Howard Journal of Crime and Justice最新文献

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.

Introduced as part of the Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) reforms, the Offender Rehabilitation Act (ORA) 2014 promised to offer resettlement support to individuals serving short sentences – a cohort which has long been neglected in penal policy and research discourse. Featuring the perspectives of 16 men serving a short sentence in England, this empirical work argues that there is a dissonance between the rhetoric of the additional support promised and the reality these individuals experienced. The pains literature is used to demonstrate how a perceived lack of institutional care and attention led respondents to feel invisible and insignificant. This caused service users to internalise a sense of reliance for their own resettlement. However, the ability to achieve this is predicated on possessing the necessary capital. Paradoxically the more an individual cycles around the revolving door of repeat short prison sentences, the more this capital becomes eroded, leading to the particular pain of burnout. The article concludes by advocating for a presumption against the use of short sentences in England and Wales.

Scotland's prison population remains stubbornly high despite reforms to sentencing and community penalties (most recently in 2016). Seeking to advance the debate on punishment in Scotland, we use empirical data to support a novel theoretical synthesis of the ‘agonistic framework’ and ‘performative regulation’. We argue that these reforms appear oriented towards decarceration, without substantively engaging with the drivers of imprisonment, and hence exemplify the ‘performative’ nature of much Scottish penal policy. The ‘performance’ is shaped by countervailing political constraints on the Scottish Nationalist government, amid continued debate over independence – but truly progressive penal policy requires radical and substantive responses to the problems that punishment seeks to address.

This study investigated how people in prison feel about the language used to describe them and how it affected them. Previous research shows that terminology used to describe people in prison affects their self-identity, namely through its shame-inducing effects. A thematic analysis of qualitative data gathered through interviews demonstrated that language impacts how an individual in prison engages with the community and how they view themselves. Positive and progressive language in prisons has the potential to remove the shame and stigma attached to the prisoner identity.

People who have speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) are more prevalent in criminal justice settings than in the wider population. Previous research focusing primarily on young people and the prison population has led to calls for early interventions and screening, particularly in youth justice settings. NHS Liaison and Diversion (L&D) referrals in a single police force region in England were screened for SLCN over a period of three months. The results indicate a need for early identification of SLCN for all age groups, and for those with no previous SLCN-related diagnoses.

We argue that defunding the police is necessary to address fundamental and systemic problems plaguing British policing. We do so in response to an article written by Fleetwood & Lea (2022), published in this journal, claiming that ‘defunding the police does not translate well to the UK’ (p.172).

Our article (Fleetwood & Lea, 2022) advocated a strategy of ‘minimal policing’ oriented to dismantling institutional racism, sexism and class oppression in policing. Our approach aimed to do this by breaking down the institutional isolation and autonomy of the police as a state agency. This would involve, first redefining the police role essentially as backup to other (mainly welfare) agencies far better suited to intervention in the vast majority of local crime and conflicts than police and, second, placing police intervention under the direction of a ‘Controller’ – an expanded and democratised variant of the (Scottish) Procurator Fiscal. We further specified that a continued role for police in governance of public space would become an administrative role under the direct control of mayors. Rather than debating whether police should be defunded, our focus is on how.

There are two main points of difference between McElhone et al. (2023) and ourselves. The first is how we understand ‘defunding’. McElhone et al. say that defunding is ‘not a stand-alone policy demand’ and cannot be set apart from abolitionism. However, we found that many US cities had responded to the slogan by cutting budgets for police. In 2020, Austin City Council Texas voted unanimously to cut their police budget by a third, redirecting funding to state social services (ABC News, 2020). There is no indication that Austin (or any of the other cities which have cut budgets) intend to abolish their police. So, as we stated in the article, we approach defunding as both a possible step on the road towards abolitionism, but also as a project in and of itself.

We wholeheartedly support the kinds of non-reformist reforms proposed by abolitionists – withdrawing lethal weapons, repealing police powers with racist outcomes (i.e., Prevent, stop and search) and scrapping ‘net widening’ legislation (Abolitionist Futures, 2019). But, taking seriously the need to prioritise security over punishment, to re-imagine social problems as requiring social (and not criminal) solutions, also requires radical changes in policing. While abolitionists have devoted considerable attention to thinking through community alternatives to police, far less attention is devoted to what a reduced police force might look like, and how it might function with other – now better funded – agencies. This is the question we sought to address. If this is a ‘realist’ question, then so be it. But, we would resist attempts to characterise this as a debate between ‘abolitionists’ and ‘realists’, a debate in criminology that goes back several decades (see, e.g., Hulsman, 1986; Lea, 1987; Matthews, 2018).

This leads us to our second point of difference – the role of the state. Our premise is that the state ought to play a primary role in protecting its citizens, ensuring basic saf

This article presents voices of youth labelled as ‘children in conflict with law’ on deviance, using the theoretical framework of labelling. Based on a narrative analysis of 24 in-depth interviews with youth and other stakeholders in Mumbai, three key themes emerged: defining deviance; self and the deviant others – the othering of deviance; and living with a deviant identity. We found that the youth explained deviance as good or bad contextually, continuously interpreting its meanings, different from adult viewpoints. The youth engaged in identity management strategies to move away from the labels and stigma. The youth, labelled as rule-breakers, balanced the power equations by ‘counter-labelling’, where they hold the rule-enforcers accountable for creating labels. The article locates the findings in Southern criminology and argues for the Indian juvenile justice system to acknowledge the local contexts of youth and their communities and address the larger pathways that lead to deviance and crime.