Howard Journal of Crime and Justice最新文献

The focus of this article is the experiences that defendants – both represented and unrepresented – have when appearing via video link(s) from prison(s) to court(s), in England and Wales. This exploration is based on second-hand accounts. In this study, 20 interviews were conducted with a range of court actors, and 403 court hearings at two magistrates' courts were observed. The findings demonstrate that while video hearings were initially introduced to promote managerialism values (i.e., increase efficiency and reduce costs), due process rights have in some instances been undermined. It will be argued that although appearing via video has advantages for defendants and can enhance their ability to effectively participate in the process, challenges also arise in relation to this. This is due to managerialism values generally being prioritised over participation concerns.

Doran Larson's new book constitutes a compelling entreaty voiced by prison residents to redress the deplorable conditions and practices of the carceral system in the United States. Larson's aim is ‘to make prison witness not only accessible but unavoidable by journalists who shape much of public debate, scholars and teachers, whose work influence thinking and practice, legal professionals, legislators, and a public that both consumes hours of skewed popular media on legal system practices and also votes’ (p.218). Writing on the inside, incarcerated people ‘mark the true first step on the path toward an authentically just criminal justice system: the recognition that the only monster contained by walls and razor wire is the prison itself’ (p.216).

His book consists of an introduction that, building on the assertion that people have the right to know how their system of justice is actually working, establishes why prison witness matters as an authentic source to counter the popular myths espoused in TV dramas and other entertainment narratives. Such first-person accounts follow the tradition of stories in which people in slavery gave the lie to southern fables of happy human chattel protected by paternal white owners. Indeed, given the disproportionate number of Blacks in detention (though the majority is still white), it is not surprising that the insidious effects of racism, a salient subtext throughout the book, punctuate the narratives of some writers.

The opening chapter describes how the espoused aims of prison since the founding of the United States have diverged from the narratives told by those experiencing prison on the inside. This account places contemporary prison writers in the context of a long and rich literary tradition. The next four chapters document how prison fails in each of its four cardinal aims, as supported by ample excerpts from contemporary writing in the American Prison Writing Archive, which Larson founded and now co-directs with political scientist, Vesla Weaver, at Johns Hopkins University (https://prisonwitness.org/). In Chapter 2, incarceration fails to dispense meaningful retribution as attested through a historical review of prison literature, including contemporary writers. In Chapter 3, we read of incarcerated people trying to achieve rehabilitation in ways often obstructed by prison practices and only rarely through prison-sanctioned programming. In Chapter 4, regarding failures of containment and incapacitation, inside writers document how the prison experience harms their ability to contribute to, and rejoin, society on the outside, and also harms their children, families and communities. In Chapter 5, deterrence is undermined by stigmatic policies and attitudes that impede even those who are no longer bent on crime from easily assimilating into legitimate work following release. Talk about an institution not only destined to fail but to ensure further social dysfun

I think the theoretical framework developed in this monograph to comprehend the nature of electronically monitoring (EM) offenders as a penal measure is groundbreaking and important, if not necessarily definitive. I do not, however, find the application of the framework to the actual use of EM-curfews in the specific jurisdiction of Scotland, where the author undertook his original PhD research, entirely convincing. This does not detract from the book, because the cluster of concepts which guide Portable prisons can be appraised separately from their application to Scotland.

Except for a limitation which was annoyingly forced on him by the Scottish Government – he was not allowed to interview people serving court-ordered time in the community on EM, only those who had been breached and returned to prison (for whom EM had notionally ‘failed’), Gacek's book is a model of how to study EM in a single jurisdiction. The polemical first chapter seeks first to ‘unsettle’ (p.4) readers about the extent to which ‘carceral’ (or as some might call them, ‘surveillant’) practices outside prison increasingly pervade everyday lives in ‘Western, liberal democracies’. It also rejects the legitimacy of using (any or all?) remote sensing-systems and databases to track and monitor peoples’ mobility. This flags up concerns that the concluding chapter revisits, about developing resistance to present and future carceral campaigns.

The second chapter elaborates Gacek's key explanatory/descriptive concept of ‘carceral territory’. It shows how spaces that might otherwise be called places, neighbourhoods and communities are structured by remote monitoring technologies and an associated set of legally and judicially-imposed regulations into a mode of governing the spatial and temporal schedules of designated offenders. ‘Carceral territory’ certainly illuminates the granular way in which satellite tracking operates to monitor the trails, traces and locations of mobile offenders 24/7, and – I agree – is not entirely without application to the simpler home detention models which curfew people in their own homes for twelve hours per day, mostly overnight. Since EM-curfews’ introduction in the late 1990s, Scotland – unlike many other jurisdictions – has done no more than toy with introducing more complex tracking systems. It has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in Europe, but its use of EM remains among the least territorially restrictive available, and unless one is in the business of imposing a priori definitions, I would hesitate to call its practice here ‘carceral’.

Portable prisons then provides two empirical chapters on the institutions and actors that enable and sustain the production of carceral territory on a 24/7 basis, one focused on the privatised monitoring centre run by G4S that oversees EM across the whole country, the other on the field monitoring officers who drive around Scotland each day installing sensors in of

This study, the first to examine parole decisions for perpetrators of domestic violence in England and Wales, examines how parole boards reach decisions through a thematic analysis of interviews with 20 Parole Board members, alongside logistic regressions of all 137 parole decisions about perpetrators in an 18-month period. In this sample, recommendations of professionals, especially psychologists, were by far the strongest predictor of a release decision. The nature of offending was also significant in predicting release. Size and composition of the panel may also affect decisions. More panel members, and longitudinal feedback, may encourage more reflective, considered decision making.

This article considers the intersecting geographical, social, medical and political frameworks necessary to construct an understanding of mental health in Guyanese prisons, historically and in the present day. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to integrate archives, modern records and interviews, it looks first at colonial and independent state management of mental health impacts with respect to sentencing, incarceration and rehabilitation. It moves on to reflect on recent efforts to provide co-ordinated policies and practices at national level to tackle more effectively moderate to severe mental health conditions. Here it shows that, as in the colonial period, prisoners and prison officials are typically neglected. Overall, our appreciation of the importance of what we term the coloniality of incarceration and public health enables us to deepen an understanding of the development and ongoing significance of approaches to mental ill health in the modern state, following Guyana's independence from colonial rule in 1966.

In recent years, parole decision makers have grappled with an intensifying challenge in addressing public concerns. While discussions on the rise of ‘parole populism’ have emerged, especially in Canada, the United States, Australia and England and Wales, little is known about the way public concerns influence parole release in Japan. This article engages in legal-systematic analysis of the intricate relationship between public concerns and Japanese parole decision making in general and release from life imprisonment in particular. The article argues that, while Japanese selective parole decision making considering public concerns in secrecy may have partially contributed to political rhetoric encouraging parole, it also poses unique challenges distinct from those in Anglophone jurisdictions. It reveals the value of fostering a transparent and accountable parole decision-making system to promote a more balanced and fairer approach to parole in the Japanese context.

The existence of this book is itself something of a triumph. The overlapping fields of ‘lived ‘participation’, ‘co-production’ and ‘lived experience’ have been around long enough for its premise – the question of what is a ‘good prison officer’ – not to be a novel idea, and yet – as claimed in the foreword – it is the first time that such a collection has been written and edited by a team of people with experience of imprisonment. The book comprises nine chapters, from seven contributors, who each consider the question of what makes a good prison officer, based to a large extent on their own personal experiences over time. It thus positions knowledge derived from personal interactions at the front and centre of its epistemology.

There is lots to like about the book. The title might seem oxymoronic to people who have experienced the tension and mutually hostile relationship dynamics that exist between officers and prisoners in institutions designed to contain and punish. It contains an implicit nod to Liebling's appreciative inquiry (Liebling, Price & Elliot, 1999). In seeking out ‘the good’, one is hopeful, and yet inevitably also encounters examples of ‘the bad’ to help illustrate counter-examples.

The humanity of the book shines through, and the work quickly dismisses simplistic narratives about people in prison. Too often, the worlds of academia, criminal justice practice, and people living through the consequences of system decisions are far apart. The logics that underpin them tend to have us working separately and isolated, encouraging misunderstandings and professional jealousies. Each author reminds us that prison is a hostile environment fostering hypervigilance and ‘tense courtesy’ where trust is a rare commodity and any whiff of kindness needs analysing with curiosity and suspicion. Any new arrival has the potential to threaten periods of hard-won equilibrium. Kierra Myles's chapter (Chapter 5, p.68) emphasises the considerable value of developing a skill for quickly reading a room for threats.

There is a recurring theme of people discovering for themselves – often with the support of others – what has happened to them and how that experience fits, and how they personally fit, into a ‘bigger picture’. Each author recounts a growing awareness of the forces involved in their detention, some of which they have a degree of ‘control’ over, but an accompanying realisation that accrued effects of early life experiences impede their ability to exercise this control meaningfully. I enjoyed the growing sense of epistemic justice as the authors develop it. Their narratives make it clear that the knowledge the authors accrued over time emerges from an amalgam of human interaction, sensory experience and the emotions that such experiences evoke, entwined with, and underpinned by, early life trauma and addictive behaviours that develop partly as a consequence of those experiences. Such analysis has not tradition

While the practices of probation and parole in Ireland have a significant history, dating back over a century, there is a considerable lack of comprehensive literature examining the place they have taken in the Irish criminal justice system, their legal framework and their inherent practices. What little literature exists is mostly academic in nature, which makes Vivian Guerin and Shane McCarthy's book unique in its approach. Probation and parole in Ireland: Law and practice contributes a valuable and comprehensive insight into both of these important aspects of the criminal justice system, focusing primarily on the legal and practical aspects of each.

In the Introduction, the authors note the lack of a substantive text on probation and parole and argue that those ‘involved in providing, delivering and managing probation and parole services need and deserve the tools to do their jobs to the best of their ability … this book is aimed at providing a collection of those vital tools for probation and parole professionals, as well as for those who study in these and related fields’ (p.1). This is an ambitious undertaking. With such a diverse agenda it would be easy to fall short of the mark, yet the authors comprehensively achieve this goal. The book draws on the experience of both authors as practitioners in the penal system to achieve this aim and to provide a clear analysis of relevant legislation, case law, international standards and research underpinning the practices of parole and probation in Ireland. The authors cover a significant amount of material throughout the book, yet manage to present it in a clear, logical and accessible manner. The organisation of the book chapters allows the reader to either follow the path of the book in a coherent way or to use particular chapters as reference points for smaller nuggets of particular information.

It would be impossible within the scope of this short review to do justice to the wide range of material covered and the perspectives offered by Shane McCarthy and Vivian Geiran. Therefore, what follows is an effort to give a brief summary of the book's structure, core insights and conclusions.

The book opens with a comprehensive history of the development of the law, policy and practices that underpin the modern system, focusing primarily on the Irish perspective but with a necessary exploration of comparative developments in the UK and the US. It outlines the development of modern punishment and sentencing approaches from standardised and retributive ones to a more individualised and rehabilitative ethos that underpinned the growth of ‘humanitarian and reforming mechanisms’ (p.30) into a quasi-singular system of probation and parole. The chapter continues to explore the early frameworks for the current Parole Board and the Probation Service in Ireland and charts their development, concluding with an examination of modern discourse in relation to both. This provides the conte

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.