The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice

vLex
Publisher:
Wiley
Publication date:
2021-02-01
ISBN:
2059-1098

Issue Number

Latest documents

  • Substance use in Guyana: Echoes of the colonial past

    The impact of intoxicating substances both licit and illicit has been integral to expressions of colonial power and the control of colonised populations, including in Caribbean societies. Historically, licensing laws and carceral institutions were used to discipline workers, and the ongoing criminalisation of certain drugs illustrates the transhistorical legacies that continue to haunt former British colonies like Guyana. Focusing on prisons and prisoners to explore the histories and lingering legacies of colonial drug policies in the country, despite a much‐changed international context, this article documents experiences of, and approaches to, the management and prohibition of psychoactive substances. It reveals connections and continuities between substance use, enslavement, labour, and incarceration, and their relationship both to what we conceptualise as ‘the colonial imaginary’ and ‘booty capitalism’ of the modern age. The article will show how now and in the past, the colonisers partook in extractive booty capitalism (Weber, 1930), while in order to survive, the colonised partook in booty capitalism of the streets (Wacquant, 2003).

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  • Colonialism and its aftermaths in prisons in Guyana: An introduction
  • ‘Prison officer pains’: How and why coloniality shapes the job of a prison officer in Guyana today

    In this exploratory article, we look at the understudied area of prison officer's lives in the Global South and the pains of their jobs. We provide a novel and decolonial perspective on these phenomena by documenting and discussing first‐hand prison officer accounts and first‐person observations of the different dimensions of their experiences of work and home today. We understand how they see and understand their jobs, including what the pains of imprisonment for officers in Guyana look and feel like from the bottom up. We learn about what prison officers perceive as the pains of their employment in Guyana – working conditions; psychological pains; prison infrastructure; intimate relations; prison within prison; social pains; and insecurity – and how such issues include echoes of the colonial past and impact officers not just in their everyday lives but how these pains also impact those closest to them. In this way, we show how, and why, the legacies of colonialism continue to haunt contemporary prison officers in Guyana.

  • Sex as work: Decriminalisation and the management of brothels in New Zealand By C. Weinhold, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 2022. pp. 275. £99.99 (hbk). £99.99 (pbk). ISBN: 9783031192593
  • The Palgrave handbook of global rehabilitation in criminal justice By M. Vanstone, P. Priestley (Ed.), Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 2022. pp. 722. £199.99 (hbk). £199.99 (pbk). ISBN: 9783031143748
  • Resisting carceral confinement in Guyana: Legacies of a colonial state

    Prisoners in Guyana have been protesting about living conditions and an overtly punitive environment since British colonial rule (1814–1966). Drawing upon official investigations, colonial records and newspaper reports, this article analyses some of the key features of resistance, including uprisings, escapes and everyday breaches of prison rules from the 19th century to the present day. It argues that Guyanese society is still impacted by the punitive nature of colonial plantation society which compels and informs prisoner experiences and responses in the nation's prisons today.

  • Mental health care in Guyana's jails before and after Independence

    This article considers the intersecting geographical, social, medical and political frameworks necessary to construct an understanding of mental health in Guyanese prisons, historically and in the present day. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to integrate archives, modern records and interviews, it looks first at colonial and independent state management of mental health impacts with respect to sentencing, incarceration and rehabilitation. It moves on to reflect on recent efforts to provide co‐ordinated policies and practices at national level to tackle more effectively moderate to severe mental health conditions. Here it shows that, as in the colonial period, prisoners and prison officials are typically neglected. Overall, our appreciation of the importance of what we term the coloniality of incarceration and public health enables us to deepen an understanding of the development and ongoing significance of approaches to mental ill health in the modern state, following Guyana's independence from colonial rule in 1966.

  • Doing transdisciplinary research in Guyana's prisons

    This article reflects on the research process that underpinned the ESRC GCRF project ‘Mental Health, Neurological and Substance Abuse Disorders in Guyana's Jails: 1825 to the present day’. Introducing readers to a transdisciplinary team comprised of academics and practitioners, in what follows we think through how the methods of the research underpinned the production of the data used in this special issue. The article highlights the emotional labour and ethics of care among the team, and the benefits of transdisciplinary research and the mutual recipriocity and learning that took place between academics and prison staff. The goal of the project was to create equitable and ethical partnerships, and this contributed to the success of this research in terms of findings, data, and real‐world impact.

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