Howard Journal of Crime and Justice最新文献

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.

The criminal law's person is a multifaceted exploration of how substantive criminal law takes humans – or makes them out – to be. As explained in the editors’ efficient and perspicacious introduction essay, the criminal law's person might be set by how people actually are, what they ought to be, or some purpose-driven fictional construct (p.8). The book's final essay, ‘Implicit bias, self-defence and the reasonable person’, by Jules Holroyd and Federico Picinali, unpacks ‘reasonable person’ belief-based exculpatory tests in defensive force law in England and Wales and the United States and evaluates them for their facilitation of morally problematic cognitive bias, which, the authors conclude, ‘cannot be avoided in the presence of racist social structures’ (p.167). The authors push past the ‘reasonable person’ as the empirically ordinary person (p.179) to the possessor of reasonably-based and non-culpably held beliefs. But there remains, I think, further scope for consideration of the ‘reasonable person’ as an optional heuristic for getting at the actual standard of reasonableness. At least one of the jurisdictions under consideration does not even use the phrase ‘reasonable person’ in statute, but uses ‘reasonable’.¹ The standard of ‘reasonable’ itself is never wrong, only its application can be wrong, and the authors’ points about implicit biases could be redeployed in regard to its application.

Holroyd and Picinali invoke a conduct rules and decision rules framing distinction for their evaluation. This dual evaluation is perhaps one reflection of what Claes Lernestedt (in his contribution, ‘Standard-setting versus tracking “profound” blameworthiness: what should be the role of the rules for ascription of responsibility’) identifies as criminal law's tension between forward-looking ambitions and its limiting constraints (p.56). Lernestedt calls for criminal law to seek ‘“profound” blameworthiness in the concrete person’ (p.73). This concrete person is the actual person, not the construct, and to appreciate them in criminal law we need more input from disciplines such as psychiatry and psychology (p.73). Broadly speaking, similar concern arises in the essays by Michael Thorburn (‘In search of the criminal law's person’), Alan Norrie (‘Victims who victimise: guilt in political theory and moral psychology’) and Craig Reeves (‘Responsibility beyond blame: unfree agency and the moral psychology of criminal law's persons’). These essays each develop critical reaction to the criminal law orthodoxy that assumes the would-be (non-insane) criminal defendant as a rational autonomous agent. They question the very possibility of the criminal law's authority. Thorburn is quite demanding about the level of political understanding needed on the part of the defendant for legitimate criminal liability imposition. It is difficult to go along with Norrie's styling of the recipient of structural social injustice as a ‘victim’ in the same 

This current study examined the perceptions and lived experiences of prisoners (n = 24) who do not engage with prison education. United Kingdom and international research highlights that prisoners who attend prison education programmes have lower recidivism rates and increased employment opportunities upon release (Abeling-Judge, 2019; Bozick et al., 2018). This qualitative study interviewed adult males who are serving a custodial sentence for a sexual offence in England and Wales. The data were analysed thematically with two key themes emerging from the rich dataset: (i) ‘Poor quality education’, highlighting the limitations of prison education and lack of quality provision; (ii) ‘We are sex offenders’, explored non-engagement with prison education due to their ‘sex offender’ label. The findings highlight how current prison education provision needs to focus on a programme of study relevant to an individual.