Howard Journal of Crime and Justice最新文献

An estimated 84,000 incarcerated individuals face solitary confinement in the United States criminal justice system. Solitary confinement is seen as a cruel punishment, with lasting effects, for incarcerated individuals. Human rights organisations, medical associations, policymakers, and incarcerated people have argued for the discontinuation of solitary confinement. After being in solitary confinement for an extended period, incarcerated people can suffer worsening and future mental health issues, physical health concerns and issues with relationships during and after serving their time in prison. This article reviews the available research and the purpose of the article is to show the detrimental effects solitary confinement has on incarcerated individuals. Clinical and policy implications for prisons that use solitary confinement are discussed to dissuade usage.

In this article we examine the curious stability of outdoor penal labour in California in the 20th century against a shifting social and penal field. Analysing state archival data on prison highway and forestry camps between 1915 and 2000, we frame the persistence of these practices as evidence of a penal labour palimpsest. We demonstrate how the agency and interpretive innovation of penal administrators – as the architects and interpreters of this palimpsest – served as a stabilising mechanism akin to, but distinct from, existing theories of path dependence. Zooming out from the intricacies of the historical record, we position this case as revealing some of the limits of strict theories of path dependence and, instead, as offering a more dynamic understanding of the complex, intersecting and malleable ways in which history matters.

Despite shared history and a common ambition to comply with European standards, post-Soviet countries differ in the way in which they reform prisons. By investigating two most-similar cases of policy transfer from Norway – the establishment of the Olaine Drug Centre in Latvia and the Pravieniškės Drug Unit in Lithuania – this article explains why outcomes diverge and how Western-European carceral individualism clashes with path-dependent carceral collectivism. Where leadership is unstable, with limited powers, the informal legacies are strong, and policy-transfer strategy is fragmented, as in Lithuania, the outcome is likely to be non-transformative. Where, on the contrary, leadership is stable, enjoying larger discretionary powers and the intervention strategy is holistic, as in Latvia, the import of foreign institutional models is likely to be successful.

Critical junctures can propel a reorientation of state, civil society, and market. I examine this process during an influential historical moment in the early 1970s, when actors ranging from incarcerated organisers to political elites worked to redefine the role of community organisations in corrections. These efforts resulted in a policy privatising the delivery of community-based correctional services in the case I study in Wisconsin, USA. Using archival records, I demonstrate how this policy was situated in leaders’ anxieties about the control of Black men. I trace historically emergent relationships among racialised social control, privatisation and NGOs, which reverberate in the non-profit sector today. The research invites further examination of moments of contingency in criminal justice policy after exceptional violence by the state.

This article builds a developmental model of probation evolution based on the dynamics generated by its feedback effects, illustrating its claims through a case study of Chile's recent probation politics. The article posits that probation emerges out of the negative infrastructural and political feedback effects of the prison. As probation generalises, it creates its own growing negative political feedback. In time, the field can enter a state that we label the politics of probation, providing for substantial political conflict and fluctuance. The article shows how different actors mediate in the conflict around the politics of probation.

The author of this book, Elaine A.O. Freer, makes evident that the work does not attempt to cover all sentencing law, nor is it a systematic analysis of sentencing comments. Rather, the aim is to examine what can be understood as the five statutory sentencing aims and objectives that judges must consider in England and Wales: punishment; deterrence; rehabilitation; protection; and reparation (Sentencing Act 2020, s. 57(2)). Moreover, rather than viewing these aims from an abstract perspective, the author seeks to shed light on their implementation in practice – examining the process and purpose of sentencing, beyond the confines of its legalistic aspects. To do this, the author draws on cases in which the author, a practising barrister, was involved, and comments made by judges during sentencing. Chapters are titled and ordered by sentencing aim, allowing the reader to engage in the chapters on a stand-alone basis or as a whole. This book focuses only on the sentencing of adults.

The introductory chapter does, as the author notes, the ‘heavy lifting’ (p.19) in laying the foundations for this text. The author provides concise but comprehensive information on sentencing disposals in England and Wales, referencing legislation extensively throughout. This greatly enhances the accessibility of the book to a wide audience, appealing to those at all stages of academia, researchers and legal practitioners. Those with a limited background in law will find this chapter to be particularly insightful and relevant when engaging with the rest of the book.

The first chapter considers sentencing as a means of punishment. The author suggests that ‘the criminal justice system has adopted an overly simplistic obsession with punishment, driven by politicians’ misunderstanding of what the public actually want to happen to those who break the social contract by offending’ (p.21). To that end, they question whether imprisonment is the punishment or for punishment, discussing Sykes's (1958) pains of imprisonment. Reflecting on whether punishment can be administered via other sentence types, the author posits that legislature has overlooked the individual experience of punishment – that is, that each person experiences punishment differently, based on their own circumstances. For some, the deprivation of liberty through imprisonment may be less impactful than a community order sentence. Within this scope, the author notes the impact of gender, and the additional pains of imprisonment that can be observed in the 21st century. The author also reflects on public misunderstandings of sentences, fuelled in part by erroneous media reporting. The author concludes that a modern approach to punishment should consider the factors that lead to offending, and moreover, that increased public awareness of sentencing and the reasons why certain sentences are imposed, would be beneficial.

The second chapter reflects on sentencing to reduce

There is a growing tendency to perceive the death penalty as always ‘on the move’, often in a teleological trajectory inevitably leading to universal abolition. This article aims to question this tendency, noting that in many cases death penalty policies remain stable, especially in cases of de facto abolition. Such cases are overlooked in the literature, treated as brief interludes towards full abolition, though in fact they can be enduring and serve important symbolic functions. Informed by the historical-institutional approach, which rejects teleology in favour of path dependence and contingency, the article focuses on the Israeli case, where since 1967 the death penalty remained a lawful option in military courts with jurisdiction over Palestinians, but never applied. I argue that such remarkable stability is not due to inertia, but an unanticipated result of contingent events and processes leading over time to entrenchment of a ‘limbo’ arrangement, which constitute intentional, functional, policy.

This article seeks to explain the persistence of high incarceration rates in England and Wales. Building upon recent theoretical work on path dependence, we identify prison population forecasting as a poorly understood positive feedback mechanism that helps to determine the overall scale, scope and reach of the prison estate by connecting capital expenditure decisions with ‘business as usual’ planning cycles that assume considerable policy continuity with the past. We illustrate this point with reference to recent controversies over women's imprisonment where the everyday, routinised working practices of the penal system have played an important role in sustaining prison expansionism long after the initial conditions that fuelled the mid-1990s prison boom have faded. Disrupting these self-fulfilling logics will not be easy and we conclude this article with a call for a more deliberative democratic politics that confronts penal momentum and invites greater consideration of the many possible futures of penal policy.

In the past decade or so a significant body of work on ‘Hibernian exceptionalism’ to broader punitive trends has emerged. The dominant argument and characterisation of Irish penality within this broad schema is that it is exceptional for having been largely stagnant. This article takes issue with the stagnation or ‘stickiness’ that is often supposed to characterise the Irish penal system arguing that stagnation as a form of ‘path dependency’ fails to adequately account for key moments of penal change and downplays the temporal dynamics that are often apparent in policy development. Using two key ‘policy windows’ as case studies – the 1996 ‘moral panic’ over crime and the post-2011 turn to a more progressive penal politics – it argues that greater consideration should be given to the ‘translation’ and ‘layering’ of policy decisions and the growing complexity of policy space that may result.