Howard Journal of Crime and Justice最新文献

Feminism and prison abolitionism are not theoretically or politically homogenous, and yet in their mainstream versions they are often situated at polar ends of the debate on how to respond to domestic and sexualised violence. The disproportionately gendered nature of sexualised and interpersonal violence has largely centralised such abuses in feminist movements. However, histories of abolitionism – particularly in continental Europe – have largely failed to address the severity of this violence and its impacts. In this article, we highlight the implications of so-called ‘carceral’ feminism on ending sexualised and interpersonal violence, while addressing key – and reasonable – critiques of abolitionism. Our central argument is that criminal justice has failed to significantly reduce and/or end sexualised or interpersonal violence. As such, we explore feminist-centred, restorative, and transformative alternatives, not only to prison, but to societies that continue to embed systematic levels of sexualised and interpersonal violence.

Early restorative justice archives challenged state criminalisation through three basic pledges – diversion, social transformation, and decolonisation – thereby inaugurating a movement against repressive state criminalisation and announcing a new paradigm of justice. Returning to that movement's beginning, this article shows how its global successes were secured through intimate ties with state justice that diluted its early pledges. Highlighting oft-overlooked insights from legal pluralism, it calls for new articulations between semi-autonomous justice fields to revitalise, and not simply recover, restorative foundations. Forging links with diverse social fields, and engaging a politics of accusation, restorative justice could recraft lenses that bring harm-producing social assemblies into focus.

While numbers of first-time entrants have decreased dramatically in the last decade, young people remaining in the youth justice system in England and Wales today are the most persistent, troubled offenders. Research suggests that the formation of a non-offending or ‘prosocial’ identity is crucial for desistance among persistent offenders. This article examines how engaging in an employment programme at a social enterprise influenced the identity of offenders aged 16–18 years. Young people's self-narratives reveal that although none possessed a strong criminal identity, they developed a more coherent prosocial identity during their employment. This can be attributed to how the employment programme reduced the social exclusion experienced by employees, demonstrating the value of such opportunities for youths.

This article critically examines our relationship with justice in contemporary Western liberal settings, with a particular focus on why our pursuit of justice is intimately entangled with punitive logics. It starts by arguing that we have a predominantly pathological approach to justice, in the sense that it follows a logic that is akin to that displayed in contemporary sensibilities regarding bodily pain. We deploy Drew Leder's concept of ‘dys-appearance’ to discuss how, in Western liberal societies, justice is primarily experienced negatively as a phenomenon; that is, we mainly become conscious of justice through the painful and episodic experience of injustice. We then explore this phenomenological quality of justice which, we argue, is linked to how the pursuit of justice in these settings predominantly takes a hostile, punitive aspect. The article concludes by exploring how this punitive impulse can be resisted, through what we term a ‘lived sense of justice’.

This article revisits Glasgow's Barlinnie Special Unit (BSU) in light of the reissue of Jimmy Boyle's biography of his time in Scottish prisons, ‘A sense of freedom’. Viewing BSU as expressing restorative values, it analyses the different meanings of the sense of freedom which emerge from Boyle's account. It finds a developing dynamic of different meanings of freedom, from negative resistance through trust and solidaristic action to love and creativity. Together these represent a basis for a moral psychology adequate to understanding human change in a prison context. The article considers BSU as a restorative and reparative practice which challenged the prison system's overall punitive and persecutory form – its ‘structure in dominance’. It reflects on Thomas Mathiesen's (1974/2015) Politics of Abolition about the relationship between therapeutic practice and political development to argue that BSU represented an abolitionism relevant to prison today.

In this article, I address a long-standing issue confronting restorative justice: its shaky ethical foundation. Leading restorative justice theorists have pursued an ethics of shame that has marginalised guilt (and remorse). The resulting shame-oriented concepts do not adequately capture the complex moral and psychological phenomena that the ethics of restorative justice requires. In part, this is because theorists have failed to account for the depths, not only of guilt, but of shame as well. These depths, I argue, are to be found in Freudian metapsychology. Guilt and shame have primitive and mature forms. It is only through understanding the difference between these formations that we can see how it is that the mature formations are related in ways that are essential to understanding restorative justice. I conclude that that the mature guilt-and-shame complex developed in the article provides the grounds for an adequate ethical foundation for restorative justice.

Over the past 30 years the restorative justice (RJ) movement has become increasingly accepted within the creases of formal justice systems everywhere, but most especially within the systems of settler-colonial states. From a critical Indigenous perspective one especially powerful driver for the elevation of RJ to its current exalted place in state crime control, has been the purposeful utilisation of Indigenous cultural artefacts by the movement to market their wares. Utilising research on Indigenous peoples’ experiences of state-centred RJ programmes, this article challenges claims made by RJ practitioners and state functionaries regarding the emancipatory potential of RJ practices for Indigenous peoples residing in settler colonial contexts.

Following on from his eminently successful first volume in this series, dealing with the end of capital punishment, the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts, and that of abortion, Paul Rock has completed this equally impressive second volume of the government-appointed, official history of this aspect of the criminal justice system. While the previous volume concentrated on ‘the liberal hour’, this volume moves onto the more mundane, but no less important, issue of institutional reform in the second half of the 20th century in England and Wales. Perhaps because, since the 1650s, England and Wales never really experienced a period that was genuinely revolutionary, there were aspects of its criminal justice system that were considerably dated and had experienced at best a haphazard development until well into the 20th century. This was certainly the case with the long-needed reforms to the assize system of justice. More recent, but no less necessary, had been the developments surrounding a truly independent prosecution service. Rock's book undertakes the mammoth task of writing the history of the origins of these problems and the solutions that created two new institutions.

The book, which is essentially two fairly distinct studies, first tackles the end of the traditional assize and the establishment of the Crown Court. The assize system can trace its origins back to later 13th century (not ‘early medieval times’, p.6)! with the incorporation of most Welsh counties into the English assize system in the 1830s. The criminal side had largely continued without any substantial administrative reform until the mid-20th century – near 800 years after its establishment. Even as England and Wales entered its period of post-industrial decline, the assize at Exeter still necessitated the stopping of traffic, javelin men, trumpeters, and a coach for the sheriff. The list of preparations for the assize at Caernarvon is particularly illuminating of how many rituals were still endured up to 1971 (pp.19–26). Most pressing in the matter was the fact that many of the county towns where hearings took place had long since declined in relative importance and particularly in population over the centuries – six assize towns had populations of less than 5,000, whereas seven non-assize towns had populations in excess of 200,000 people. A particularly strong light was shone on the situation during the Great Train Robbery trial of 1964 when the assize town of Aylesbury (population 34,000) had to facilitate a 51-day trial of eleven defendants with 240 witnesses in attendance, all paid for by Buckinghamshire Council. The location was purely by dint of where the train had been stopped – none of the defendants had any connection with the county.

Thus, a Royal Commission was established to consider the archaic system of the administration of criminal justice in the provinces and recommend a more modern solution. Lord Beeching was chosen as chair; his experienc

A profound change has occurred, during the last half century, in patterns and strategies for handling crime in modern societies. During the same period, the campaign for restorative justice has increasingly influenced penal policy and practice. In stories about correctional change, these developments are often linked by suggestions that the success of the campaign for restorative justice puts in question notions that we are experiencing relentless penal regression. This article argues for a different narrative, in which the rise of restorative justice is located within a broader disenchantment with large-scale, institutionalised ways of handling crime.