Howard Journal of Crime and Justice最新文献

This article analyses the Howard League's campaigning against the death penalty in mid-20th-century British colonies. It examines two case studies: the Howard League's campaign to limit the death penalty in the Palestine Mandate in the 1930s and their silence on mass executions during the Kenya Emergency in the 1950s. Drawing on Ben-Natan's (2021) concept of the dual penal regime, we argue the Howard League concentrated its intervention in ordinary penal regimes and demarcated emergency penal regimes as outside its sphere of interest and influence. Consequently, it was silent on the penal excess of colonial authorities during periods of counter-insurgency. Criminology as a discipline largely shares this demarcation of the penal measures associated with colonial wars, militarism and states of emergency as beyond its purview. Inclusion of these aspects of colonial penality into the criminological narrative highlights the significance of colonialism and colonial ways of thinking to penal liberalism.

Forty years ago, when Daniel Boorstin (1983) published his now classic volume of popular history, The discoverers, a sceptical reviewer in Time magazine said that the book read like the work of a man whose suitcase full of looseleaf notes had burst open while he was running to catch a bus. A not dissimilar feeling sometimes came over me while reading Peter Baldwin's extraordinarily ambitious new survey of crime, law, punishment and policing across recorded human history. There is much here both to enjoy and admire, not least the astonishing scale and range of the secondary referencing: nearly 1,800 notes covering the last 78 pages of the book. Baldwin has certainly consulted a lot of scholarship.

The broad assertions of this book will not strike any reasonably well-informed historian of criminal justice as overly surprising. Over several millennia, Baldwin tells us, sin and crime – once seen as essentially indistinguishable – have come to be defined, far more rigorously, as distinctive categories of human behaviour. Much of the reason for this involves the advent of state power. Where once human beings relied upon divine intervention for the enforcement of moral and social norms, increasingly that task has fallen to the state. Early regimes, which were authoritarian in character, relied upon occasional examples of extreme penal severity – breaking on the wheel, decapitation, hangings on a sometimes enormous scale, and so forth – to deter potential wrongdoers. As states grew more democratic and humane, so too did the formal character of their penal sanctions. The advent of non-lethal punishments, notably banishment, fines, and finally large-scale imprisonment, enabled the state to relinquish its early reliance upon execution and other modes of bodily torment. Indeed, since the early 19th century, professionalised policing – now critically abetted by the extraordinary surveillance capacities afforded by modern technologies, and by the substantial abandonment of paper currency and coin – has enabled states to pursue more and more rigorous and effective means of preventing crimes from occurring in the first place. In many parts of the developed world, a person can go their whole life without being robbed or burgled.

If the general trend of all this sounds broadly and reassuringly humane, however, there is also an authoritarian paradox at work. Even as the capacity of modern societies to inspire wider and deeper adherence to social norms has taken hold, so too has the sheer volume of criminal offences as the compulsory capacities of the state have reached unprecedented levels. The US federal penal code, only eight pages long in 1875, now runs to almost 900 (p.22). About 40% of the new enactments were made in only a quarter century after 1970 (p.348), a dismal testimony to the cultural shocks of the 1960s and the prevailing sense – especially in America – that society was on the brink of collapse, a conviction

Internationally, whole life sentences are becoming an increasingly common sanction. They are supported by abolitionists of state executions and ‘tough on crime’ conservatives alike and, as a result, have flourished in recent years. The US has the highest number of persons serving whole life sentences anywhere in the world with an unprecedented 55,945 persons serving life without parole sentences in 2020 (p.94). Kleinstuber et al.’s Life without parole: worse than death? considers the purpose, development and impact of life without parole sentences in the US by focusing upon the increased use of life without parole sentences across the previous three decades. The authors examine the US's increasing dependency upon these sentences by considering arguments in support of their continued use and, in so doing, shine a light on the inhumane ‘pains’ suffered by those serving such sentences.

The book starts by considering the legitimacy of life without parole sentences, questioning whether life without parole sentences are humane and subsequently ‘just’ by considering the experiences of death row prisoners who – by most people's standards – are serving a significantly ‘worse’ sentence. The authors focus on ‘death penalty volunteers’ (p.21) (death row prisoners who purposely refuse to pursue any form of appeal so as to accelerate the execution process) in order to demonstrate the inhumane nature of life without parole sentences. The authors subsequently argue that the increasing number of ‘death penalty volunteers’ calls into question the notion that ‘life’ (without parole) is ‘better’ than death.

The second chapter continues to question the legitimacy of life without parole sentences by considering the experiences of life without parole prisoners. This chapter consolidates and builds upon existing literature on the pains of imprisonment (such as Sykes, 1958) and life without parole (e.g., Hartman, 2016; Johnson & McGunigall-Smith, 2008; Leigey, 2015; Zehr, 1996) further emphasising the cruel and ‘inhuman’ (p.61) nature of life without parole sentences.

In the third chapter, the authors draw upon Van Zyl Smit and Appleton's (2019) Life imprisonment: a global human rights analysis to expose the ‘degrading’ (p.61) nature of life and whole life sentences and argue – in the words of Judge Power-Forde (see Vinter and Others v. The UK [2013] ECHR 645) – that prisoners ‘ought not to be deprived entirely of … hope’ (p.54).

These early chapters collectively present a persuasive argument against the increasing use of life without parole sentences. Nevertheless, many of these arguments have been made by various scholars within recent decades but – due to their predominantly theoretical nature – have failed to have any significant consequence; life without parole has continued to increase in popularity among legislators, judiciaries and society,

This article is based on the 24th annual Bill McWilliams memorial lecture which was delivered at the Institute of Criminology in Cambridge on 9 June 2022. Coinciding with the first anniversary of the unification of probation services in England and Wales, the lecture considered the recent past, present and potential future of the service through the lens of a central concept in probation work: namely, rehabilitation. Three ways of understanding this concept are considered: rehabilitation as restoration; rehabilitation as a process of building back better; and looking-glass rehabilitation. It is argued that each perspective suggests a different orientation to, and a different set of issues and questions about, probation's future and the work that is needed to help the unified service move on from a traumatic recent past.

This article outlines how restorative practices (RPs) were introduced into prisons in Northern Ireland (NI) over a period of 20 years. It explains the context of how this change was introduced, using real life case examples underpinned by an approach based on praxis (Freire, 1985; Schön, 1983). Through the synthesis of relevant theory and practice experience it identifies the barriers to bringing about effective and meaningful change to practice and ways of overcoming these at the micro, meso and macro level (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). The RIPPLE model is introduced as a means of successfully implementing and sustaining innovative and creative practice within a complex and potentially hostile environment. It is the success story of an accomplishment that has never been achieved before in any prison service.

There is increasing recognition that correctional officers (COs) serve a crucial role in their work in relation to communications underpinning discretion, especially regarding interactions with prisoners. This article examines attitudes and perceptions among Canadian federal correctional officer recruits (CORs) regarding what they anticipate are the greatest challenges they will face as new COs. We examine these discussions through the framework of Goffman's dramaturgical model of face work, especially face work within the ‘total institution’ of prisons. Our findings centre on anticipated challenges of building rapport with prisoners, including the requirements to monitor one's demeanour and ‘face work’. Characterisations of prisoners as inherently manipulative factor into CO anticipations of interactional challenges. We also consider the role that ‘soft power’ has in facilitating CO-prisoner rapport and trust, which, we argue, ultimately undergirds opportunities in prisons to facilitate prisoner social change and successful community reintegration and desistance from crime.

Strong evidence of racial and ethnic disparities has been documented in recent government-led reports, suggesting the presence of discrimination in sentencing, with Black and ethnic minority defendants being systematically sentenced more harshly than their white counterparts. However, we still do not know how these disparities come about as most of the sentencing research has relied on quantitative designs focused on documenting the problem, rather than exploring its causes. In this exploratory study we use qualitative interviews with criminal law barristers to explore the different mechanisms that may give rise to these disparities. From our interviews we identified two predominant causal mechanisms: the differential consideration of mitigating and aggravating factors and indirect discrimination arising from defendants’ socio-economic backgrounds and over-policing. Based on these findings, we suggest effective strategies such as explicitly listing social deprivation as a mitigating factor in the sentencing guidelines and increasing judicial diversity for redressing these disparities.

Our aim in this conceptual article is to theoretically reimagine the concept of ‘healthy prisons’ in a way that more thoroughly grounds it in the everyday experiences of prisoners. Our point of departure is the observation that there seems to be an intriguing conceptual and theoretical overlap between first-person oriented empirical studies of two spheres of human experience that are normally seen as separate: serious illness and imprisonment. Our analysis leads us to reimagine the term ‘healthy prisons’ in a way that increases its usefulness for anyone interested in making prisons healthier and more constructive and reinventive institutions.

Research into desistance from crime has progressed enormously in the past three decades. Despite this tremendous growth, some issues remain unexplored. Among these is the extent to which the reasons why people stop offending might vary by the age at which they stop, and their previous lifestyles. Herein we explore the extent to which the reasons why people desist are associated with their age, and the length and nature of their criminal career. We find that there are no particular associations between the reasons for their desistance and any of these variables, though social context is important. So particular social contexts are seen by those desisting as key to their wish to desist, but they may occur at different ages and it is when they are salient to that individual that they promote action. We close by discussing why this might be the case and the ramifications for theories of desistance.

Women's deaths in custody remain under-researched around the world. This article reports on a large-scale study on deaths in custody conducted in Australia that involved an analysis of 736 coroners’ inquest reports dated between 1991 and 2020. Women were substantially under-represented among this sample, comprising less than 5% of all deaths, but half of the women were Indigenous. While most of the women had a range of individual risk factors in common – such as a history of victimisation, mental illness and drug and alcohol use – the Indigenous women also experienced systemic racism from their custodians and the medical personnel to whom they were referred for treatment. While most coroners focused primarily on the cause of death, some made recommendations directed at addressing unconscious bias. This research supports calls for alternatives to detention for women and the decriminalisation of racialised offences such as public intoxication.