Theoretical Criminology

Publisher:
Sage Publications, Inc.
Publication date:
2021-09-06
ISBN:
1362-4806

Latest documents

  • Book Review: Prisons, Inmates and Governance in Latin America by Máximo Sozzo (ed.)
  • Risk, political security and extra-judicial penality under Xi

    In authoritarian regimes, risk tends to be politically positioned to reflect the ruling party's interests, needs and priorities. In this article, I focus on the People's Republic of China (China) as a case study to isolate the issue of risk, and more specifically, analyse why risk is framed as a political tenet, what becomes the evidence of such risk, and how it relates to the country's legal approach to maintaining political stability in the Xi Jinping era. This article critically scrutinizes the latest political dynamics and police practices to argue that China has formulated an extra-judicial penal jurisprudence through what I call ‘forward-leaning’ policing (前倾式警务) against those who are perceived to present a threat of political harm. By using data on 2226 cyber-dissident cases during 2014–2021, my analysis points to this ‘warrior style’ policing being an intensified application of coercive police actions, which is heavily weighted towards incarceration as the main approach to addressing political dissent, especially through administrative detention. In doing so, the judicial process that traditionally determines conviction and sentencing is either circumvented or reduced to symbolic significance.

  • Unlikely downsizers: The prison service's role in reversing mass incarceration in Kazakhstan

    Since 2000, the prison rate has declined significantly in Kazakhstan. This article demonstrates that the Kazakhstani prison service, counterintuitively, became a key advocate of prison downsizing owing to a coalescence of norms and incentives in the 1980s and 1990s. In the process, the prison service elite maintained the loyalty of rank-and-file personnel through a focus on reform to performative and quantifiable measures of penal performance – such as rankings in the World Prison Brief – while qualitative changes to the service's identity and organization remained unchanged. Prison staff remained militarized and their livelihood and professional culture continued to be independent of the existence of prisons. In conclusion, we argue that the Kazakhstani case demonstrates the need for an integrative theory of penal change that focuses on the interplay of macro-, meso- and micro-level factors in relationally shaping the norms, incentives and opportunities of penal policy actors.

  • Understanding conflict penality: Dominant themes and the case of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

    Confinement is a common result of conflict, and states use various mechanisms to imprison enemy fighters. This article examines practices of incarceration in times of conflict as punishment. It analyses dominant themes in how states punish those they conceive as ‘enemies’ and proposes the term ‘conflict penality’ to encapsulate commonalities in state punishment during conflict. The article then discusses conflict penality further by examining Israel's punishment of Palestinians for ‘security offences’. The article contributes to the geographical and topical expansion of punishment studies, beyond the traditional borders of national criminal justice systems of Anglo-European countries. It concludes by showing how, under the extreme political climate of conflict, states use penal power to delegitimise their opponents, yet do so through extensive normative compromises that undermine their moral authority to punish.

  • Penal duress in (post)colonial Myanmar

    This article explores the notion and nature of penal duress, illustrated through analysis of martial, penal practice in Myanmar. We examine prison labour and pone-san (a demeaning, defamatory and coercive control of prisoners’ bodies) to show how these two enduring practices of domination, subjection and constraint – understood, drawing on Ann Laura Stoler, as relations of duress – animate penal practice in powerful, productive and problematic ways. Resisting the urge to view imperial forms through a peripheralising northern lens, or solely in terms of continuity and discontinuity, we pursue an understanding of penal duress as a ubiquitous, yet distinctly situated and relational phenomenon that has taken form through local colonial experiences and their afterlives. In sum, we attend to ‘processes of partial inscriptions, modified displacements and amplified recuperations’ to discuss how relations of penal duress are endured and enduring in Myanmar today.

  • Book Review: Women, Incarcerated: Narratives from India by Mahuya Bandyopadhyay and Rimple Mehta (eds)
  • Book Review: Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi by Zoha Waseem
  • Gendering the carceral web: Public sector reform, technology and digital (in)justice

    The UK government's Transforming Our Justice System agenda represents an emerging system of penal governance. Its cumulative impact, manifested through the mainstreaming of virtual hearings, a system of automatic online convictions and the Single Justice Procedure is a story yet to tell, with the potential impact on marginalised women simply a footnote. Such women, well-documented victims of the legal aid cuts as well as the digital divide, must comply with and negotiate the requirements of the carceral web alone. Pursuance of the reforms, representing the next instalment in the neo-liberal justice agenda, exposes another example of life at the penal–welfare nexus. This precarious territory has burgeoned since government-imposed austerity, with implications for self-criminalisation, net-widening and social justice. Reforms couched in the language of ‘efficiency’ and ‘common sense’ are likely to run in direct opposition to what marginalised women might need (or respond well to) and may jeopardise official reductionist strategies.

  • The President and the Boss's son: Prosecuting the crimes of America's most powerful

    Relatively few theoretical criminologists are recognized for their lasting impact on public policy, and it is therefore instructive to reconsider a scholar whose influence endures. Donald Cressey wrote a theoretically driven Presidential Commission essay that inspired the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). He also advanced a theory of “respectable crime” that explains why this act has more extensively been directed downwards to dismantle ethnically organized criminal groups rather than upwards to prosecute elite political conspiracies led, for example, by Chicago Mayor Richard M Daley and US President Donald J Trump. We present case studies of Daley and Trump that illustrate the continuing relevance and underappreciated potential of Cressey's theoretically driven scholarship.

  • Innocence as burden and resource: Adaptation and resistance during wrongful imprisonment

    Drawing on theoretical scholarship on adaptation and resistance in prisons, I explore the significance and function of innocence—and the acute sense of non-belonging it triggers in the prison setting—in wrongfully-convicted men's responses to imprisonment. Using in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States, I argue that innocence functioned as a double-edged sword for the men as they adapted to their wrongful imprisonment: Innocence represented a social and psychological burden as men adjusted to prison life, but it simultaneously facilitated their resistance to formal and informal penal control. Through a discussion of how the men leveraged their innocence to distance themselves psychologically, socially, and symbolically from the prison world, I highlight how, despite being victims of egregious injustice, wrongfully-convicted men are also agentic resistors of the penal system.

Featured documents

  • Pleasures of policing: An additional analysis of xenophobia

    In police research, dominant explanations of why law enforcers harbour xenophobic attitudes are most often dressed in cultural or political rationalizations. Based on an ethnographic study of Danish police detectives and their noticeable negativity towards foreign suspects, this article offers an...

  • Book Reviews
  • Difference, diversity and criminology

    This article argues that criminology has not moved sufficiently from the construction of a series of different `others', towards an epistemology of diversity. The emerging theory of cosmopolitanism is advocated as more consistent with the empirical realities of diversity and globalization than the...

  • Book review: David Skarbek, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System
  • Choice within constraint: An explanation of crime at the intersections

    Intersectionalities have become central to theory and research on sex, gender and crime. Viewing crime through an intersectionalities lens allows us to move beyond deterministic views of the relationship between social structures and offending by emphasizing that structures of gender, race,...

  • In Defense of Self-Control

    In the 10 years since its publication in A General Theory of Crime, the authors' self-control theory has been the focus of considerable research and critical assessment. This article responds to questions about the theory that have attracted the most thoughtful attention in the serious literature...

  • Desistance and social marginalization

    This paper examines the issue of desistance by considering the relationship between societal constraints and individual choices in the process of moving away from crime. The question of the distribution of those opportunities and resources to support desistance is raised within the context of a...

  • Refining control balance theory

    This article proposes revisions to control balance theory to address a logical flaw, mistaken categorization, and inconsistencies and conceptual ambiguity in the original formulation, and it attempts to accommodate empirical findings that challenge...

  • A Critique of Control Balance Theory:
  • Systematic racist violence in Russia between ‘hate crime’ and ‘ethnic conflict’

    Racist violence in Russia has recently become a subject of interest to scholars and analysts of Russian politics. What are the similarities and differences between racist violence in Russia and the West? How does the level of Russian racist violence compare to other societies? Do racist hate groups ...

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT