Howard Journal of Crime and Justice最新文献

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.

The Nordics have employed discourses of gender equality and women's rights and a welfare-oriented approach to punishment as integral parts of inclusive welfare states and their ‘goodness’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with non-citizen women at Vestre Prison in Denmark, this article suggests that the will to punish and banish prevails over the state's commitment to women's rights and protection. Rather than being an inherent feature of incarceration, the pain experienced by non-citizen women in prison is a ‘political statement’ (Bosworth, 2023). Employing precarisation, incarceration and deportation to govern unwanted non-citizens and (re)produce the borders of membership, the Danish state also reproduces the conditions for gendered harm. Bordered penality, this article concludes, is gendered.

In 2021, China amended its law on the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR), lowering the MACR of two specified offences to twelve years. As a result, China now has three different levels of MACR for different offences. Based on the position in China, this article argues that while lowering the MACR against the international trend can be justified as a necessary measure to tackle serious crimes committed by children, creating different levels of MACR based on the types of crime is wrong in principle. This article further considers the classic dilemma in setting an absolute MACR, which results in either freeing the guilty or convicting the innocent. It is argued that setting a relatively low MACR accompanied by robust safeguards of doli incapax, child immaturity defence, diversion and wider sentencing options would allow a better assessment of children's culpability and better serve the interests of justice. It is also suggested that lowering the MACR will not unjustifiably undermine children's rights if the juvenile justice system could ensure only those truly culpable could be convicted and that the option of prosecution is reserved as a last resort.

This study examined the influence of job demands (role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload and dangerousness) and job resources (job variety, supervisor structure and training views) on employee perceptions of procedural justice, general perceptions of distributive justice, and specific perceptions of distributive justice. Using a sample of 160 employees at a high-security prison, the regression analyses found that only demands of role conflict was inversely correlated with procedural justice and both distributive justice measures. Role ambiguity was inversely related to procedural but was not related to either dimension of distributive justice. Furthermore, dangerousness was inversely associated with distributive justice (both general and specific), but it was not correlated with procedural justice. Among the job resources, job variety was positively associated with procedural and both distributive justice measures. Supervisor structure was predictive of procedural but not distributive justice. Role overload, and training views had non-significant relationships with all the justice measures.

Highly criticised and widely discussed, there is a general consensus that the defence is in dire need of reform: from its stigmatic title to the narrow interpretations of both limbs of the Rules, it is a rarely used and outdated defence. Despite the vast amount of commentary on this topic, The insanity defence: International and comparative perspectives, part of the Oxford Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice series, provides a fresh outlook on this defence, collating internationally renowned experts and a diverse range of jurisdictions into one edited collection.

The book aims to explore the insanity defence in other jurisdictions and to ‘point the way to a balanced assessment of how the insanity defence might be altered and improved’ (p.369). Both of these aims are, in my view, achieved. The breadth of jurisdictions covered within this collection provides the reader with a variety of alternative interpretations or possible amendments to the M'Naghten Rules, as well as cautioning against directions in which the defence ought not to go.

The insanity defence begins with a critique of the M'Naghten Rules in England and Wales and an exploration of reform proposals, subsequently moving on to address other common law jurisdictions, including: Scotland, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. Beyond this, four civil law jurisdictions are covered: France, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, before consideration is made of the insanity defence in China and under international criminal law.

Of the civil law jurisdictions, Meynen, in Chapter 12, suggests that the open criterion set out in the Dutch Criminal Code creates the potential for ‘disparity’ (p.285), of which we should take heed. The tragic mass killing by Anders Breivik in Norway triggered a move away in that country from what was arguably a successful medicalised model of the insanity defence, demonstrating the dangers of ‘knee-jerk’ legislation in the wake of tragedy. It is hoped that Gröning's suggestion that the move is less significant than initially suspected proves to be correct (p.314).

Key themes emerging from this collection concern the ubiquity of the M'Naghten Rules, versions of which are still used, albeit more flexibly, in many jurisdictions. Ireland, for example, has an additional volitional element. The Canadian Supreme Court has a ‘pragmatic and somewhat chameleon interpretation of the Rules (p.122), while Australia seems to offer ‘an incoherent patchwork of inconsistent provisions’ (p.196), many of which also reflect the Rules. Even Article 31(1)(a) of the Rome Statute ‘evokes’ the Rules (p.344), despite the International Criminal Court having no accepted procedure for detention in the highly unlikely event of a successful plea.

Other themes in this book include the willingness of most jurisdictions to link a mental disorder to the defendant's conduct, as well as similarities in