Howard Journal of Crime and Justice最新文献

Literature regarding trans and gender diverse (TGD) prisoners’ experiences of prison custody is limited. Reviewing international literature enables a better understanding of these experiences and how effectively TGD policies are implemented. This systematic review employed PRISMA and ENTREQ guidelines to enhance transparency in reporting the synthesis of qualitative and mixed-methods research. Seventeen papers were included and through meta-ethnographic synthesis three overarching themes emerged: structural, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Recommendations include reducing reliance on survival strategies by TGD prisoners through implementation of policies which meet TGD prisoners’ needs and to enabling better informed decision making regarding housing. Further research into lived experiences would allow for a better understanding of what currently works, how services could be improved, and identify potential training needs.

To what extent are accused's backgrounds within the criminal justice system considered during the sentencing process, and if they are, how do judges make sense of them? To better understand this aspect of the sentencing process, this article examines data from interviews with, and observations of, 16 Sheriffs in 14 different Scottish Sheriff Courts. The accused persons’ backgrounds were indeed considered during the sentencing process. However, how Sheriffs constructed their role as sentencers seemed to directly affect how they acknowledged and took them into account.

In this article we sketch a vision that might guide academic and third sector collaboration. We do so by drawing on a project that involved collaboration with a range of stakeholders, in order to stimulate ongoing discussion about how academics and the third sector might work together to seek positive change. Our findings show that there are keenly felt challenges, but also a sense of resilient optimism. A key finding among our stakeholders was a sense that there is an absence of an overarching shared vision, which was experienced by many of our respondents as consequential. Therefore, in the spirit of constructive provocation we set out such a vision, which was collaboratively developed with our respondents: opening a dialogue, rather than providing a conclusive position.

Using an experimental vignette design, the study investigates the effects of criminal records on the hiring decisions of a convenience sample of 221 human resource (HR) managers in Ghana. The HR managers were randomly assigned to read one of four vignettes depicting job seekers of different genders and criminal records: male with and without criminal record, female with and without criminal record. The evidence shows that a criminal record reduces employment opportunities for female offenders but not for their male counterparts. Additionally, HR managers are willing to offer interviews to job applicants, irrespective of their criminal records, if they expect other managers to hire ex-convicts. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Criminologists could be forgiven for failing to notice a book entitled Administrative law in action. The subtitle, Immigration administration, begins to indicate its relevance. This book engages in a detailed examination of the United Kingdom's immigration department (the Home Office). In so doing, it speaks to issues of immigration and border control that have been explored with increasing depth and precision, and, indeed, moral urgency, by those working within the criminological field (see, e.g., Aliverti, 2021; Bhatia & Canning, 2021; Pickering, Bosworth & Franko, 2017).

As a public law scholar based in England, Thomas's primary goal is to approach questions of administrative law in a manner that ‘gets under the surface’ (p.31): one which recognises the importance of abstract questions relating to judicial review, but which engages with the ‘basic nuts and bolts of how administrative systems operate in practice and develop over time’ (p.3). In this vein, he examines matters including how the Home Office is organised in relation to immigration, operative administrative rules and guidance, caseworking, redress and legal challenges, immigration enforcement and the role of judicial review. He devotes particular attention to the Hostile Environment Policy and Windrush.

Thomas demonstrates that ‘the organisational competence of the immigration department is significantly constrained in various ways’ (p.260). Its policymaking has been flawed, its rules unnecessarily complex, the quality of casework highly variable. Thomas argues therefore that ‘people who interact with the department experience an enormous amount of bureaucratic oppression that is often beyond the scope of any effective form of judicial or other means of redress’ (p.261).

That said, Thomas urges the reader not to view the situation, despite the problems being ‘undoubtedly serious and deep-seated’ (p.261), as being a complete catastrophe. He reminds us that much of the work is done tolerably well: most immigration applications are granted, most decisions are made within customer services standards, and most individuals (who take the time to respond) indicate in official surveys that they were satisfied with relevant processes (p.260). Thomas also points out that many of the underlying problems are common complaints that have been made against government for many years now, across a wide range of policy areas: lack of resources, clashes of internal organisational cultures, lack of sufficient support and training for staff, and poor quality control of work ‘on the ground’ (pp.262–263).

For Thomas, this is primarily to be understood as a question of good governance. He cites approvingly the Windrush review's position that ‘ministers and senior officials must provide staff with a clear understanding of what effective public administration looks like by establishing an organisational culture and profess

To be found guilty of an offence is to be marked not just as a wrongdoer, but an ‘offender’. To be found guilty of a sexual offence is to be doubly marked – to become the worst of the worst: a ‘sex offender’. In this short book, Ievins reports an ethnography of life in HMP Stafford – an English Category C prison devoted exclusively to incarcerating sex offenders.

The stains of imprisonment is deeply concerned with questions of truth, identity and communication. What is the nature of truth in the aftermath of (allegations of and/or convictions for) serious violence, both in the context of penal institutions and processes and of academic research into them? How do those ‘stained’ with the label of ‘sex offender’ come to terms with this identity, especially within a prison environment characterised as one specifically for sex offenders? How do the realities of lived experiences in a complex and (historically, institutionally and socially) contingent prison setting impact upon the meanings (intentional or otherwise) communicated by criminal sentences to penal subjects? Not least, how do researchers engage authentically with participants in such circumstances, letting them tell their stories and looking for the human being behind the crime, without denying or obscuring the experiences of survivors of sexual violence?

Ievins lays out this complex, thought-provoking, and empathetic enquiry in eight chapters. Chapter 1 places the book in a wider context of feminist and other discourses about the validity of state punishment, in general and in the context of sexual offending. Chapter 2 discusses the idea that punishment serves the purpose of moral communication and identifies a central tension in academic criminology, to which her book is addressed. On the one hand, penal theorists speak abstractly about what punishment should do without thinking about how institutions actually work in practice. On the other, prison sociologists typically insulate themselves from wider theoretical and normative contexts. Both sets of scholars, Ievins forcefully argues, therefore separate themselves from a full understanding of prisons and wider criminal justice and need to interface with each other's work to produce meaningful and impactful discussions of penal phenomena. Chapter 2 also sets up the empirical study, with a particular focus on HMP Stafford as the research site, and provides a brief methodological note, including a valuable reflection on the challenges of doing research in a sex offenders’ prison as a young female criminologist.

Chapters 3 through 7 discuss different aspects of the empirical data generated by Ievins's ethnography. Chapter 3 considers three structural factors impacting on participants’ understanding of their punishment, which affected the messages they perceived as being communicated by their punishment. These were: the legal framework by which offenders were officially designated ‘sex offenders’; the

Prisoner incompatibility is a challenge for correctional officers (COs), as incompatible people in prison are more likely to engage in negative interactions, participate in altercations, cause harm to each other and create tension on a unit. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 28 COs employed in Atlantic Canada, we explore how incompatibility among incarcerated people shapes how incarcerated people are managed and perceived by COs. Engaging the prison design literature, we further examine the kinds of spatial designs and protocols that contribute to, or mitigate, incompatibility. We find that COs describe a complex prison hierarchy that, while being laced with challenges beyond the control of COs, could nevertheless be effectively mitigated through architectural transformation or policy reforms. We highlight the need to consider how prison culture informs and is interpolated through spatial configurations of correctional institutions and how these social and spatial dynamics shape interactions between prisoners.

Despite dropping crime rates and prison muster, pretrial population rates in New Zealand are growing faster than in other OECD nations, risking negative impacts on defendants and communities. Fourteen defendants and 18 stakeholders were interviewed about a bail support service's strengths and weaknesses. Officer-training quality, communication between stakeholders and access to practical and cultural resources were crucial to success. Defendants reported that professional staff support and having access to services were the most helpful aspects. Changes were positive overall, but the programme's implementation, resources (especially lack of housing suitable for bail), and structure (within changing pretrial legislation) were of concern.

This article analyses mass incarceration in Brazil and how the ongoing ‘war on drugs’ results in punitive dynamics involving the police and the judiciary, leading to the imprisonment of residents of poor neighbourhoods. I argue that the war on drugs intensifies the criminalisation of stigmatised and impoverished territories, extending beyond individual cases. In section 2, drawing on research from the United States and Brazil, I explore the key aspects of the spatial concentration of incarceration in both countries. In section 3, I focus on the specific dynamics of the war on drugs in Brazil, encompassing the shifts in drug policy, legislation, police tactics and the judiciary's role in the prisonisation of specific social places. This article intends to bridge a theoretical gap in the study of spatial concentration of incarceration in Brazil, underscoring the relevance of understanding the complex relationship between prisons and marginalised communities within Brazilian cities.

This article presents the findings from the United Kingdom's (UK's) first in-depth exploration of the impacts of Covid-19 on children at each stage of the youth justice system. Based on interviews with 140 youth justice professionals, participatory research with 40 children in custody and in the community, and a survey of all 157 youth offending teams in England and Wales, the research demonstrates that the pandemic increased the vulnerabilities of justice-involved children; children who are routinely exposed to health anxieties, instability and inequalities, adverse experiences in the home, systemic racism and school exclusion. Professionals and children reported an increase in mental health illnesses such as anxiety and depression due to range of intersecting factors such as isolation, lack of socialising, lack of routine, lack of physical activity and poor sleep patterns. Post-pandemic, there is an urgent need for a systemic commitment to addressing the mental health vulnerabilities of justice-involved children.