Introductory editorial
| Author | Mona Lynch,Kelly Hannah-Moffat |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516682437 |
| Published date | 01 January 2017 |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Punishment & Society
2017, Vol. 19(1) 3–4
!The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474516682437
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Editorial
Introductory editorial
Mona Lynch
University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Kelly Hannah-Moffat
University of Toronto, Canada
We are delighted to be editing Punishment & Society as the sixth editorial team
since the journal’s inception in 1999, and we thank outgoing editor Dario Melossi
for his help with the transition.
During our editorship, the journal will mark its 20-year anniversary, a major
milestone. The field has expanded and changed over the years, but the journal’s
core purpose remains the same. In his inaugural editorial, founding editor David
Garland characterized punishment as ‘‘one of the most pressing problems of our
age’’ (1999: 5). He stressed the need for a distinct intellectual outlet for scholarship
on punishment, noting that ‘‘the new centrality of penal politics and the changing
configuration of the field, together with the growth over the last two decades of a
vigorous and impressive body of new penological scholarship made it seem timely
and important to establish a forum for this kind of discussion and debate’’
(Garland, 1999: 9). Recent global political changes make an attentiveness to pun-
ishment and the expansion of penality, especially the impact of changes on mar-
ginal populations, particularly germane.
Since its first issue, the journal has advanced critical, theoretically groundbreak-
ing, and always-engaging scholarship on penality. Its intellectual space is occupied
by social scientists, social theorists, historians, criminologists, and socio-legal scho-
lars who frame state punishment as more than just a policy problem or a techno-
cratic solution to the problem of crime. Instead, they show how this central
institution can also shed light on wider society.
Indeed, the journal has become the intellectual center of a growing, global com-
munity of people who identify themselves as ‘‘punishment and society’’ scholars.
Punishment and society panels are regularly organized at annual professional meet-
ings internationally, as well as at stand-alone symposia and conferences at univer-
sities worldwide. Most notably, a well-established Punishment and Society
Collaborative Research Network (CRN) (http://punishment-society.blogspot.
com/) at the Law & Society Association (LSA) organizes multiple sessions at
Corresponding author:
Mona Lynch, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
Email: lynchm@uci.edu
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