Howard Journal of Crime and Justice最新文献

This article examines women's experiences of moving from a closed to an open prison in England. Transition to an open prison is often viewed in a positive, reformist light and although androcentric auto-ethnographical work has demonstrated challenges associated with this pivot when serving a long-term sentence, much less is known about the experiences of women. Using interview discussions, this article draws upon the concept of transcarceral habitus to examine experiences of transfer and adaptation to the open prison within the broader context of the lives of criminalised women. By extending our understanding of the women's open prison as a site of punishment and recognising the connections and pluralities of women's carceral experiences, this article seeks to disrupt unhelpful binaries that legitimise the incarceration of women and the open prison estate.

This article explores both the reasons for, and the potential impact of, the current level of disenfranchisement in Scotland. First, we scrutinise Scottish legal provisions for their compatibility with the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)’s jurisprudence, which require disenfranchisement's aims to be clarified and delimited. Second, we examine where disenfranchisement sits within the wider context of Scottish penal values, and what principles underlie its imposition. Finally, we turn to a discussion of whether and how dis/enfranchisement aligns with the Scottish Government's commitments to the rehabilitation and reintegration of people who have been in prison, and to related empirical evidence about desistance from crime. The limited enfranchisement of prisoners established by the Scottish Government in 2020 avoided these core questions and this article aims to help address this neglect and to open up dialogue on these issues.

The Nordics have employed discourses of gender equality and women's rights and a welfare-oriented approach to punishment as integral parts of inclusive welfare states and their ‘goodness’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with non-citizen women at Vestre Prison in Denmark, this article suggests that the will to punish and banish prevails over the state's commitment to women's rights and protection. Rather than being an inherent feature of incarceration, the pain experienced by non-citizen women in prison is a ‘political statement’ (Bosworth, 2023). Employing precarisation, incarceration and deportation to govern unwanted non-citizens and (re)produce the borders of membership, the Danish state also reproduces the conditions for gendered harm. Bordered penality, this article concludes, is gendered.

In 2021, China amended its law on the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR), lowering the MACR of two specified offences to twelve years. As a result, China now has three different levels of MACR for different offences. Based on the position in China, this article argues that while lowering the MACR against the international trend can be justified as a necessary measure to tackle serious crimes committed by children, creating different levels of MACR based on the types of crime is wrong in principle. This article further considers the classic dilemma in setting an absolute MACR, which results in either freeing the guilty or convicting the innocent. It is argued that setting a relatively low MACR accompanied by robust safeguards of doli incapax, child immaturity defence, diversion and wider sentencing options would allow a better assessment of children's culpability and better serve the interests of justice. It is also suggested that lowering the MACR will not unjustifiably undermine children's rights if the juvenile justice system could ensure only those truly culpable could be convicted and that the option of prosecution is reserved as a last resort.

This study examined the influence of job demands (role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload and dangerousness) and job resources (job variety, supervisor structure and training views) on employee perceptions of procedural justice, general perceptions of distributive justice, and specific perceptions of distributive justice. Using a sample of 160 employees at a high-security prison, the regression analyses found that only demands of role conflict was inversely correlated with procedural justice and both distributive justice measures. Role ambiguity was inversely related to procedural but was not related to either dimension of distributive justice. Furthermore, dangerousness was inversely associated with distributive justice (both general and specific), but it was not correlated with procedural justice. Among the job resources, job variety was positively associated with procedural and both distributive justice measures. Supervisor structure was predictive of procedural but not distributive justice. Role overload, and training views had non-significant relationships with all the justice measures.

Highly criticised and widely discussed, there is a general consensus that the defence is in dire need of reform: from its stigmatic title to the narrow interpretations of both limbs of the Rules, it is a rarely used and outdated defence. Despite the vast amount of commentary on this topic, The insanity defence: International and comparative perspectives, part of the Oxford Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice series, provides a fresh outlook on this defence, collating internationally renowned experts and a diverse range of jurisdictions into one edited collection.

The book aims to explore the insanity defence in other jurisdictions and to ‘point the way to a balanced assessment of how the insanity defence might be altered and improved’ (p.369). Both of these aims are, in my view, achieved. The breadth of jurisdictions covered within this collection provides the reader with a variety of alternative interpretations or possible amendments to the M'Naghten Rules, as well as cautioning against directions in which the defence ought not to go.

The insanity defence begins with a critique of the M'Naghten Rules in England and Wales and an exploration of reform proposals, subsequently moving on to address other common law jurisdictions, including: Scotland, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. Beyond this, four civil law jurisdictions are covered: France, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, before consideration is made of the insanity defence in China and under international criminal law.

Of the civil law jurisdictions, Meynen, in Chapter 12, suggests that the open criterion set out in the Dutch Criminal Code creates the potential for ‘disparity’ (p.285), of which we should take heed. The tragic mass killing by Anders Breivik in Norway triggered a move away in that country from what was arguably a successful medicalised model of the insanity defence, demonstrating the dangers of ‘knee-jerk’ legislation in the wake of tragedy. It is hoped that Gröning's suggestion that the move is less significant than initially suspected proves to be correct (p.314).

Key themes emerging from this collection concern the ubiquity of the M'Naghten Rules, versions of which are still used, albeit more flexibly, in many jurisdictions. Ireland, for example, has an additional volitional element. The Canadian Supreme Court has a ‘pragmatic and somewhat chameleon interpretation of the Rules (p.122), while Australia seems to offer ‘an incoherent patchwork of inconsistent provisions’ (p.196), many of which also reflect the Rules. Even Article 31(1)(a) of the Rome Statute ‘evokes’ the Rules (p.344), despite the International Criminal Court having no accepted procedure for detention in the highly unlikely event of a successful plea.

Other themes in this book include the willingness of most jurisdictions to link a mental disorder to the defendant's conduct, as well as similarities in

Most countries fail specifically to task the judiciary with upholding the autonomy of the child and protecting children's rights and interests when sentencing a mother to a custodial penalty. Author and judge Alice Macharia argues that the focus of criminal courts should be widened to include the needs and the welfare of a woman's dependent children as a mandatory legal requirement.

In this reworking of her doctoral thesis, Judge Macharia debates that sentencing without consideration for the impact on children punishes them for their mother's crimes, with consequences for the children's future well-being. Macharia discusses the conflicting obligations for judges both to sanction the offending and to uphold the rights owed to children to protect their best interest, describing these as two competing duties of care: the duty to protect the public from crime; and the duty to protect children's rights. However, she argues that imprisoning children with their mothers is a form of discrimination against the child – an argument based on Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and consistent with the landmark South African Constitutional Court case, S v. M ([2007] ZACC 18) in which Justice Albie Sachs stated that children ‘… cannot be treated as a mere extension of his or her parents, umbilically destined to sink or swim with them’ (para. 18).

The book describes that the practice in most jurisdictions globally is for children to remain invisible and unheard, irrespective of a country's level of development, and therefore that the goodwill of sentencers to protect the rights of the child is not enough, with the author arguing: 'at best, criminal justice systems are focused on the child's immediate basic needs and do not consider the long-term impact of the rights violation on the adult individual the child will grow into’ (p.64). Macharia argues that consideration of the impact on children when a mother is sentenced is not a new concept in Kenya, as the state already commutes the death penalty to life imprisonment if a woman is pregnant. The book argues powerfully for the need to take this consideration further.

Throughout, Macharia's book argues that the penal environment is designed to punish, meanwhile a child has no committal warrant and has not been convicted of anything. Without such a warrant: 'he or she is administratively invisible’ (p.74). This results in a lack of co-ordination and communication between agencies and even institutional neglect such as there being no allocation of additional food to support children living in prison with their mothers.

The book states that: ‘… the criminal process cannot assume that it has moral authority to ignore the devastating impact its decisions have on innocent children’ (p.28). As children are not culpable for their mother's offence, the author argues that welfare and best interest principles should carry greater weight in shaping the duty

In early 2021, half of the youth detention centres in Ontario, Canada, were abruptly closed. We ask how this development can be understood in relation to broader explanations of youth detention closures in Canada, which cite the success of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) and the best interests of youth, and the broader international context. Using a process tracing methodology to analyse existing data, we demonstrate that these closures had less to do with the interests of youth, and were primarily a cost-effective calculation. We demonstrate this by pointing to three key developments: (i) the transference of institutionalised carceral logics onto community service providers; (ii) an undermining of the principle of ‘relationship custody’; and (iii) a focus on high-capacity and high-security detention centres, over smaller, locally situated open detention centres.

The role of identity construction has been a central theme in empirical analyses of desistance from crime. Despite the novelty of these studies, their findings are predominantly situated in the post-imprisonment context. There has been limited attention on the drivers of identity change for prisoners who are incarcerated. Based on 16 interviews conducted in an open prison for men, this article demonstrates how experiences of self-reflection shape identity reconstruction for prisoners nearing release and serve as important modes of adaptation to prison life. The article ends with a discussion on the key implications of the study's findings.

Accused individuals employ various techniques in response to the challenges posed by living with bail conditions. By asking ‘what advice would you give to an accused individual who must appear in bail court and who will be assigned conditional bail’, this study assesses how individuals navigate release on bail in the community. A thematic analysis of interviews with 108 accused yielded three master themes: ‘abiding by the system’; a ‘broken system’; and ‘working the system’. The findings add to current research by identifying points of similarity, but also difference, in how common discourses used by bail court actors and bail scholars – including responsibilisation, self-governance, and accountability – are responded to by accused. The results reveal how individuals accused of a crime find ways to assume a more advantageous position within a system largely perceived as working against them.