The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice

Publisher:: Wiley
Publication date:: 2021-02-01

ISBN:: 2059-1098

Issue Number

No. 62-4, December 2023

Latest documents

Issue Information
Doing family: Imprisoned parents as collaborators
The focal point of this article is the design of a game‐based tool for dialogue (‘Dads’ Round’) developed in collaboration with the Danish Prison and Probation Service for a Parenting Program. The tool is unique insofar as it includes stories collected from prisoners’ children about their troubled relationship with their fathers. By evaluating the tool through interviews with incarcerated fathers, we demonstrate how they work together as peers to assess how such a tool works to help assume parenting roles during incarceration. Through the fathers’ statements, the stories they share and their collaborative scaffolding, we are able to identify the tool's potential effect on parenting practices as well as pinpoint strengths and weaknesses of the tool. Our study suggests that new notions of parenting and doing family must be carefully considered in the design of parenting programmes.
Experiences of self‐reflection as identity reconstruction and adaptation to prison life
The role of identity construction has been a central theme in empirical analyses of desistance from crime. Despite the novelty of these studies, their findings are predominantly situated in the post‐imprisonment context. There has been limited attention on the drivers of identity change for prisoners who are incarcerated. Based on 16 interviews conducted in an open prison for men, this article demonstrates how experiences of self‐reflection shape identity reconstruction for prisoners nearing release and serve as important modes of adaptation to prison life. The article ends with a discussion on the key implications of the study's findings.
Probation and parole in Ireland: Law and practice By V. Guerin, S. McCarthy, Dublin: Clarus Press. 2022. pp. 380. €45.00 (pbk). ISBN: 9781911611608
The good prison officer By A. Brierley (Ed.), Abingdon: Routledge. 2023. pp. 139. £120.00 (hbk); £34.99 (pbk). ISBN: 9781032394398; 9781032394404
Youth carceral deinstitutionalisation and transinstitutionalisation in Ontario: Recent developments and questions
In early 2021, half of the youth detention centres in Ontario, Canada, were abruptly closed. We ask how this development can be understood in relation to broader explanations of youth detention closures in Canada, which cite the success of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) and the best interests of youth, and the broader international context. Using a process tracing methodology to analyse existing data, we demonstrate that these closures had less to do with the interests of youth, and were primarily a cost‐effective calculation. We demonstrate this by pointing to three key developments: (i) the transference of institutionalised carceral logics onto community service providers; (ii) an undermining of the principle of ‘relationship custody’; and (iii) a focus on high‐capacity and high‐security detention centres, over smaller, locally situated open detention centres.
Looking for ‘emotional balance’ in desistance from crime: Testimonies from justice‐involved individuals in French‐speaking Switzerland
This article is based on 48 interviews and five writing testimonies of 23 men convicted, incarcerated and released from high‐security prisons in the French part of Switzerland. Through a longitudinal and phenomenological perspective, this contribution explores the role of affective states in desistance from crime. The findings show that giving up crime requires navigating through three ‘emotional seeds’ that qualify the most significant affective states of the desistance process: distress; disillusionment; and hope. Thus, this research develops the notion of ‘emotional balance’ in desistance from crime, which consists of being neither overwhelmed by one's feelings nor repressing them.
Unsubstantiated use of force in the killing of Atatiana Jefferson: A critical policy analysis
A sustained history of white supremacy is in the system of policing. Police engage in state‐sanctioned murders of African American women. Too many times, police state‐sanctioned violence is disregarded. A critical analysis and applicable theoretical frameworks were used to examine the Fort Worth Police Department's (FWPD's) Use of Force Policy in the case of Atatiana Jefferson's murder. The findings show cultural situatedness impacted this case. In other words, the normed cultural, social and environmental factors versus policy components influenced the case. The employed theoretical perspectives provide policymakers and researchers with critical viewpoints to deconstruct hierarchical systems of power that perpetuate injustices.
Path dependence and jumping tracks: Investigating institutional continuity and change across the Tasmanian convict and pauper systems
This article uses a historical case study to significantly advance theoretical debates on path dependence in institutional change and continuity. In particular, it argues that the heuristic of ‘jumping tracks’ can be productively developed to explain how institutional arrangements can shift into different policy arenas. The historical criminological case study examines welfare provision and penalties in colonial Australia. Substantively, the case study provides historical support to current claims that the boundaries between crime, poverty and welfare are fluid. Just as the shadow of the contemporary carceral state is enlarging non‐criminal pathways to punishment, it will be shown that in 19th‐century Tasmania the shadow of the penal colony acted to control paupers. When the Tasmanian penal system began to be dismantled, the institutional arrangements that had developed within it jumped tracks to the pauper system. Fundamentally, the key theoretical proposition is that path dependence can work across institutions by jumping tracks.
Harm, injustice & technology: Reflections on the UK's subpostmasters’ case
One of the more striking recent miscarriages of justice was perpetrated by the UK's Post Office when subpostmasters and subpostmistresses were prosecuted for fraud that actually arose from malfunctioning software. Over 700 were victimised, losing homes and livelihoods. We first use a zemiological lens to examine the harms caused by these events at both a first and second‐order range – referred to as ‘ripples’. Yet, the zemiological analysis, while useful in identifying the personal harms suffered by postmasters, is less successful in associating with some of the wider costs – especially to the justice system itself. Additional tools are required for identifying how technology might be culpable in the damage that unfolded. We use a technological injustice lens to augment the zemiological analysis, to reveal how and why technology can harm, especially when appropriate checks and balances are missing, and naïve belief in the infallibility of technological solutions prevails.