties in public prisons. Funded by private foundations and unregulated by government oversight, Christian educators operating inside public prisons today directly influence the material conditions of incarceration for thousands of inmates. While previous God Pod programs were declared unconstitutional for use of government funding in proselytizing Christianity, newer programs use private resources for conduct of Christian ministry inside public prisons. Drawing from on-site and archival research, this article documents a shift in focus within immersive God Pod units from providing religious education at one institution to credentialing prisoners for “Inmate Field Ministry” systemwide. The article traces the ad hoc beginnings of privately-funded religious education inside US prisons, to today's emphasis on establishing Christian ministry as correctional rehabilitation. The article argues newer God Pod units engender a novel form of religious neoliberalism, abandoning previous commitments to religious neutrality while highlighting “moral rehabilitation” and deemphasizing secular rehabilitation. Directions for future research are discussed.
Hudson, Becka S. 2025. “Material Pathologies: Caring for Personality Disorder in Prison.” History of the Human Sciences38(2): 98-123. [Access it here]
The British prison estate is characterised by an elaborate mental health infrastructure, an edifice often rearranged to meet the near-permanent mental health ‘crisis’ in its walls. From ‘trauma-informed’ prisons to behaviour change programmes, care for mentally ‘vulnerable’ people in prison has sedimented into the backbone of penal strategy. Much of this is developed through appeals to inclusion: of the vulnerable, disadvantaged, and traumatised people who are increasingly recognised as comprising a disproportionate number of prisoners. One category around which this infrastructure is organised is ‘personality disorder’. Since New Labour's demarcation of this ‘offender group’ in the early 2000s, they are now thought to comprise a majority of the prison population. This article, grounded in prison documents and interviews with former prisoners, looks at the disorder's operationalisation in prison. It shows the disorder to be a broad and malleable category that works to mediate between prisoners, as individual subjects, and an expanding, complex, and shifting prison structure. Prisoners are explained in terms of the diagnosis, as the category’s borders are wide and shifting enough to absorb all kinds of behaviour, beliefs, and experiences. We thus see how the diagnosis simultaneously works to dismiss prisoners’ inner lives at the very moment it claims to understand them—and how this move facilitates penal management. The article uses Althusser's work on subjects and interpellation to make sense of this situation, and prisoners’ tactical navigation of it. The material practices that make the diagnosis real are emphasised, and connected to the imperatives of prison management.
Iverson, Justin. 2025. “eCarrots: Prison Control and Profits from Correctional Tablets.” Nebraska Journal on Advancing Justice 1(1): 6-33. [Access it here]
In recent years, tablets have gained tremendous popularity behind bars for their ability to expand access to educational and rehabilitative services for people in prison. However, there are downsides to tablet implementation, including high costs at the expense of a captive population and shifting power dynamics resulting in possible volatility. This Article examines the use of correctional tablets in jails and prisons as mechanisms for administrative control and profit-making in an era of beleaguered correctional budgets. It also considers legal and policy implications related to the disproportionately negative impact of the introduction of tablets on people in poverty, increased dependency on third-party contractors through the elimination of existing service structures, and the dangers of screentime addiction for people in prison. Ultimately, tablet suppliers are likely to continue working their way into prison systems, and there are many benefits to the incarcerated population from this expansion. However, it must be done thoughtfully and under careful oversight of interested parties to ensure the worst impacts are mitigated.
Jiang, Jize. Forthcoming. “A Genuine Empowerment or Continued Authority Enhancement?
Dynamic Relationships of Community Organizations with the State in Chinese Environmental Justice.” Asian Journal of Law and Society.
Recent years have witnessed a “juridical turn” in Chinese environmental governance, emphasizing and encouraging legal mobilization and litigation deployment by citizens to address environmental grievances in either individual or collective forms. This legalization movement has spawned a budding, sociolegal field of Chinese environmental justice (CEJ), with an ostensible trend toward the legal empowerment of community organizations as “autonomous” litigants representing public interests. Drawing on extensive qualitative data, this study examines how plural, fluid state-society relations are manifested, animated and permeated in the interactive processes of the CEJ. The analysis reveals four emergent modes of political-organizational connections – the state’s challengers, allies, servants, and subordinates – all of which depend on how the Chinese state interprets their motives for using the law and engaging in litigations, and anticipated effects their legal mobilization can generate or diffuse in society. The bounded community mobilization within the CEJ has also embodied the continuing state supremacy and the growing legal responsiveness in the Chinese approach to modernization. Future theoretical and policy implications for the participatory effectiveness of community organizations in the CEJ are also discussed.
Jiang, Jize. 2025. “Modernizing Penal Capacity and Defusing Political Tensions: How Social Workers’ Rehabilitation Shapes Offenders’ Perceptions of Justice within Chinese Community Corrections.” Asian Journal of Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
The introduction and operation of community corrections in China has been hailed as a justice mechanism that addresses criminogenic needs of offenders and advances their well-being. Despite the growing research on the operational significance of this emerging penal institution, few studies have been conducted from the perspective of offenders, the staple recipients of rehabilitation services. Much less research has also yet paid attention to the impact of the rehabilitative provision on offenders’ perceptions of justice. To bridge this gap, this study examines how offenders’ participation in rehabilitation and their interactions with social workers shape their sense-making about Chinese penality. Analysis of in-depth interviews with offenders reveals that rehabilitation by social workers revitalizes offenders’ self-identities, instills a sense of modernization in Chinese state capacity, and defuses long-standing tensions between offenders and the state. Notably, this salutary effect of rehabilitation on offenders’ perceptions of justice is rotted or undercut when social workers are compelled or mandated to supplement the state’s hand of surveillance and control. Moreover, offenders attach particular importance to the destigmatizing element of rehabilitation work, which helps them navigate the extraordinarily shameful reentry process. Research and policy implications of this study are also addressed.
LaBranche, Jillian and Joachim Savelsberg. 2025. “Stigma Management, Group Interaction, and Cultural Trauma: A Rwanda–Germany Comparison.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
This article examines the relationship between the cultural trauma of perpetrators as a culture structure, the experience of stigma, stigma management, and intervening group processes. It does so comparatively for post-genocide Rwanda and post-Holocaust Germany. Both Rwandan interviewees and German biographers report about interactive situations in which intra- and intergenerational sets of actors—faced with cultural trauma—manage stigma or spoiled identities through practices of silencing, denying, and acknowledging in the context of family and friendship circles. In both cases, they do so in group interactions, generating group styles that partially set their narratives of the past apart from collective representations. Yet they operate in different national contexts, with consequences for group styles and stigma management. In Rwanda—different from Germany—(1) public, government-led acknowledgment set in immediately after the end of the genocide, (2) under authoritarian rule, (3) by members of the victimized group, (4) in a different historical era, (5) under distinct cultural norms, and (6) in a setting in which perpetrator and victim groups co-exist in day-to-day interactions. This comparative analysis advances insights into questions about cultural trauma, group styles, and stigma management.
Lageson, Sarah E. and Alessandro Corda. 2024. “Chasing a Clean Slate: The Shifting Roles of Privacy and Technology in Criminal Record Expungement Law and Policy.” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 38(1): 1-47. [Access it here]
This Article explores criminal record expungement policy in the United States through the lens of privacy interests. Embarking on a historical policy analysis spanning from the 1950s to the 2020s, it unveils the evolving interplay between privacy rights and the shifting tides of rehabilitative and punitive ideologies and policies in the criminal legal system. The analysis shows that privacy concerns initially emerged as a silent underpinning of rehabilitative policies where privacy was recognized as key to rehabilitation but were subsequently dismissed in the “tough-on-crime” era, where emphasis was placed on public punishment and labeling in the name of public safety. The Article then posits that contemporary strides in criminal record expungement legislation and the embrace of automated record-clearing processes through algorithmic means find their roots in our current moment that emphasizes personal data privacy alongside criminal justice reform.
The Article argues that in the current data-driven landscape, informational privacy — the right of individuals to control and protect their personal data from unauthorized access or disclosure — has emerged as an essential yet often understated element in legal reforms addressing criminal record discrimination. These reforms are unfolding against the backdrop of societal calls for safeguarding individuals against life-long stigmatization and unwarranted surveillance. Privacy considerations, serving as a surrogate for rehabilitation, also help avoid “soft on crime” criticism, redirecting attention toward providing individuals with an opportunity to rebuild their lives free from perpetual judgment.
However, the Article also introduces a nuanced perspective, cautioning against unbridled optimism in these technological advancements meant to mitigate the collateral consequences of having a criminal record. Specifically, it scrutinizes the potential pitfalls inherent in the algorithmic automation of record clearance processes, as technological realities may also undermine the purported success and fairness of recently enacted criminal record clearance mechanisms. Ultimately, the Article contributes a timely and critical analysis that not only illuminates the historical trajectory of privacy considerations in criminal record expungement law and policy but also injects a note of caution regarding the implications of contemporary technological solutions.
Mamet, Elliot. 2025. “Democratic Equality for Washington, D.C.!” Perspectives on Politics. [Access it here]
The political status of Washington, D.C., is a longstanding question in American political thought. Intervening in that debate, I argue that Washington, D.C. deserves democratic equality. Democratic equality entails that, at a minimum, D.C. residents should have the power to vote for representatives in national and local legislatures (like residents of the several states), that their vote should have equal weight to others, and that D.C.’s elected legislative representatives should have power to vote on what the law is. This ideal of democratic equality for D.C. is only possible via D.C. statehood. Drawing on original archival research, the article provides a historical overview of D.C.’s democratic disenfranchisement, outlines three principal forms of democratic inequality faced by D.C. residents, and imagines what democratic equality for D.C. might look like. It concludes by sketching a broader research agenda about the democratic injustices accorded to those Americans living outside the several states.
Melossi, Dario. 2025. “Del Estado a la Fábrica: La Penalidad y la Crítica de la Economía Política Entre Marx y Foucault.” Política y Sociedad 62(1): e97755. [Access it here]
It has often been said that Foucault was critical of Marxism or even anti-Marxist. This has certainly been the case in relation to Foucault’s attitude toward the “official Marxism” of his times, that is the Marxism of the PCF or, to a lesser extent, of “extraparliamentary” groups. However, especially his analyses in Discipline and Punish and in the course of lectures that prepared it, The Punitive Society, can be made to frame a very different reading of the relationship between Foucault and Marx, a reading which, at the same time, challenges some of the most traditional interpretations of Marx and suggests that power can be centred in “the factory” rather than in “State”. It highlights the continuity between violent accumulation in its original phase and power in the “sphere of production”. Hence the idea of “discipline” is central both to “Capital” and to “Discipline and Punish”. This relationship becomes evident in the rediscovery of a factory-focused Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Moore, Hollis, José A. Brandariz, Vicki Chartrand, Jennifer M. Kilty, Dawn Moore, Máximo Sozzo and Sarah Turnbull. 2024. “Cultures of Transparency in Carceral Governance: Lessons from the Global North/South Divide.” Incarceration 5. [Access it here]
This conceptual article offers new ways to map and understand the role of transparency in carceral governance. Mobilizing our expertise in our respective fields of study, we comparatively reflect on case studies of carceral transparency in Argentina, Canada, and Spain. In each, we decentre forms of transparency favoured by carceral authorities by considering the range of mechanisms and actors at play in the production of transparency. Taken together, our accounts of cultures of transparency in prisons and migrant detention facilities in the global north and south highlight absences and presences of different means of generating transparency across carceral sites and denaturalize northern and state-centric ideas about carceral transparency. Ultimately, our juxtaposition of three cultures of transparency reveals the range of means of generating carceral knowledge and the potential scope for its dissemination. Amidst persistent human rights violations, this work underlines the need for further southernized research on transparency to shape possibilities of carceral governance.
Pascoe, Daniel. 2024. “Worthless Checks? Clemency, Compassionate Release, and the Finality of Life Without Parole.” Northwestern University Law Review 118(5): 1393-1453. [Access it here]
Life without parole (LWOP) sentences are politically popular in the United States because, on their face, they claim to hold prisoners incarcerated until they die, with zero prospect of release via the regularized channel of parole. However, this view is procedurally shortsighted. After parole there is generally another remedial option for lessening or abrogating punishment: executive clemency via pardons and commutations. Increasingly, U.S. legal jurisdictions also provide for the possibility of compassionate release for lifers, usually granted by a parole board.
On paper, pardon, commutation, and compassionate release are thus direct challenges to the claim that an LWOP sentence will inevitably and invariably lead to the prisoner’s death while incarcerated. Few previous studies, however, have examined the finality of LWOP empirically. In this Article, I present original empirical data on clemency covering the period 1990–2021 in order to investigate the relationship between LWOP sentences and the release mechanisms of executive clemency and compassionate release in both state and federal cases.
Ultimately, the results of this research reaffirm the finality of LWOP in the United States, despite the availability, on paper, of at least three potential release procedures. Only a handful of LWOP prisoners have received commutation or pardon from U.S. presidents, state governors, or pardons boards. Compassionate release has been granted almost as rarely. That said, some demographics tend to have benefited more than others. The findings presented within this Article are relevant not only to domestic clemency and end-of-life release policy but also to litigation dealing with a “right to hope” as a component of human dignity, and to the academic debate over LWOP as a global replacement for the death penalty and a form of “extreme” punishment of its own accord.
Rowland, Alexis, Joanne DeCaro and Keramet Reiter. 2025. “The Securitization of Research Ethics: Navigating the Ethics of Engaging Criminalized Voices.” Theoretical Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
We ask what ethical regulations govern criminal legal system research that is not “biomedical and behavioral research”—including oral history and archival projects, legal work and research, journalistic projects, big data, and multidisciplinary projects—but nonetheless takes place inside the academy? We examine ethical frameworks for research in the social sciences, as well as participatory action, oral history, archival, and data use, attending to how these academic ethical frameworks define risk and how these definitions shape resulting research, in intentional and unintentional ways. Through analysis of examples from each of these frameworks, we argue that efforts to eliminate risk often create other harms, while distracting from more fundamental ethical questions about the well-being of research subjects and data contributors in the criminal legal system. We identify an alternative to risk elimination: risk metabolization, a more collaborative and iterative approach to managing risk in research ethics.
Schoenfeld, Heather, Chas Walker and Marielis Rosa. 2025. “Criminal Justice as Racialized Organizations: Evidence from Ethnographies of Police, Courts and Jails.” Criminology 63(1): 122-154. [Access it here]
Criminology has long grappled with the relationship between race/racism and the criminal justice system. In this article, we build on past critiques and demonstrate how scholars of the criminal legal system can use meso-level theories of race/racism to better explain their findings, develop new insights, and pose new research questions. To this end, we introduce the theory of racialized organizations. Drawing examples from recent ethnographic studies of police departments, criminal courts, and jails, we illustrate how criminal legal organizations (CLOs) embody the core tenets of the theory. Specifically, CLOs endow racial schema with power, distribute and extract resources unequally in part by using racialized credentials, legitimize racial harm by decoupling formal commitments to legal rights from actual practice, and reduce the agency of non-White people. We also extend the theory of racialized organizations to describe how legitimacy and racial harm accumulate and deepen across CLOs. The article concludes with actionable research directions that illuminate the complex interactions between race and the criminal legal system.
Sheely, Amanda, Frank Edwards and Kelley Fong. 2025. “Children’s Pathways of Exposure to Child Protective Services over the Life Course and by Race/Ethnicity.” Population Research and Policy Review 44(20): 1-9. [Access it here]
Existing research has highlighted the prevalence, racial/ethnic disproportionality, and effects of Child Protective Services (CPS) contact among children and their parents. However, less is known about the distribution of processes through which children become exposed to CPS. In this paper, we examine how pathways into CPS contact change over the course of childhood, as well as how these pathways vary by child race/ethnicity. We use national administrative data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System to calculate report rates for each child age and racial/ethnic group by CPS report source. We find that the source of reports shifts over the course of childhood, in line with the different institutional contacts children have as they age. Additionally, racial/ethnic differences in report rates are largest when children are under the age of one and reduce as children age. Across all report sources, report rates for Black children are higher than rates for children in other racial/ethnic groups, although the extent of this inequality varies by report source. Findings suggest that attending to variation in institutional contact over the life course and across groups can illuminate the distribution of CPS system exposure across children and families.
Song, Apei and Jize Jiang. 2025. “Coercive Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Control: How the Police Navigate the Penal-Welfare Nexus in Chinese Drug Governance.” Policing and Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
The recent ‘lenient turn’ in Chinese crime policy has prompted the rise of humanitarianism and the establishment of the rehabilitation ideal in drug governance. Despite rich insights into the workings of drug rehabilitation and its effects on offenders, scarce research has been conducted to address how this broad policy shift affects the exercise of discretion by the police, who are primarily tasked with drug enforcement in China. Using data from an ethnographic project on drug policing in one Chinese city, the present study examines how police make sense of and adapt to the increased policy demand for the rehabilitation of people who use drugs. The analysis reveals that police officers have vigorously interwoven control and care logics into their routine activities surrounding drug control, devising and deploying tactics within the penal-welfare continuum for situational accomplishments of drug rehabilitation. Consequently, their modes of implementation crystallize into forms of coercive rehabilitation and therapeutic control. Research and practice implications for the increased use of police in drug rehabilitation in particular and social problems in general are also discussed.
Stitt, Mary Ellen. 2025. “Adjudication Under Cover: Compliance and Inequality in the Criminal Courts.” American Journal of Sociology 130(5): 1113-1149. [Access it here]
State agencies tasked with governing poverty often aim to improve individuals’ social conditions by transforming their conduct. From welfare offices to prison reentry programs, those agencies work to compel behavioral changes by making the receipt of aid—or punishment— contingent on individuals’ compliance with requirements like appearances for regular appointments and negative drug test results. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a court-mandated therapeutic program, this study shows how “compliance” with standard behavioral requirements is constructed around health, financial resources, and institutional trust, with the result that the most vulnerable people are systematically marked as noncompliant and channeled toward more punitive interventions. This sorting process helps to legitimize the inequalities it produces: by framing marginalized people as unwilling to accept help to improve themselves and their lives, agencies can justify placing them under more coercive forms of control.
Strange, Carolyn, Daniel Pascoe and Andrew Novak. 2024. “The Politics of Abolition: Reframing the Death Penalty’s History in Comparative Perspective.” Punishment & Society. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
Literature on opposition to the death penalty typically characterizes abolition as inexorable and attributes its fulfillment to the age of human rights. Although most countries abolished capital punishment after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this article uses three comparative case studies to demonstrate abolition’s entanglement with a broader range of political, legal, and cultural factors. Applying a historically grounded nonteleological approach, we offer three insights. First, civilizationist values drove abolitionism in countries in the “vanguard,” such as Canada and England/Wales, where human rights rationales were expressed well after abolition and as a mark of superiority. Second, death penalty abolition has often allied with decolonization and penal reform, but assertions of independence and sovereignty have periodically provoked reinstatement, as in Mexican and Philippine history, which underscores the fragility of abolition. Third, state-centric approaches to de jure and de facto abolition overlook the practice of extrajudicial and summary “rebel” executions in polities such as Myanmar and Mali, which lack a state monopoly on force. Further historical studies that do not presuppose a human rights explanation of abolition and that compare jurisdictions within as well as between the Global North and South will better grasp the death penalty’s complex history.
Turnbull, Sarah. 2024. “Vulnerability, Immigration Detention, and (Carceral) Reform.” The British Journal of Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
This article examines the British government’s recent concern around ‘vulnerable detainees’ and reforms to immigration detention, looking specifically at the evolving ‘adults at risk in immigration detention’ policy. It critically explores the notion of ‘vulnerability’ and the production of the ‘vulnerable detainee’ as a certain kind of carceral subject who is constituted as less deserving of detention. The article considers what the lessons learned from histories of carceral reform can offer the current immigration detention reform movement. By unpacking the notion of the ‘vulnerable detainee’, it encourages critical reflection on the potential limitations of reform efforts and how seemingly good intentions can be co-opted by the state to further solidify the power to deprive non-citizens of their liberty.
van Ginneken, Esther F. J. C. and Ben Crewe. 2025. “Explaining Experiences of Punishment and Degradation in Prisons: A Comparative Analysis of England & Wales and Norway.” European Journal of Criminology. OnlineFirst. [Access it here]
There is a consensus in the scholarly literature that imprisonment is a painful and degrading experience. Nevertheless, there is considerable variation across jurisdictions and within countries in prison experiences. In other words, some prisons may be experienced as more degrading and punitive than others. The aims of this article are threefold: first, we establish to what extent experiences of punishment and degradation in prisons in England & Wales and Norway can be attributed to institutional versus individual differences. Second, we examine what factors contribute to experiences of punishment and degradation. Third, we analyse the relationship between institutional (wing) variation in perceived punishment and degradation and self-harming behaviour. Data is used from surveys distributed among individuals incarcerated (N = 1101) in eight prisons in England & Wales and six prisons in Norway. Findings show that prisoners, on average, report experiencing more punishment and degradation on English than Norwegian prison wings, but that there is also substantial variation within each country. Various facets of the prison experience are related to perceived punishment and degradation, such as treatment by staff (i.e., ‘weight’) and imposed restrictions (i.e., ‘depth’). Finally, individuals report more self-harming behaviour when they are incarcerated on wings that are perceived as more degrading and punitive. In conclusion, this shows that surveys can offer insight into the extent to which a prison sentence is experienced as more or less painful, and that this has important implications for the health and well-being of people subjected to it.
BOOKS/BOOK CHAPTERS/EDITED COLLECTIONS
Jefferson, Andrew M., Nai Hla Yin, Lynn Tar Yar, Nwe Thar Gi, Bihlo Boilu and San Tayza. 2025. Everyday Prison Governance in Myanmar: Understanding Imprisonment Beyond the West. Emerald Publishing. [More information here]
Everyday Prison Governance in Myanmar analyses prison life in Myanmar during a short-lived period of democratic transition. The accounts of former prisoners reveal the realities of everyday life illuminating survival strategies, landscapes of emotion, and power dynamics.
Making a significantly different kind of contribution, this is the first in depth, empirically based, systematic study of imprisonment practices in Myanmar between 2015-2020, a period believed by many to herald a new democratic dawn for Myanmar before the subsequent military coup. Based on rich data gathered across four sites and examined collaboratively by a team comprised of experienced prison scholars and a local research team, the authors do not simply document the dynamics of prison governance; they analyse and contextualise them, utilising a bottom-up perspective informed by the most recent scholarly trends on prison governance in the Global South.
Filling an important gap in the scholarship about prisons in South East Asia and expanding the scope of the field of prison studies ‘beyond the west’, the authors provide important counterpoints to dominant understandings of imprisonment based on Western sources.
Kupchik, Aaron. 2025. Suspended Education: School Punishment and the Legacy of Racial Injustice. NYU Press. [More information here]
In 2017–2018, two and a half million public school students were suspended out of school at least once in the US. Exclusionary school punishments (e.g., suspensions) are overused and destructive: their overuse harms students, families, schools, and entire communities. They increase racial inequities in society since Black students are at far greater risk of school punishment and are more likely to suffer its harms. Over the past fifteen years, scholars have recognized the importance of school punishment and studied it intensely. Yet the question of why—why we punish students the way we do and how such policies became prominent—has received little attention. Suspended Education demonstrates how contemporary school punishments are a legacy of resistance to racial desegregation following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision. Given that exclusionary punishment is ineffective at improving student behavior and harmful to the schools assigning it, it only makes sense if one understands it as a way of excluding unwanted students from school rather than as a pedagogical or behavior-management tool. Suspensions, the most common form of exclusionary punishment, only became common in the years after desegregation occurred. Case studies of the histories of desegregation in New Castle County, Delaware, and Boston, Massachusetts, demonstrate that school suspension rates increased after—and in response to—the pressures arising from highly contested school desegregation. And analyses of national data on school desegregation lawsuits show that schools in districts with more desegregation-related legal battles from the 1950s onward suspend more Black students today.
Romero, Adriana. 2025. “La Cuestión Criminal y Justicia Transicional en América Latina: Dos Campos Indivisibles.” (The Criminal Question and Transitional Justice in Latin America: Two Inseparable Fields) In: F. Tamayo and N. Hernandez (eds). Castigo y Sociedad. Análisis Interdisciplinares Sobre el Control del Crimen. (Punishment and Society. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Crime Control). Universidad Javeriana – Universidad de los Andes – Editorial Ibáñez. [More information here]
Romero, Adriana. 2025. “Cambio Penal y Continuidad: La Invitación de Ashley Rubin Para Entender Las Tecnologías Penales.” (Penal Change and Continuity: Ashley Rubin’s Invitation to Understanding Penal Change) In: F. Tamayo (ed). Pensamiento Contemporáneo Sobre el Castigo (Contemporary Thought on Punishment). Universidad de los Andes. [More information here]
van der Valk, Sophie. 2025. Overseeing Rights in Prison: The Irish Experience of Human Rights Protection in Prison. Routledge. [More information here]
Drawing on Ireland as its primary case study, this book is an in-depth critical examination of how rights protection bodies and mechanisms are experienced by those in prison in Ireland.
Through its analysis of the Irish experience, the book considers the implementation of, and challenges faced by, human rights protection within the prison context, and explores some of the reforms that Ireland has undertaken in this area over the past 15 years, including the introduction of a new complaint system and establishment of an Office of the Inspector of Prisons. Using a wealth of information gathered through interviews and surveys of participants in 3 male prisons, the book sets out personal experiences of such mechanisms and identifies the key barriers to effective rights protection.
Offering a detailed presentation of the international framework for the protection of prisoners’ rights through oversight mechanisms, and proposing methods for overcoming common barriers, Overseeing Rights in Prison: The Irish Experience of Human Rights Protection in Prisons will be of interest to students and scholars of criminology, particularly in relation to prisons and human rights.
PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
Romero, Adriana. 2025. “Special Jurisdiction for Peace in Colombia: Impunity, Change or Restoration? Harvard Review of Latin America.” ReVista. Winter 2025, Volume XXIV, Number 2. [Access it here]
