Punishment & Society

Publisher:: Sage Publications, Inc.
Publication date:: 2021-09-06

ISBN:: 1462-4745

Issue Number

No. 27-1, January 2025

Latest documents

‘Entrapped in a penal time capsule’: Extralegal discourses in sentence review of life prisoners in India
Scholars argue that lifers’ parole can be mobilised to be punitive and politicised. However, how parole decision-makers construct and disguise their punitive and politicised discourses when deciding the paroled subject is understudied, especially with regard to the global south. In this paper, based on content analysis of the dossiers of Delhi's Sentence Review Board (SRB) during 2018–2021, and in-depth interviews with the SRB members, we found that most of the SRB's rejections were solely based on the crime, a violation of a lifers right to a meaningful consideration for premature release. The SRB members rationalise their decision-making through two discourses: ‘temporal entrapment’, and ‘disguised punitivism’. Through these discourses, the SRB exercises penal power which is formally unified by the legal scaffolding but discursively bifurcated, for negotiating competing penal and political values and logics.
There is no place to go in “America's Finest City”: Basic sanitation deprivation is punishment in San Diego, California, USA
Safe and consistent access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH) resources is an internationally recognized human right. Yet in the U.S., access to public toilets, handwashing facilities, potable water, and menstrual supplies is grimly limited, especially for unhoused people. This article develops the concept of “sanitation justice” and argues for its urgent consideration alongside calls for racial, gender, social, and environmental justice. We advance this argument via a case study analyzing three novel data sources on WaSH access in San Diego, California's second-largest city, with a focus on public restrooms: geospatial data on facility locations, infrastructure assessments, and interviews with unhoused people on their restroom needs and challenges. We present a conceptual model, informed by the prior literature and our data, for visualizing how deliberate sanitation deprivation in the U.S. urban environment functions as a punishment regime inflicted on city residents, unhoused residents especially, to the detriment of public health and safety. As our data show, WaSH access is the most basic way governments can support not only public health but also social and economic mobility. We conclude with a vision of sanitation justice that centers the voices of those most affected by sanitation deprivation.
The pains of prison reform: Informal prisoner governance and penal subjectivities in Estonia and Lithuania
Building on the growing literature on the varying degrees and dimensions of prisoner governance across prison systems, this paper aims to understand how such governance, and reforms to reduce its informal influences, shape prisoner experiences in Estonia and Lithuania. Estonia has limited the influence of prisoner governance through the creation of a cell-based prison system, while Lithuania has maintained penal colonies in which prisoners largely self-govern. Utilizing a metaphor approach to the pains of imprisonment, we offer the concept of an imposition gradient to capture variation in the experience of the weight and tightness produced by both prison authorities and prisoners themselves across our cases. The paper makes three contributions: first, it aims to explicitly assess the relationship between varieties of prisoner governance and penal subjectivities. Second, it rethinks the relatively static metaphors of weight and tightness as fluid and dynamic experiences shaped by the degrees of prisoner governance present within prison systems and particular spaces of particular prisons. Third, the paper speaks to recent appeals to develop comparative research into varieties of imprisonment regimes, deepening comparative theories of prison order across the Global North and South.
Bordered welfare in Australia: Income management as a bordering technology of neoliberal and colonial governance
In this article we investigate the imposition of compulsory income management on racialised categories of welfare recipient in Australia, identify the contribution made by neoliberalism and settler colonialism in shaping that policy, and characterise income management as a form of ‘bordered welfare’. We begin by acknowledging that key features of neoliberal governance include an ideological aversion to the provision of welfare and the shifting of responsibility onto individuals to promote their own financial security and wellbeing. This has been accompanied by punitive approaches to welfare provision for those perceived to be deficient neoliberal citizens and a commitment to using financial levers, including the welfare system, to shape all manner of human behaviour. We trace the contours of the income management system and report the views of Aboriginal organisations and community leaders about their differential treatment as welfare recipients, noting that restrictions on financial autonomy are a well-documented form of surveillance and control historically directed towards Aboriginal Peoples in Australia. We conclude that this system operates as a form of bordered welfare that classifies certain categories of Aboriginal people as deficient citizens, subjecting them to differential, and detrimental, treatment driven by the ideologies and technologies of both neoliberalism and settler colonialism.
Contextualizing Indigenous people and the state of exception: New Zealand's Waikeria Prison protest
On Tuesday, December 29, 2020, 16 protesters at Waikeria Prison, one of New Zealand's largest male prisons, engaged in a six-day standoff with prison guards to protest inhumane prison conditions. The Department of Corrections framed the event as an aimless riot, delegitimizing the intentional demonstration of resistance against state violence. Imprisoned intellectuals, specifically Imprisoned Black Radical tradition, have long examined and centered the prison as the harshest instrument of the state linked to the struggles of the collective. However, voices from imprisoned intellectuals are rarely considered in academic scholarship despite acute analysis of the state and liberation. This article employs the state of exception to contextualize the Waikeria protest. Particular attention is devoted to the ‘state of continuity,’ which allows for a broader understanding of a permanent state of racialized oppression and marginalization faced by Indigenous and Black communities in racialized-settler-colonial contexts. Populations designated as the exception are thus framed as a threat targeted for militaristic police intervention. This article concludes by extending the discussion of the state of continuity to include how expressions of rage and dissent by Indigenous and Black people are viewed as a direct threat to the sovereign order but are necessary for revolutionary change.
Contaminated memories: How formerly incarcerated mothers remember their pasts and imagine their futures
In this article, we use 15 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated mothers to explore an understudied dimension of the punitive nature of system contact: its contamination of memory. Drawing on theoretical scholarship in the sociology of memory, we reveal how contact with both the criminal legal system and the child welfare system defined participants’ worst maternal memories and contaminated even their best maternal memories. In sharp contrast with their retrospective narratives, participants’ imagined futures were notably devoid of references to system contact, even in the form of desistance narratives. These findings, we argue, capture just how invasive contact with punitive state institutions can be, and they suggest that reentry represents a meaningful period during which participants can envision futures that are—at least in their imaginations—free from this intrusion.
Penal extractivism: A qualitative study on punishment and extractive industries in Peru
This article introduces the concept of penal extractivism in the punishment and society literature. We define penal extractivism as the punitive strategies that a state implements to safeguard extractive industries from citizens’ contention. This concept addresses the limitations of categories like criminalization, protest policing, social control, and labour discipline while bridging the gap between punishment studies and research on extractive industries. Additionally, we draw upon evidence of the Espinar mining conflict in Peru to explain five punitive strategies the state uses to handle protests: (1) off-duty policing and critical assets legislation, (2) state of emergency declarations, (3) police or prosecutorial notes against environmental defenders, (4) criminal indictments, and (5) the transferring of criminal cases to distant jurisdictions. Based on our findings, we argue that penal extractivism is a dynamic and ambivalent project that targets marginalized rural populations. The state partially deters mobilizations but fails to address the underlying social unrest, reinforcing the conditions that perpetuate mining conflicts. This in-depth within-case analysis examines the relationship between punishment and extractivism in the global context of contemporary social mobilizations.
John M. Halushka, A Weberian nightmare: Review of Getting the Runaround: Formerly Incarcerated Men and the Bureaucratic Barriers to Reentry
Tony Cheng, The Policing Machine: Enforcement, Endorsements, and the Illusion of Public Input
‘Standing with Soldier F’: Bloody Sunday, disrupting the degradation ceremony and the court of public opinion
This article merges the literatures on crime and punishment, law and performance and transitional justice to critically examine how high-profile prosecutions for historic state violence become contested in societies attempting to address the legacy of prolonged conflict. Drawing empirically from the case study of the prosecution of Soldier F for the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings in the North of Ireland, it demonstrates how legacy case prosecutions become a proxy for wider societal and political disagreement over the causes and consequences of past violence. It argues that when the legal basis for prosecution becomes obscured by extra-legal factors the expressivist function of punishment and criminal law is fundamentally undermined. By concentrating on these extra-legal factors rather than focusing on the legal semantics of the case, certain constituencies can challenge the legitimacy of the prosecution, question whether it is helpful to a post-conflict society that needs to ‘move on’ and prevent the accused being ‘othered’ as an ‘outsider’. In disrupting the expressivist logic of criminal prosecution like this, it is concluded the accused can be reframed by sympathetic audiences as a victim who needs solidarity and support rather than a victimiser who needs to be denounced and punished.