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Keeping it real: A signaling theory perspective on authentic claims of gang membership made on social media Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 John Leverso, James A. Densley, Lindsey Insco
The advent of social media has transformed the landscape of street gang dynamics. Although existing research has documented gang members’ use of social media—including identity performance, rival taunting, promoting gang culture, and conflict de-escalation—it often lacks a theoretical foundation and process-oriented view of these digital interactions. This study advances a signaling timeline approach
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Rental housing and the continuum of carcerality Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Anna Reosti, Rahim Kurwa, Robin Bartram
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
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Book Review: Making Surveillance Public: Why You Should Be More Woke About AI and Algorithms by Marc Schuilenburg Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-09-09 Aleš Završnik
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Legitimation work in privatized criminal justice: Softening, shrinking, and signaling Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-09-07 Brett C. Burkhardt
How do private companies justify taking on criminal justice functions? Building on writing on legitimacy and privatization, this article describes three rhetorical practices intended to increase the legitimacy of private companies carrying out criminal justice functions: softening (obscuring the use of force); shrinking (demonstrating deference to the state); and signaling (proclaiming alignment with
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Book Review: The Sensation of Security: Private Guards and Social Order in Brazil by Erika Robb Larkins Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-08-30 Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti
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Hyper-agency and county lines Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-08-09 Sally Atkinson-Sheppard
The article considers the decision-making and actions of young people engaged in county lines. By drawing on data gathered with practitioners and young people associated with a homeless charity in London, the article argues that in convergence with existing theory, the agency that young people exhibit is ambiguous, blurring the boundaries of what children should and should not do. Agency is also tactical;
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Gendering postcolonial penality: The religious detention of women in Ireland Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-26 Lynsey Black
The role of religion was pivotal in shaping how women were punished in postcolonial Ireland. The new state used the Catholic Church to establish a separate system of confinement, a shadow penal regime for women, which drew its inmates from within a newly recognized threat to the nation. Drawing on Mark Brown's work on the ways in which postcolonial states can replicate the repression of colonialism
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Probation and the shadow carceral state: Legal envisioning from Minnesota Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-26 Michelle S. Phelps, Eric Seligman
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
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Book Review: Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis by Meredith J. Greif Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-25 Brandon Morrissey
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Prison places, foreign prisoners and the Danish welfare state: Towards a conceptualization of prison space as a welfare resource Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-23 Meritxell Abellan-Almenara
In December 2021, the government of Denmark entered into a rental agreement with Kosovo whereby 300 non-EU foreign nationals convicted by the Danish criminal justice system would be sent to Kosovo to serve their sentence of imprisonment and await their subsequent deportation. Based on an analysis of the wording of the Agreements on the finances of the Danish Prison Service, the article argues that
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The epistemic power of the police Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-07-23 Magda Boutros
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
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Book Review: Defund the Police: An International Insurrection by Chris Cunneen Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-22 Leanne Weber
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Exploring the impact of algorithmic policing on social justice: Developing a framework for rhizomatic harm in the pre-crime society Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-07 Rosamunde Van Brakel, Lander Govaerts
This article aims to contribute to digital criminology by proposing a framework of rhizomatic harms of algorithmic policing. We propose to expand zemiologist insights with a technological and relational component, and to broaden the concept of ‘social harms’ to ‘rhizomatic harms’. Rhizomatic harms are to be understood in all their complexity, as they emerge from multiple entry points with the creation
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Book Review: Crime, Violence, and Justice in Latin America by Carlos Solar, and Carlos A Pérez Ricart Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-07 Hugo Goeury
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Regulating mobility through detention: Understanding the new geography of control and containment at the Southern European border Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Giuseppe Campesi
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
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Border penality as antagonistic politics Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Mattia Pinto
This article examines the socio-political implications of using criminal law to address migration issues in Italy. It delves into the polarised political debate characterised by crimmigration, on the one hand, and calls to criminalise border violence to protect migrants, on the other hand. It argues that both uses of penality reflect and foster penal antagonism, whereby both sides of the debate seek
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Strip-searching as abjectification: Racism and sexual violence in British policing Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Koshka Duff, Tom Kemp
This article examines police strip-searching practices in the UK. Drawing on newly acquired Freedom of Information data, publicly available testimonies, thematic analysis of official literature and media reports, and first-hand experience, we advance three arguments. First, strip-searching is used systematically, not exceptionally, and targets young people and people of colour, especially Black young
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Book Review: Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America by Felicia Arriaga Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Mirian G Martinez-Aranda
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Book Review: Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition by Calvin John Smiley Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Khirad Zahra Siddiqui
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Using theory from the Global South: From social cohesion and collective efficacy to ubuntu Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Bill Dixon
Criminologists adopting a southern or decolonial perspective bemoan the failure to use theories from the Global South in making sense of crime and responses to it. This article takes the African philosophy and ethics of ubuntu and demonstrates how they might be used to ground a more relevant and effective approach to preventing urban violence in South Africa than northern ideas about social cohesion
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The conceptual limits of risk governance in terrorism prevention: Towards a theory of threat thinking Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Anya Degenshein
Risk theories have dominated research on policing and punishment for the past 30 years, including a growing interest in crime prevention. Drawing on excerpts from court documents of 351 counterterrorism stings, an empirical exemplar in contemporary crime prevention, I demonstrate that these cases both defy the logics of actuarial risk governance and exceed the logics of precautionary risk governance
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The soundtrack of criminal careers: On music, life courses and life stories Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 David Rodriguez Goyes, Sveinung Sandberg
Music is ubiquitous in contemporary societies, and criminologists are paying increasing attention to it, asserting that it takes antisocial, prosocial and anti-establishment forms regarding crimina...
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Foreigners’ crime and punishment: Punitive application of immigration law as a substitute for criminal justice Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Jukka Könönen
Notwithstanding claims about the emergence of ‘crimmigration’ systems, immigration law and criminal law entail two different sets of instruments for authorities to control foreign nationals. Drawin...
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Mass incarceration in times of economic growth and inclusion? Three steps to understand contemporary imprisonment in Brazil Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Luiz Dal Santo
Mass incarceration is a phenomenon that emerged in the USA in the 1970s. Since then, this pattern of imprisonment has taken shape in all other continents. Nowadays, many ‘core countries’ have been ...
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The boundaries of the carceral state: Accounting for the role of military incarceration Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Smadar Ben-Natan
This article extends the study of carceral expansion—currently encompassing criminal, civil, and immigration enforcement—by examining the role of military (and, within that, extraterritorial) incar...
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Dirty money and financial inequality in North Philadelphia Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 Jackson Smith
Between 1984 and 2016, Philadelphia prosecutors seized over US$86 million dollars, most of it in the form of cash taken from Black and Latinx Philadelphians. These seizures of dirty money were real...
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Penal duress in (post)colonial Myanmar Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 Andrew M. Jefferson, Tomas Max Martin
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 c...
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The capitalization of crime in the city of real estate Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 Eilat Maoz, Meirav Aharon Gutman
This article explores how the relationship between crime and property values is reshaped by the transformation of houses into investible assets. Departing from neoclassical economics of crime, we i...
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Gendering the carceral web: Public sector reform, technology and digital (in)justice Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2023-02-12 Gemma Birkett
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 syst...
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Prison, technology, and consumption: A visual study of the use of electronic commerce strategies in the inmate package industry Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-12-21 Isabel Arriagada
In recent years, the US penal system has increasingly contracted prison services and introduced electronic commerce technologies for penal populations and their social networks. This study uses vis...
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Prison order through the hyperopticon, collectivism, and atomisation: The surveillance and disciplining of Ukrainian prison officers Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Anton Symkovych
Bentham's idea of the panopticon has long influenced the theorisation of prison order. However, this model of control has been applied almost exclusively to prisoners. Drawing on ethnographic work ...
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Capital in illegal online drug markets: How digital capital changes the cultural environment of drug dealing Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Silje Anderdal Bakken, Atte Oksanen, Jakob Demant
Digital societies demand technological competence, including for actors in illegal activity. Inspired by Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and related criminological concepts such as street cap...
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Policía beyond the police Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-12-12 Laura Gutiérrez, Mark Neocleous
This article develops and extends the critical theory of police power by applying it to Colombia. Scholarship on police in Colombia has been undermined by a focus on the kind of creation myth that ...
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Who can organize and exercise effective resistance? A southern criminology perspective on the victimology of state crime Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Valeria Vegh Weis
More than 75 million people were killed in wars, dictatorships and civil conflicts in the 20th century alone. To date, states and international organizations have been regarded as the reliable enti...
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Introduction to Special Issue on comparative criminology: Context, scope and applicability in critical criminological research Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Matthew Light, Anne-Marie Singh
This Special Issue highlights the value of the comparative case study method for theory-building and refinement in criminology. Early figures in criminology, including those in the Chicago School, ...
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The President and the Boss's son: Prosecuting the crimes of America's most powerful Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-10-31 John Hagan, Bill McCarthy, Daniel Herda
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 w...
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All-foreign prisons in the United States, England and Wales, and Norway: Related logics and local expressions Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-09-21 Robert Hallam Tuck, Dorina Damsa, Elizabeth Kullman
Norway, England and Wales, and the USA are among a small number of affluent Western countries to establish ‘all-foreign’ prisons in response to public concerns about the growing threat of foreign-n...
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Innocence as burden and resource: Adaptation and resistance during wrongful imprisonment Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-07-21 Janani Umamaheswar
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 setti...
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The externalization of border control in the global South: The cases of Malaysia and Indonesia Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-07-12 Maggy Lee
Existing scholarship highlights the novel approaches and the capacity of northern states to control mass mobility by externalizing the border; outsource their control apparatus to migrant sending a...
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Rehabilitation within pre-crime interventions: The hybrid criminology of social crime prevention and countering violent extremism Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Sadi Shanaah
Criminological literature frequently argues that the rehabilitative penological paradigm of the 20th century (‘penal welfarism’) has been replaced by pre-crime, risk-based, ‘new penology’. Under th...
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Why Global North criminology fails to explain organized crime in Mexico Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Valentin Pereda
The prevailing definitions of organized crime and methodological approaches to studying it derive mainly from the Global North. However, an emergent body of literature suggests that organized crime...
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Transnational policing between national political regimes and human rights norms: The case of the Interpol Red Notice system Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-06-07 Serdar San
Current transnational policing mechanisms such as Interpol appear to reproduce authoritarianism-like actions in democratic contexts by helping to undermine the rights and freedoms of individuals ta...
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Police legitimacy and approval of vigilante violence: The significance of anger Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-05-31 Muhammad Asif
Most of the previous studies on vigilante violence suggest that people employ vigilante violence instrumentally to compensate for a lack of state monopoly on violence and the state's illegitimacy in controlling crime. This study, however, highlights the significance of emotions—most notably anger—in explaining approval of vigilante violence. A cross-sectional study was conducted at six Pakistani universities
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The civic crime of corruption: Citizen networks and public sector bribery in the non-democracies Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-06-05 Marina Zaloznaya
In the Global North, corruption is considered incompatible with civic health: scholars argue that it decreases social trust, atomizes communities, and discourages active citizenship. Using the first-ever national dataset from Russia with behavioral measures of corruption, ego-centric networks, and political participation, this article develops an alternative theory of corruption’s impact on civic life
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Private security and national security: The case of Estonia Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-06-05 Matthew Light, Anne-Marie Singh, Josh Gold
Most studies of the industry’s growth and regulation. In contrast, based on the case of post-Soviet Estonia, we investigate how a state’s external security environment influences private security. Estonia’s tense relations with neighbouring Russia and related pursuit of EU and NATO membership have generated several policies through which private security evolved from a lawless, politically contested
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The not-so-hidden partisan politics of community policing: Community police meetings in Buenos Aires, Argentina Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-06-05 Leslie Elva MacColman, Violeta Dikenstein
Community policing promises to foster collaboration between police and citizens, strengthen social cohesion, and address the root causes of crime and disorder. In order to understand why it often f...
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The security mindset: Corrections officer workplace culture in late mass incarceration Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-05-18 Heather Schoenfeld, Grant Everly
Prison officers’ behavior is one of the most consequential features of the modern prison. In this article, we introduce an organizational culture conceptual framework and build on previous prison scholarship to develop a model of prison officer workplace culture. We then apply the proposed model to original research in a US prison to investigate the relational aspects of prison officer culture during
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Negotiating penal hybridity: Time–space boundary-work in parole decision making Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-05-16 Netanel Dagan
Drawn on qualitative findings from discretionary chairpersons of parole boards in Israel, the study aims to theorize parole decision making as time–space boundary-work. Parole decision-makers were found to act within a hybrid professional environment that requires them to process distinct, and possibly conflicting, penal values, competencies and orientations. In order to address their professional
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The de-realization of Black bodies in an era of mass digital surveillance: A techno-criminological critique Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-05-09 Bruce Arrigo, Olivia P Shaw
This article describes the ways in which existing methods of dataveillance and big data collection have contributed to the current de-realization of Black bodies. In the present or ultramodern era, de-realization consists of datafication (i.e. digital profiling techniques and life mining strategies) in support of techno-crime control policy. The process of de-realization both de-politicizes Black identities
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Re-theorizing the progress of women in policing: An alternative perspective from the Global South Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-05-09 Kerry Carrington, Jess Rodgers, Máximo Sozzo, María Victoria Puyol
Women’s entry into policing, a traditionally masculine occupation, has been theorized almost entirely through a liberal feminist theoretical lens where equality with men is the end target. From this theoretical viewpoint, women’s police stations in the Global South established specifically to respond to gender violence have been conceptualized as relics from the past. We argue that this approach is
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Book Review: The Death of Asylum: Hidden Geographies of the Enforcement Archipelago by Alison Mountz Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-04-26 Francesco Vecchio
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Book review: Vera Lopez and Lisa Pasko (eds), Latinas in the Criminal Justice System: Victims, Targets and Offenders Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Kayla Marie Martensen
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Violence and bordering on the margins of the State: A view from South Africa and the southern border of Spain Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-03-10 Gail Super, Ana Ballesteros-Pena
This article examines expulsions in and around the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla and in informal settlements in former black townships in South Africa. These violent bordering processes expose the violent injustices that constitute the boundaries of lawful (liberal) law, and the violence that sovereigns use to secure territories. Drawing on Walter Benjamin we make three main theoretical arguments
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Remote control: Horizontal surveillance and the gendering of carceral punishment Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-03-07 Michael Gibson-Light
Research traditionally suggests that men incarcerated in the USA regard horizontal surveillance—that is, monitoring the behaviors of other prisoners—as antithetical to notions of masculinity behind bars. Yet, following an 18-month ethnography in a US prison for men, this article reveals that the imprisoned may in fact embrace prisoner-on-prisoner monitoring tied to labor. It details how participants
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Governing against the tide: Populism, power and the party conference Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-24 Thomas Guiney, Stephen Farrall
In this article we argue that a tendency to treat populism as a ubiquitous, mechanistic characteristic of contemporary penality has impeded systematic theoretical discussion of how populist ideologies find contingent expression within national penal systems. Drawing upon an agonistic perspective we seek to show that the intersection between populism and punishment must be understood as a structured
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Irreducibly social: Why biocriminology’s ontoepistemology is incompatible with the social reality of crime Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-02-23 Callie H Burt
Professing interactionist bio + social terminology, contemporary biocriminology asserts a break from its biologically essentialist past. Assurances notwithstanding, whether biocriminology has undergone a decisive paradigm shift rejecting notions of biological criminals and bad brains remains uncertain. Unfortunately, discussions of biocriminology's assumptions are mired in politics, obscuring important
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Feminized need and racialized danger: Punitive therapeutics and historical addict tropes in a Midwestern drug court Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-31 Veronica Horowitz, Teresa Gowan
Drug courts are widely praised as a therapeutic alternative to mass incarceration. Using ethnographic discourse analysis, our intersectional comparison of a Midwestern court demonstrates how gender and race create differentiated and unequal rehabilitative projects. Striking differences in treatment, sanctions, and requirements demonstrate the lasting power of long-standing historical addiction tropes
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Gestalt contexture and contested motives: Understanding video evidence in the murder trial of Officer Michael Slager Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-31 Patrick G Watson
This article is situated in ongoing discussions about the influx of images of police violence. To date, much scholarship has centred on Foucauldian notions of knowledge-power and sousveillance. Alternatively, I attend to how video evidence produces understanding of police violence in court through a case study of the murder trial of Officer Michael Slager who shot and killed Walter Scott in North Charleston
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Book review: Louise Brangan, The Politics of Punishment: A Comparative Study of Imprisonment and Political Culture Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Marguerite Schinkel
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Book review: Forrest Stuart, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy Theoretical Criminology (IF 1.9) Pub Date : 2022-01-21 Marta-Marika Urbanik