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‘A pre-requisite of progress’? Prison modernisation and new prison building in England and Wales Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Robert Jones, Emily Hart, David Scott
Drawing upon archival research and documentary analysis, this article offers the first in-depth critical account of the prison modernisation narrative in England and Wales. By closely examining the claims behind the UK Government's current prison building policy, the article reveals that prison modernisation is severely undermined by a lack of supporting evidence as well as arguments which indisputably
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States of denial: Magdalene Laundries in twentieth-century Ireland Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Louise Brangan
On the first day at a Magdalene Laundry, women and girls who had been sent there had their hair cut off, their names replaced, and their possessions taken. In the days and weeks that followed, everything else was stripped from them. How do we make sense of this carceral regime? The new conceived wisdom is to describe Magdalene Laundries as places of containment and confinement, as tantamount to prisons
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The monster and the self: Taking on the monstrosity of sexual violations Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Anja Emilie Kruse, May-Len Skilbrei
The contemporary normative climate regarding sexual violence affects how perpetrators of such violence relate to their harmful acts. In this article, we analyze how men convicted of sex offences are affected by how perpetrators of such offences are often represented as monsters and ask what this tells us about what characterizes the Monster as a figure. While people convicted of sexual offences are
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Punishment is purple: The political economy of prison building Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 John M Eason, Mary E Campbell, Benjamin Ghasemi, Eileen Huey
The United States is unique among rich countries in the world in its level of contemporary mass incarceration, a massive social change that has reshaped the nature of inequality and social mobility. We have more than tripled the number of prison facilities since 1970. Despite employing nearly 450,000 corrections officers, occupying a land mass of roughly 600 square miles, and costing conservatively
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Border control within Spanish prisons? Intersections between immigration control and imprisonment at the southern border of Europe Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Cristina Güerri
Recent scholarship has highlighted that, for many foreign nationals, Western European prisons function as 'places of crimmigration' where non-citizens are over-represented, often excluded from rehabilitation efforts, sometimes held in segregated prisons, and where it is common for incarceration to lead to deportation. However, this literature has mainly focused on north-western European countries and
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"A prison is no place for a pandemic": Canadian prisoners' collective action in the time of COVID-19. Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-08-10 Jessica Evans,Jordan House
Since the onset of COVID-19, social protest has expanded significantly. Little, however, has been written on prison-led and prison justice organizing in the wake of the pandemic-particularly in the Canadian context. This article is a case study of prisoner organizing in Canada throughout the first 18 months of COVID-19, which draws on qualitative interviews, media, and documentary analysis. We argue
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Solitary confinement as state harm: Reimagining sentencing in light of dynamic censure and state blame. Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-07-05 Marie Manikis,Nicholas Doiron
The continuous perpetration of unjustified harms by the carceral state through its use of solitary confinement justifies the creation of a novel process of automatic sentence review. This process is necessary to account for such state-perpetrated harms and communicate censure more accurately. This article proposes the use of a communicative theory of punishment developed in sentencing to characterise
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Carceral safety in a post-PREA era: An examination of perceptual indicators of safety among incarcerated persons in four southeast prisons Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Richard Ledet, Melanie M Holland, Sharon Emeigh, Somer Givens
Since the inception of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), its reception has been notably ambivalent among practitioners and scholars. While this policy was promoted as a means of enhancin...
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Carceral reckoning and twenty-first century US abolition movements: Generational struggles in the fight against prisons Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-05-01 Zhandarka Kurti, Michelle Brown
The spectacle of racist state violence in the middle of a global pandemic was the spark that ignited one of the largest Black led and multiracial protest movements in recent history. The George Flo...
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Justifying leniency at a time of punitiveness: Federal clemency narratives in the United States Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Erika Canossini
Scholarship on contemporary US penality has paid little attention to practices opposing the punitive trend. This study explores clemency – official acts moderating punishment and its lasting conseq...
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Prosecutors as punishers: A case study of Trump-era practices Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-03-30 Mona Lynch
Recent punishment and society scholarship has addressed the limits of policy reforms aimed at reducing mass incarceration in the U.S. This work has focused in particular on the political dimensions...
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Punishment as text Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Netanel Dagan, Adiel Zimran
Punishment is often performed through judicial texts. Narrative criminology scholarship, however, has paid little attention to how criminalised people engage with these texts when constructing thei...
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‘Time's relentless melt’: The severity of life imprisonment through the prism of old age Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Marion Vannier, Ashley Nellis
This paper considers the pains of life-sentence imprisonment through the novel vantage point of old age understood as a process. Our prison populations are getting older and the use of life sentenc...
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Cultural differences in control: How Thailand's order-centric legal mentality shapes its constraining lower-court practices Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-01-08 Thanyanuch Tantikul
Studies in comparative penology still lack English writings about penal cultures in non-Anglo-European countries, particularly those that steer their focus away from imprisonment. This article fill...
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Haven't they suffered enough? Time to exoneration following wrongful conviction of racially marginalized minority- vs. majority-group members Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2023-01-09 Eran Itskovich, Roni Factor, Daniel Ohana
Studies on the criminal justice process up to the point of conviction show that defendants who belong to racially marginalized groups suffer a greater risk of being wrongfully convicted. However, l...
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Surveillance potential: Exploring how unbanked social assistance recipients in Toronto, Canada negotiated a mandatory transition from cash to cards Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-12-04 Kelsi Barkway
This article explores how purportedly benign technologies, such as benefits cards used to distribute welfare funds, can be perceived as a tool for surveillance and social control, particularly in c...
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Beyond rhetoric: Emplotting the life course of criminal justice narratives Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-11-27 Lauren O’Connell, Deirdre Healy
Understanding key trends within the penal field has become a core preoccupation of criminologists in recent decades. However, critical analyses of the emplotment of narratives, or how narratives th...
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Servitude for a time: From the permanent slavery of the unfree to the slavery pro tempore of the free Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Dario Melossi
I consider the forms of control, which went “untreated” by 1970s “revisionist” penality literature (in other words, I wonder whether the categories of human beings who are (mostly) not found in pri...
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Privatisation and accountability in Australian immigration detention: A case of state-corporate symbiosis Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Mark Yin
Across the global north, immigration detention has become an increasingly common punishment for ‘illegal’ movement between borders. The punitive nature of Australia's border protection laws is enha...
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Remnants of carcerality and fascism in contemporary literature from Equatorial Guinea Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-10-30 Anna Mester
From 1939 to 1968, the Spanish territory in the Gulf of Guinea suffered from a double, imperial and fascist oppression under the Franco regime. While colonialism officially ended in 1968, the promi...
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Toward a penology of organizational offending Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-10-18 James E Sutton, Clayton D Peoples
The punishment of organizational offending has largely been overlooked by penologists, despite the fact that organizational actors such as corporations and the state perpetrate the most serious for...
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Extraction without reserve: The case of Arizona's penal care regime Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-10-13 Justin D Strong
Prison healthcare reform and litigation have emerged as critical sites of social and political struggle in early twenty-first century punishment. In the case of Arizona, privatization of its prison...
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The risk–gang nexus in Sweden: Penal layering and the uneven topography of penal change Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-10-12 Henrik Örnlind, Torbjörn Forkby
This article maps the emergence of a risk–gang nexus in the Swedish correctional field. Using the concept of penal layering, the article analyses the configuration of risk-based practices to manage...
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Prison officers and esprit de corps. Ingroup and outgroup relationships in prison Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Alessandro Maculan, Maddalena Rodelli
This paper presents a qualitative study exploring the concept of esprit de corps in prison officers (POs), through the interpretative lens of Social Identity Theory. The study relies on semi-struct...
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Shaping the road to reentry: Organizational variation and narrative labor in the penal voluntary sector Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-10-05 Kaitlyn Quinn, Philip Goodman
Financial austerity, welfare state retrenchment, and the movement towards evidence-based interventions have intensified the pressures on penal voluntary sector (PVS) organizations. The result is an...
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Carceral community in the time of COVID-19: Isolation, adaption, and predation Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Anthony W Fontes
State failures to protect prisoners from COVID-19 have made prisons key “hotspots” of infection, particularly in the “new mass carceral zone” of Latin America. In Guatemala, which has the 3rd most ...
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Making sense of penal difference: Political cultures and comparative penology Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-08-24 Louise Brangan
In this paper I argue that if we are to make sense of why punishment differs between jurisdictions, then we should focus on the political cultures that shape penal practices. Political culture is c...
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More than monsters: Penal imaginaries and the specter of the dangerous sex offender Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-08-22 Robert Werth
Drawing from ethnographic data, this article examines parole personnel's imaginaries of dangerous sex offenders: individuals perceived as especially aberrant, predatory and irredeemable. While the ...
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What does Lawfare mean in Latin America? A new framework for understanding the criminalization of progressive political leaders * Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-08-08 Valeria Vegh Weis
This article addresses the origins of the term lawfare, as well as different definitions developed in the Global North and the Global South while proposing a conceptualization linked to the particu...
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Surviving austerity: Commissary stores, inequality and punishment in the contemporary American prison Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-08-08 Tommaso Bardelli, Zach Gillespie, Thuy Linh Tu
Privatization and austerity measures have turned US prisons and jails into sites of financial extraction. As corrections systems have slashed budgets for essential services, incarcerated individual...
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Introduction: African penal histories in global perspective Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-07-26 Erin Braatz, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Stacey Hynd
It has been over twenty years since the publication of Florence Bernault's edited volume Enfermement, prison et châtiments en Afrique: du 19e siècle à nos jours (1999), a first of its kind collection that helped establish the field of African penal history.1 Since then, this field has greatly expanded (see Alexander and Kynoch, 2011; Roberts 2013; Waller, 2017) with innovative research on topics such
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Radical right populism and the sociology of punishment: Towards a research agenda Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-07-18 Claire Hamilton
The recent populist ‘explosion’ in the US, UK and Europe has pushed radical right populist movements to the centre of western politics. Given criminology's long experience of penal populism in the 1980s and subsequent decades, these developments raise important questions as to the role of sociology of punishment, and the wider discipline of criminology, in responding to far-right populism. This article
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Something in the air: Toxic pollution in and around U.S. prisons Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-07-15 Elisa L. Toman
Toxic chemicals are released into land, air, and waterways daily. Exposure to such chemicals, however, is not equally distributed across the U.S. It is well documented that communities without agency and capital, typically economically and socially disadvantaged, are those that suffer the brunt of the impacts of a polluted environment. These impacts can have both acute and chronic health consequences
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Book review: The Politics of Punishment: A comparative study of imprisonment and political culture by Louise Brangan Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-07-03 John Todd Kvam
The Politics of Punishment examines how prisons policy develops over time in specific political and cultural contexts; and how scholars should examine and theorise such developments. The book conducts a ‘deep comparison’, in that the author takes two case countries (Ireland and Scotland) and provides a rich and detailed empirical account of how prisons policy, instantiated in what Brangan terms imprisonment
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Malleable detention: The restructuring of carceral space within U.S. immigration detention Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-06-22 Luis A Romero
The expansion of immigration detention in the United States has been attributed to policy, privatization, and anti-immigrant racialization. This research extends understandings of immigration detention's growth by focusing on how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintains the necessary space to detain migrants during this expansion. In this article, I introduce the concept of “malleable detention:”
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Managing inclusion or preparing for exclusion? A critical examination of gender-responsive management of female Central and Eastern European prisoners in England and Wales Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-06-20 Magdalena Tomaszewska, Karen Bullock, Jon Garland
This article examines practitioner understandings and implementation of gender-responsive support within female prisons in England and Wales in the context of a growing emphasis on effective deportation of foreign national prisoners. Drawing on a case study of female prisoners from Central and Eastern states of the European Union (EU), we argue that the aims of gender-responsivity, designed to address
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Book Review: Criminal Justice Responses to Maternal Filicide: Judging the Failed Mother by Emma Milne Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-06-16
As the abortion debate continues to rage in the United States, this book comes as a reminder of the ways in which English law has regulated women's reproduction and fertility and continues to do so. Judging the Failed Mother joins a growing area of feminist literature which explores, critiques and challenges the ways in which society responds to women and their decision-making during pregnancy and
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Calories, commerce, and culture: The multiple valuations of food in prison Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-05-02 Collins Ifeonu, Kevin D. Haggerty, Sandra M. Bucerius
In the last two decades, a body of critical scholarship has emerged accentuating the social and cultural importance of food in prison. This article employs a tripartite conceptual framework for contemplating and demarcating food's different valuations in prison. We draw from our interviews with over 500 incarcerated individuals to demonstrate how acquiring, trading, and preparing food is inscribed
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Parole, parole boards and the institutional dilemmas of contemporary prison release Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-04-27 Thomas C Guiney
The decision to release is a defining feature of the carceral experience: at once a necessary function of a dynamic penal system, and a highly contested form of symbolic communication where the anxieties and contradictions of contemporary penality begin to coalesce. In this paper I argue that the institutions we rely upon to make these determinations in a fair, consistent and efficient manner are under
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“Secondary registrants”: A new conceptualization of the spread of community control Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-04-14 Chrysanthi S Leon, Ashley R Kilmer
U.S. policies influence worldwide responses to sexual offending and community control. Individuals in the U.S. convicted of sex offenses experience surveillance and control beyond their sentences, including public registries and residency restrictions. While the targets are the convicted individuals, many registrants have romantic partners, children, and other family members also navigating these restrictions
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Enemy parole Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Netanel Dagan
Pushing and expanding the boundaries of the ‘criminology of the other’ and ‘enemy penology’ to the post-sentencing phase, this study aims to analyse parole for terror-related prisoners. For doing so, the study thematically analysed 207 decisions of the Israeli parole board for individuals labelled as ‘security prisoners’. It found that for security prisoners, the parole board employs a distorted version
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Book Review: Normalizing Extreme Imprisonment: The Case of Life Without Parole in California by Marion Vannier Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-04-07 Christopher Seeds
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Book Review: Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court by Matthew Clair Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-03-30 Michael Lawrence Walker
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Penal diversity, penality and community sanctions in Australia Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-03-30 Arie Freiberg, Lorana Bartels
This article explores Australian penal diversity, through the lens of community sanctions. We first examine what is meant by ‘community sanctions’ and suggest that the problem of definition provides one of the reasons for the dearth of comparative studies on their use, compared with prison studies. The article then examines the concept of punitiveness, ‘penal reach’ or ‘penal load’. This is followed
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Transformational learning and identity shift: Evidence from a campus behind bars Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-03-24 Amy E Lerman, Meredith Sadin
Identity-driven theories of desistance provide a useful model for understanding change in a carceral context. However, these theories often are not grounded in specific programmes or practices that might catalyze identity shift, and tend to focus narrowly on recidivism as the sole outcome of interest. In this study, we examine the role of prison higher education in identity-driven change through the
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The exercise of authority during interactions in custody hearings in São Paulo (Brazil): Building legitimacy through exclusion Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Bruna Gisi, Efraín García-Sánchez, Fernanda Novaes Cruz, Giane Silvestre, Maria Gorete Marques de Jesus
In Brazil, the Custody Hearing is a legal device established in 2015 to safeguard the rights of people arrested in flagrante delicto by the police. In an attempt to prevent the indiscriminate use of preventive detentions in the country, the custody hearings were created for the potential effects that an in-person meeting may have on the flow of the Criminal Justice System. While the recent literature
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Slave “Corrections” in Luanda, Angola from 1836 to 1869 Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Tracy Lopes
This paper uses thousands of cases of imprisonment published under the police section of a weekly gazette entitled Boletim Oficial do Governo da Província de Angola to explore the connections between slavery and the “birth of the prison” in Luanda, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola between 1836 and 1869. It demonstrates that as the colonial administration gradually abolished the institution
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Trans architecture and the prison as archive: “don’t be a queen and you won’t be arrested” Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-03-11 Tait Sanders, Jessica Gildersleeve, Sherree Halliwell, Carol du Plessis, Kirsty A Clark, Jaclyn MW Hughto, Amy B Mullens, Tania M Phillips, Kirstie Daken, Annette Brömdal
Most incarceration settings around the world are governed by strong cisnormative policies, architectures, and social expectations that segregate according to a person's legal gender (i.e. male or female). This paper draws on the lived experiences of 24 formerly incarcerated trans women in Australia and the U.S. to elucidate the way in which the prison functions according to Lucas Crawford's theory
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The jailhouse divergence: Why debtors’ prisons disappeared in 19th century Europe and flourished in West Africa Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-03-07 Sarah Balakrishnan
It has been argued that the debtors’ prison was abolished in 19th century Europe and North America because the institution contradicted the principles of modern capitalism; by confining debtors for unpaid loans, it punished the poor while hampering the creditor, who could not be repaid by a debtor rotting in jail. This essay revises these assumptions through a study of debtors’ prisons in 19th century
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Cars, compounds and containers: Judicial and extrajudicial infrastructures of punishment in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ South Africa Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Gail Super
This paper examines non-state infrastructures of vigilante violence in marginalized spaces in South Africa. I argue that car trunks, shacks, containers, and other everyday receptacles function as the underside of official institutions, such as prisons and police lock-ups, and bear historical imprints of the extrajudicial punishments inflicted on black bodies during colonialism and apartheid. I focus
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Book Review: Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Stephen E. Tillotson
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Renouncing criminal citizens: Patterns of denationalization and citizenship theory Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Milena Tripkovic
This article examines the underlying aims of denationalization of criminal offenders by framing the discussion within citizenship theory. It argues that such citizenship revocation policies exclude individuals who are perceived as non-ideal citizens under a complex vision of citizenship that combines communitarian and liberal undertones, which has significant consequences for detecting those with weak
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Imprisonment and Citizenship in Senegal, 1917–1946: The Case of the Originaires Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Dior Konaté
This paper examines the incarceration of the Originaires in colonial Senegal to illuminate how imprisonment had shaped or altered their French citizenship rights in prisons. Among the prison population in colonial Senegal were some Originaires, the residents of the Four Communes who were granted French citizenship rights as early as 1833, a status that remained ambiguous until 1916 when a new law made
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Surveillance and the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic for formerly incarcerated individuals Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Mike Vuolo, Lesley E Schneider, Eric G Laplant
To date, most criminal justice research on COVID-19 has examined the rapid spread within prisons. We shift the focus to reentry via in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals in central Ohio, specifically focusing on how criminal justice contact affected the pandemic experience. In doing so, we use the experience of the pandemic to build upon criminological theories regarding surveillance
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Book Review: Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal by Alexandra Natapoff Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-14 Matthew Clair
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Book review: Punishing Poverty: How Bail and Pretrial Detention Fuel Inequalities in the Criminal Justice System by Christine S. Scott-Hayward and Henry F. Fradella Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-14 Alexes Harris
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Book Review: Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico by Marisol LeBrón Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-10 Robert J. Durán
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Ruptured alliances: Prosecutorial lobbying, victims’ interests and punishment policy in Illinois Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-10 Anya Degenshein
Using a combination of FOIA-requested legislative committee hearings and in-depth interviews, this manuscript investigates the work of Illinois prosecutorial lobbyists in state-level crime policy during a time of penal reform. I find that prosecutorial lobbyists are a regular and influential presence in policy discussions, advocating primarily for 'law and order' policies that expand prosecutorial
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Book Review: Professionalism in Probation: Making Sense of Marketisation by Matt Tidmarsh Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-08 Jamie Buchan
Just seven years after it began in 2013, and amid a pandemic which has put enormous pressures on criminal justice institutions, the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) programme was officially brought to an end. Under TR, and on the basis of little evidence, probation in England and Wales was split into an outsourced provision for low- and medium-risk offenders run by 21 regional Community Rehabilitation
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Book Review: Neoliberalismo y castigo by I González Sánchez Punishment & Society (IF 2.289) Pub Date : 2022-02-07 José A. Brandariz