Theoretical Criminology

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

Issue Number

Latest documents

  • Book Review: Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers by Lynne Haney
  • Book Review: Migrant Homelessness and the Crimmigration Control System by Regina Serpa
  • Regulating mobility through detention: Understanding the new geography of control and containment at the Southern European border

    The aim of this article is to describe the evolution of immigration detention policies at the Southern European border. This will be done by presenting original data on the actual functioning of immigration detention in Italy in the wake of the so-called “refugee crisis”. By shedding light on these developments, the article reveals a notable convergence of first reception and return policies, which in turn is driving a transformation of the landscape of immigration detention leading to a proliferation of detention regimes and spaces of containment. Drawing on the literature on carceral geographies, this development is analyzed within the framework of Italy's distinct role in the geopolitics of EU border control policies. The article ultimately suggests that the immigration detention system has gradually been co-opted by the border control infrastructure, becoming part of a broader and intricate control assemblage whose essential function is the regulation of human mobility.

  • Book Review: Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis by Meredith J. Greif
  • The epistemic power of the police

    This article uses movements against police brutality as a starting point to rethink our theorizations of police power, asking how the police maintain their dominance over oppressed groups, and what it takes to challenge it. I argue that an important, but undertheorized dimension of police power is epistemic power, the ability to control what is known and what remains unknown about policing practices. Epistemic power derives from (1) the police's control over the production and non-production of data about crime and policing; (2) the assumption that police officers are more credible than their targets; and (3) their privileged access to the media. Using France as a case study, I show how the police draw on epistemic power to produce ‘truth’ and manufacture ignorance about their practices, and I examine activist strategies to challenge and disrupt this power.

  • Probation and the shadow carceral state: Legal envisioning from Minnesota

    The transformation of US punishment in the late 20th century was defined not just by mass imprisonment, but the growth of a shadow carceral state of administrative and civil sanctions, including technical violations of probation and parole that smooth the pathway to prison. We consider the role of technical violations in the shadow carceral state through the lens of lived experience, analyzing interviews with adults on probation in Hennepin County, Minnesota, conducted in 2019. Building on the concept of legal envisioning, we ask how people subject to probation experience the threat of violations and what they imagine would be helpful to avoid them. Ultimately, these perspectives illuminate the need for transformative changes to dismantle the shadow carceral state and raise challenging questions about the role of care in punishment.

  • The family policing industrial complex: The shadow carceral state in sites intended for the support of families

    The US criminal punishment system, undergirded by carceral logics that center retributive punishment for all measure of offenses, has extended far beyond the walls of formal institutions of incarceration as a shadow carceral state, including into the institution of the family. Families, particularly those of color and who are low-income, face these carceral logics in systems expected to provide support and services, but that often reinforce and reproduce the criminal punishment system's structural violence and retributive responses. We contribute to the understanding of the carceral state's impact on families by conceptualizing the family policing industrial complex through a synthesis of the carcerality experienced by families in two sites—the immigration system and the child support enforcement system. We conclude by calling for the abolition of this complex, exploring transformative justice-oriented remediations of its harm found in various alternative responses to policing families.

  • Reforming the shadow carceral state

    This article examines the repeal of prison pay-to-stay policies in the United States. We process-trace reform efforts in Illinois drawing from novel data retrieved through multiple FOIA requests to state agencies and public records searches. Our analysis reveals how lawmakers who advocated for reforming the shadow carceral state in 2016 and 2019 through repealing prison pay-to-stay repurposed penal logics they had once used punitively in the 1980s and 1990s to enact the same policy—such as protecting taxpayers, fiscal efficiency, and rehabilitation. Our findings advance existing research by suggesting that penal logics are open to interpretation depending on the socioeconomic and historical moment. These contextual factors are also crucial to determining how lawmakers and institutions re-interpret long held penal logics when reforming the shadow carceral state. We argue the ways in which lawmakers strategically operationalize penal logics exemplifies their cultural durability as a resonant means to a political end.

  • Rental housing and the continuum of carcerality

    Existing research on housing and the carceral state demonstrates a divergence in the carceral state's orientation toward property owners and the unhoused. We focus on the liminal arena of rental housing and draw on three cases—landlords’ use of criminal history to screen rental applicants, citizen participation in policing neighborhoods, and crime initiatives that weaponize building code enforcement—to posit a continuum of housing carcerality. We argue that the carceral regulation of rental housing emerges from sources in civil law and policy, illustrating the enduring relevance of what Beckett and Murakawa call the shadow carceral state. Yet, in the rental context, the carceral state tends to have a more covert, decentralized character which does not consistently align with the economic interests of rental property owners and other housing market elites in comparison to its manifestation at the ends of the continuum.

  • Immigration detention as a shadow carceral system

    Immigration detention plays a critical role in maintaining the ever-expanding machinery of immigration enforcement. Yet, producing public knowledge about immigration detention remains a very difficult task. This article describes how immigration detention as a shadow carceral system trades in invisibility, instability, and inscrutability. These structural features that characterize immigration detention systems across different national and regional contexts present many challenges for researchers. Drawing on my review of the current empirical scholarship on immigration detention, as well as my own struggles as a researcher in this field, I argue that bringing light to immigration detention systems requires scholars to tap into a more diverse array of data sources and types, leverage mixed methods to a greater degree, and break the academic code of silence on missteps and mistakes in research process.

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