Theoretical Criminology

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Latest documents

• Book Review: Indefinite: Doing Time in Jail by Michael L Walker
• Book Review: Suspended: Punishment, Violence, and the Failure of School Safety by Charles Bell
• ‘Come on mate, let's make you a cup of tea’: Theorising materiality and its impacts on detainee dignity inside police detention

  In this article, we examine detainee experiences of dignity in police detention through the lens of materiality. To do this, we draw on sociological and anthropological literature on the ‘material turn’ and its application to criminal justice settings, and a mixed-methods study of police custody in England and Wales. First, we conceptualise different dimensions of materiality in police custody. Second, we show how some forms of materiality, in conjunction with staff–detainee relationships, shape detainee dignity rooted in equal worth, privacy and autonomy. Third, we examine how the intertwining of the social and material in police custody opens up new possibilities for theorising police work. The materiality of police work is active, not just symbolic. Alongside social relations, it shapes citizen experiences of the police, including of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms of policing, and by implication, pain and injustice. Materiality therefore provides a further way of theorising the production of social order inside and outside police detention.

• Carceral racialization, prison segregation, and the Integrated Housing Program in Arizona

  Prisoners in the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry (ADCRR) coordinate to circumvent full racial housing integration, revealing how “race” and adherence to the “racial code” is used as an organizing concept in carceral settings that is distinct from conceptualizations of race and politics of identity within free society. In addition to providing a review of the literature on the complexity of prison racialization, we base our discussion of racialization and adherence to the racial code on our combined experience as formerly racialized and gang-affiliated inmates, as well as on insights from informal and semi-structured interviews with prisoners who have navigated attempts at racial integration as part of the ADCRR's recently adopted Integrated Housing Program.

• Book Review: Intersecting Lives: How Place Shapes Reentry by Andrea Leverentz
• Book Review: The Slow Violence of Immigration Court: Procedural Justice on Trial by Maya Pagni Barak
• Deen and Dunya: Islam, street spirituality, crime and redemption in English road culture

  This article presents ethnographic and media analysis that explores how Islam has come to shape conceptions of the material, sacred, crime and redemption in contemporary English street culture. Islam’s clear dichotomy between the mundane ‘Dunya’ and sacred ‘Deen’ shape how socio-economically marginalised, ethnic minority men make sense of the world around them. Stark inequalities have tainted the material world for the UK’s most disadvantaged, prompting them to seek redemption entirely outside it – in the world of the sacred where they can experience warmth. In analysing their experiences we highlight how paths to desistance have arguably been overlooked where analyses of Islam in street culture have focused on questions of radicalisation.

• Dead or alive? Reassessing the health of the death penalty and the prospects of global abolition

  There is a growing position among human rights advocates, academics and UN officials, predicting “the death of the death penalty”, and forecasting that it will completely disappear soon. This article questions and problematizes this prediction, exploring the assumptions, premises and gaps that underpin the optimistic outlook. Based on analysis of abolitionist discourse, three fallacies are identified and analyzed: a progressive fallacy, assuming the death penalty is a barbaric anachronism in the “civilized” modern world and displaying a teleological belief in its demise; a classificatory fallacy, entailing defining-down the prevalence of the death penalty through the category of “de-facto abolition”; and a functional fallacy, assuming that repudiating the death penalty as a crime-fighting tool will cause its demise, overlooking its transformation into an institution serving political-symbolic functions. In concluding, I suggest viewing the global death penalty as bifurcated: dying as an ordinary law-enforcement tool, but relatively healthy as an extraordinary political symbol.

• Practice without prospect: The imaginary response to the recording and investigations of sexual assault in prison

  This article draws on Incident Reporting System data from the National Offender Management Service over a ten-year period (2004–2014) and limited, small-scale interviews with four custodial managers. Pat Carlen's work (2008) on imaginary penalities provides the theoretical framework for an assessment of the reporting, recording and initial response to sexual assaults in prisons in England and Wales. The article argues that the recording of sexual assaults became part of a response to new management systems that emphasised compliance, process and audit rather than realising safety in custody. Although the data shows substantial levels of initial activity among staff it is, in essence, practice without prospect. The article suggests that outcomes generally for sexual assaults in prisons in England and Wales are uncertain. Incident reporting has become a bureaucratic process ‘or paper shadow’, which Goffman described as showing ‘what has been done by whom, what is to be done, and who last had responsibility for it’ (Goffman 1961: 73).

• Book Review: The Horror of Police by Travis Linnemann

Featured documents

• ‘Penal populism’ and penological change in contemporary Japan

  This article examines whether the concept of penal populism can be useful in understanding contemporary developments in Japanese criminal justice. In addressing this issue it is suggested that we need to draw a clear distinction between different conceptions of penal populism and, in particular, we ...

• Visual criminology and Lombroso: In memory of Nicole Rafter (1939–2016)

  Nicole Rafter (1939–2016) formed her vast and diverse oeuvre long before the rise of visual criminology. Nevertheless, Rafter was a pioneer in this new, expanding field. Rafter’s scholarly interest in ‘the visual’ and biological theories of crime appeared in her early scholarship. Eventually,...

• Place and time in the Criminology of Place

  This article evaluates developments in the ecological analysis of crime, which have found their most recent expression in a Criminology of Place. We argue that theoretical and methodological deficiencies are evident in the Criminology of Place and associated literatures with respect to their...

• The Sociology of Corporate Crime: An Obituary

  This article makes three arguments: first, that the brand of state regulation known as corporate crime has basically disappeared; second, that it has been argued into obsolescence through neoliberal knowledge claims advanced through specific discourses by powerful elites; and third, that the...

• Displaced Expertise

  The long-standing relationship between criminal justice policy and the advice of criminologists has been ruptured in the past two decades. Three interrelated factors help to account for this displacement of criminological thought: (1) the rise of neo-libe...

• Books Received
• Fin de Siècle Criminology

  The culture of fin de siècle Vienna was characterized by a struggle for (intellectual) autonomy against social exclusion. One of the manifestations of the latter was the foundation of scientific criminology. It was and has remained a science of social exclusion. The struggle is illustrated by the...

• Book review: The Crime of All Crimes: Toward a Criminology of Genocide
• Rethinking Bestiality:

  This paper seeks to introduce a view of bestiality which differs radically from both the anthropocentrism enshrined in the dogma of Judaeo-Christianity and also from the pseudo-liberal tolerance fashionable today. I argue that bestiality should be understood as `interspecies sexual assault' because ...

• Book Review: Judah Schept, Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion