Pub Date : 2022-01-19DOI: 10.1177/13624806211069545
Julie Laursen
Prisoners’ hopes for a life without suffering—without causing and experiencing harm—are embedded in practices of ethical becoming and ideas of transcendence. These hopes are somehow both more banal and complex than the literature on hope generally suggests; they emerge because of lack and are signs of despair, rather than realistic prospects or opportunities. Based on longitudinal interview data (N = 452) with short-term prisoners in Norway and England & Wales, this article shows how hope functions as an orientation through different phases of a prison sentence as well as post-release regardless of whether it materializes. With inspiration from Lear’s idea of ‘radical hope’, I describe prisoners’ hopes as a mode of living with more emphasis on where hope comes from rather than what it leads to, thus following recent prompts to distinguish between hopes derived from opportunities from deeper hopes grounded in despair. I outline prisoners’ pain upon entry into custody and show how their ‘ground projects’—the things without which they would not care to go on with their lives—become clear when they are taken away. In this conceptualization, short-term prisoners’ hopes are in many ways a manifestation of despair fused with ethical deliberations on what kind of person one wishes to become and to whom one owes something.
{"title":"Radical hope and processes of becoming: Examining short-term prisoners’ imagined futures in England & Wales and Norway","authors":"Julie Laursen","doi":"10.1177/13624806211069545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211069545","url":null,"abstract":"Prisoners’ hopes for a life without suffering—without causing and experiencing harm—are embedded in practices of ethical becoming and ideas of transcendence. These hopes are somehow both more banal and complex than the literature on hope generally suggests; they emerge because of lack and are signs of despair, rather than realistic prospects or opportunities. Based on longitudinal interview data (N = 452) with short-term prisoners in Norway and England & Wales, this article shows how hope functions as an orientation through different phases of a prison sentence as well as post-release regardless of whether it materializes. With inspiration from Lear’s idea of ‘radical hope’, I describe prisoners’ hopes as a mode of living with more emphasis on where hope comes from rather than what it leads to, thus following recent prompts to distinguish between hopes derived from opportunities from deeper hopes grounded in despair. I outline prisoners’ pain upon entry into custody and show how their ‘ground projects’—the things without which they would not care to go on with their lives—become clear when they are taken away. In this conceptualization, short-term prisoners’ hopes are in many ways a manifestation of despair fused with ethical deliberations on what kind of person one wishes to become and to whom one owes something.","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"27 1","pages":"48 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46664668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-17DOI: 10.1177/13624806211072859
J. Espindola
Public authorities take considerable and oftentimes controversial steps in their efforts to dismantle criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking and related crimes in Mexico. Among other things, they recruit offenders who abandon their criminal organization and strike a deal with law enforcement agents and prosecutors to share information about their co-perpetrators in exchange for leniency in sentencing as well as of protection from retaliation. This article explores whether the deployment of collaborators is morally permissible in view of the significant risks it exposes them to, most notably retaliatory aggressions. The article examines the underlying philosophical problem regarding the justifiability of deploying collaborators in the social and political circumstances prevailing in the country. The normative framework I advance to explore the Mexican case can be useful in examining the ethical implications of using collaborating witnesses elsewhere.
{"title":"Bargaining with criminals: The morality of witness collaboration in Mexico's “war on drugs”","authors":"J. Espindola","doi":"10.1177/13624806211072859","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211072859","url":null,"abstract":"Public authorities take considerable and oftentimes controversial steps in their efforts to dismantle criminal organizations involved in drug trafficking and related crimes in Mexico. Among other things, they recruit offenders who abandon their criminal organization and strike a deal with law enforcement agents and prosecutors to share information about their co-perpetrators in exchange for leniency in sentencing as well as of protection from retaliation. This article explores whether the deployment of collaborators is morally permissible in view of the significant risks it exposes them to, most notably retaliatory aggressions. The article examines the underlying philosophical problem regarding the justifiability of deploying collaborators in the social and political circumstances prevailing in the country. The normative framework I advance to explore the Mexican case can be useful in examining the ethical implications of using collaborating witnesses elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"27 1","pages":"5 - 22"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46637056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-17DOI: 10.1177/13624806211056313
Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Sadi Shanaah
Using a combination of documentary and archival research methods, this article explores the development of Social Defence criminology across the 19th and 20th centuries—highlighting the influence the ‘new’ Social Defence movement had upon the United Nations' and Council of Europe's international crime policy programmes. By exploring the integration of Social Defence within these international programmes, the article is able to challenge several longstanding arguments in Criminology which associate pre-crime and the securitization of criminal justice with the neoliberal era. Social Defence scholars influenced International Organizations to research and disseminate anticipatory mechanisms to identify and reform potential deviants decades earlier than prominent theses suggest. These measures were steeped in the language of security and were oriented towards the prevention of future juvenile crime. The article argues for a reweighing of the influence of Social Defence criminology and against accounts which draw significant divisions between ‘penal welfarism’ and ‘neoliberal penality’.
{"title":"The long history of prevention: Social Defence, security and anticipating future crimes in the era of ‘penal welfarism’","authors":"Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Sadi Shanaah","doi":"10.1177/13624806211056313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211056313","url":null,"abstract":"Using a combination of documentary and archival research methods, this article explores the development of Social Defence criminology across the 19th and 20th centuries—highlighting the influence the ‘new’ Social Defence movement had upon the United Nations' and Council of Europe's international crime policy programmes. By exploring the integration of Social Defence within these international programmes, the article is able to challenge several longstanding arguments in Criminology which associate pre-crime and the securitization of criminal justice with the neoliberal era. Social Defence scholars influenced International Organizations to research and disseminate anticipatory mechanisms to identify and reform potential deviants decades earlier than prominent theses suggest. These measures were steeped in the language of security and were oriented towards the prevention of future juvenile crime. The article argues for a reweighing of the influence of Social Defence criminology and against accounts which draw significant divisions between ‘penal welfarism’ and ‘neoliberal penality’.","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"26 1","pages":"357 - 376"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45238330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-17DOI: 10.1177/13624806211056680
D. Schaap, Elsa Saarikkomäki
While procedural justice theory has become the dominant paradigm in thinking about police legitimacy, it has several important weaknesses. First, procedural justice's conceptually essential distinction between ‘process’ and ‘outcome’ is blurred in reality, which is visible both in empirical operationalizations and in researchers’ understanding of police work. Second, procedural justice theory views society through an implicit consensus lens, making it poorly equipped to address police–citizen conflicts and structural societal inequalities. This is evident in the theory's inability to unpack the dynamics of police–citizen interactions and its reluctance to problematize the police role in contemporary plural societies. To advance our understanding of police legitimacy and police–citizen relations, particularly among marginalized groups, we strongly recommend working toward theoretical renewal and empirical diversification.
{"title":"Rethinking police procedural justice","authors":"D. Schaap, Elsa Saarikkomäki","doi":"10.1177/13624806211056680","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211056680","url":null,"abstract":"While procedural justice theory has become the dominant paradigm in thinking about police legitimacy, it has several important weaknesses. First, procedural justice's conceptually essential distinction between ‘process’ and ‘outcome’ is blurred in reality, which is visible both in empirical operationalizations and in researchers’ understanding of police work. Second, procedural justice theory views society through an implicit consensus lens, making it poorly equipped to address police–citizen conflicts and structural societal inequalities. This is evident in the theory's inability to unpack the dynamics of police–citizen interactions and its reluctance to problematize the police role in contemporary plural societies. To advance our understanding of police legitimacy and police–citizen relations, particularly among marginalized groups, we strongly recommend working toward theoretical renewal and empirical diversification.","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"26 1","pages":"416 - 433"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42482198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-17DOI: 10.1177/13624806211067770
S. Wright, Susie Hulley, Ben Crewe
Drawing on Snyder's ‘hope theory’ as a conceptual framework, this article examines the hope narratives of men and women at the ‘late stage’ of a life sentence. The article aims to bridge the existing gap between jurisprudence and sociological accounts on hope and life imprisonment by extending this debate to men and women serving reducible life sentences in England and Wales, for whom release is not guaranteed but assumed to be attainable. Through focusing on the individual ways in which the spectre and procedural elements of release shape narratives of hope and hopelessness, this article agrees with Vannier that recent human rights debates have fallen short in terms of subjectively understanding the complex relationship between ‘hope’ and ‘release’ for life-sentenced prisoners. It concludes by highlighting the necessity of procedural legitimacy in reducing uncertainty and promoting and maintaining hope among this group.
{"title":"Trajectories of hope/lessness among men and women in the late stage of a life sentence","authors":"S. Wright, Susie Hulley, Ben Crewe","doi":"10.1177/13624806211067770","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211067770","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on Snyder's ‘hope theory’ as a conceptual framework, this article examines the hope narratives of men and women at the ‘late stage’ of a life sentence. The article aims to bridge the existing gap between jurisprudence and sociological accounts on hope and life imprisonment by extending this debate to men and women serving reducible life sentences in England and Wales, for whom release is not guaranteed but assumed to be attainable. Through focusing on the individual ways in which the spectre and procedural elements of release shape narratives of hope and hopelessness, this article agrees with Vannier that recent human rights debates have fallen short in terms of subjectively understanding the complex relationship between ‘hope’ and ‘release’ for life-sentenced prisoners. It concludes by highlighting the necessity of procedural legitimacy in reducing uncertainty and promoting and maintaining hope among this group.","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"27 1","pages":"66 - 84"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2022-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45419338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-13DOI: 10.1177/13624806211056771
Benjamin D. Fleury-Steiner
release from prison, are handed a list of halfway houses and treatment facilities with an order to move into one of them within a day or two of release. The onus of “choosing” a facility is put on the individual who likely finds that facilities no longer exist, do not have room, do not accept people with their particular backgrounds or are located outside the reach of public transportation. The idea of “choice” in these instances exposes the false dichotomy between treatment and punishment. As part of “treatment”, the individual is taught to make so-called better choices. Yet in the absence of real alternatives, the process of choosing leads back to institutions of punishment. This sort of dilemma is built into the system. Looking back, Miller explains that George W. Bush’s “Second Chance Act” passed at a time in which policymakers knew that people with criminal records struggled to find jobs and housing. Yet this Act emphasized personal transformation (and funded programs with that emphasis) rather than addressing the structural conditions that make it impossible for people to obtain decent jobs. Still today, so-called reentry programs rarely lead to good jobs or a meaningful career ladder. Rather, they focus on teaching people “how to cope with their position on the bottom of the social order” (p. 225). Halfway Home is an extraordinarily deep and nuanced exploration of intersectionality of race and class. In future work I would like to read more of Miller’s thoughts about how gender intersects with both race and class. As much as racism drives the over-incarceration of people of color, hegemonic notions of gender define citizenship and personhood. Thus, Miller notes that the criminal legal trajectory for boys includes getting into fights, cutting class, police and incarceration while girls tend to be a bit older when first arrested, most have children and almost all have been sexually assaulted. I’d like to hear more about how these differences play out. Within the carceral landscape, gender segregation is taken for granted, and gendered “pathways into crime” are assumed to be the norm. I especially wanted to learn more about how Black men experience racialized portrayals of sexually insatiable and predatory masculinity. This is not meant as criticism—no one book can do it all. Rather, this is hope that Miller will continue to turn his compassionate and astute eye on additional pieces of the carceral landscape. Halfway Home is a book I will assign to undergraduates, and have already recommended to friends and community activists. Indeed, if I were asked to suggest one book as an introduction to race and incarceration, this is the book I would choose. It is beautifully written, accessible and compellingly personal. Yet it is not simplistic: veterans in the field will gain new insights from the ways in which Miller weaves together law and policy, the history of racial constructions, neighborhood dynamics in Chicago and Detroit, and the politics o
{"title":"Book review: Armando Lara-Milan, Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity","authors":"Benjamin D. Fleury-Steiner","doi":"10.1177/13624806211056771","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211056771","url":null,"abstract":"release from prison, are handed a list of halfway houses and treatment facilities with an order to move into one of them within a day or two of release. The onus of “choosing” a facility is put on the individual who likely finds that facilities no longer exist, do not have room, do not accept people with their particular backgrounds or are located outside the reach of public transportation. The idea of “choice” in these instances exposes the false dichotomy between treatment and punishment. As part of “treatment”, the individual is taught to make so-called better choices. Yet in the absence of real alternatives, the process of choosing leads back to institutions of punishment. This sort of dilemma is built into the system. Looking back, Miller explains that George W. Bush’s “Second Chance Act” passed at a time in which policymakers knew that people with criminal records struggled to find jobs and housing. Yet this Act emphasized personal transformation (and funded programs with that emphasis) rather than addressing the structural conditions that make it impossible for people to obtain decent jobs. Still today, so-called reentry programs rarely lead to good jobs or a meaningful career ladder. Rather, they focus on teaching people “how to cope with their position on the bottom of the social order” (p. 225). Halfway Home is an extraordinarily deep and nuanced exploration of intersectionality of race and class. In future work I would like to read more of Miller’s thoughts about how gender intersects with both race and class. As much as racism drives the over-incarceration of people of color, hegemonic notions of gender define citizenship and personhood. Thus, Miller notes that the criminal legal trajectory for boys includes getting into fights, cutting class, police and incarceration while girls tend to be a bit older when first arrested, most have children and almost all have been sexually assaulted. I’d like to hear more about how these differences play out. Within the carceral landscape, gender segregation is taken for granted, and gendered “pathways into crime” are assumed to be the norm. I especially wanted to learn more about how Black men experience racialized portrayals of sexually insatiable and predatory masculinity. This is not meant as criticism—no one book can do it all. Rather, this is hope that Miller will continue to turn his compassionate and astute eye on additional pieces of the carceral landscape. Halfway Home is a book I will assign to undergraduates, and have already recommended to friends and community activists. Indeed, if I were asked to suggest one book as an introduction to race and incarceration, this is the book I would choose. It is beautifully written, accessible and compellingly personal. Yet it is not simplistic: veterans in the field will gain new insights from the ways in which Miller weaves together law and policy, the history of racial constructions, neighborhood dynamics in Chicago and Detroit, and the politics o","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"26 1","pages":"175 - 178"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47654284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-07DOI: 10.1177/13624806211028274
Ummni Khan
This article draws on governance theory, critical theory and cultural criminology to interrogate how legal, social scientific and feminist discourses converge to construct rap music as a pressing social problem. While each discourse has its own preoccupations, ideologies and internal contestation, the overarching message is that rap music is a potential source of danger that conveys anti-social attitudes. Suspicion is sometimes also cast on musicians themselves. While I compare three overlapping fields, the ultimate purpose is to problematize the supposedly progressive approach to interpreting and mobilizing against songs deemed harmful. Significantly, I argue that much of the social science scholarship and feminist activism that addresses hip hop music perpetuates anti-Black stereotypes and dovetails with repressive state apparatuses. Among other things, social science and feminist criticism of rap hermeneutically support the use of rap lyrics as evidence of criminality—a distinctly non-progressive, racialized legal practice.
{"title":"A guilty pleasure: The legal, social scientific and feminist verdict against rap","authors":"Ummni Khan","doi":"10.1177/13624806211028274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211028274","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws on governance theory, critical theory and cultural criminology to interrogate how legal, social scientific and feminist discourses converge to construct rap music as a pressing social problem. While each discourse has its own preoccupations, ideologies and internal contestation, the overarching message is that rap music is a potential source of danger that conveys anti-social attitudes. Suspicion is sometimes also cast on musicians themselves. While I compare three overlapping fields, the ultimate purpose is to problematize the supposedly progressive approach to interpreting and mobilizing against songs deemed harmful. Significantly, I argue that much of the social science scholarship and feminist activism that addresses hip hop music perpetuates anti-Black stereotypes and dovetails with repressive state apparatuses. Among other things, social science and feminist criticism of rap hermeneutically support the use of rap lyrics as evidence of criminality—a distinctly non-progressive, racialized legal practice.","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"26 1","pages":"245 - 263"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44058407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-04DOI: 10.1177/13624806211035103
Amy M. Magnus, Frank A Donohue
Access to justice is a theoretical construct and applied principle within the US legal system, centering equity in access to legal services and representation. However, access to justice extends beyond the legal sphere and into the daily lives of vulnerable people. This article contributes to long-standing efforts to reimagine and repurpose the access to justice framework through an ethnographic examination of rural domestic violence. In doing so, there exists significant promise to transform access to justice in a way that comprehensively sees and addresses inequity and injustice. Access to justice can be used in a multitude of ways to make sense of vulnerability at the intersection of rurality, domestic violence, resource accessibility, and activism, expanding the theoretical framework beyond its original scope toward social justice.
{"title":"Reimagining access to justice through the eyes of rural domestic violence survivors","authors":"Amy M. Magnus, Frank A Donohue","doi":"10.1177/13624806211035103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211035103","url":null,"abstract":"Access to justice is a theoretical construct and applied principle within the US legal system, centering equity in access to legal services and representation. However, access to justice extends beyond the legal sphere and into the daily lives of vulnerable people. This article contributes to long-standing efforts to reimagine and repurpose the access to justice framework through an ethnographic examination of rural domestic violence. In doing so, there exists significant promise to transform access to justice in a way that comprehensively sees and addresses inequity and injustice. Access to justice can be used in a multitude of ways to make sense of vulnerability at the intersection of rurality, domestic violence, resource accessibility, and activism, expanding the theoretical framework beyond its original scope toward social justice.","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"26 1","pages":"434 - 455"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/13624806211035103","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45699905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-01DOI: 10.1177/13624806211029562
David Sausdal, Kjersti Lohne
This special issue sets out to explore the Theatrics of Transnational Criminal Justice. ‘Why’, we ask, ‘do transnational criminal justice actors perform themselves as they do?’ ‘Why are their representations frequently, if not different from, then often quite dramatized versions of the average reality of their practices?’ ‘What does such dramatization tell us about not only the symbolism but also the structure and state of transnational criminal justice?’ And, more generally, ‘what do such performances of transnational criminal justice reveal about the nature of penal power in a global day and age?’ In probing such questions, the special issue draws together a number of accomplished ethnographers who have been exploring the performative nature of transnational criminal justice issues around the world, considering both international bodies such as Frontex, Europol, UNODC, the ICC as well as the many national actors involved in the prevention, policing and prosecution of border-crossing issues.
{"title":"Theatrics of transnational criminal justice: Ethnographies of penality in a global age","authors":"David Sausdal, Kjersti Lohne","doi":"10.1177/13624806211029562","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211029562","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue sets out to explore the Theatrics of Transnational Criminal Justice. ‘Why’, we ask, ‘do transnational criminal justice actors perform themselves as they do?’ ‘Why are their representations frequently, if not different from, then often quite dramatized versions of the average reality of their practices?’ ‘What does such dramatization tell us about not only the symbolism but also the structure and state of transnational criminal justice?’ And, more generally, ‘what do such performances of transnational criminal justice reveal about the nature of penal power in a global day and age?’ In probing such questions, the special issue draws together a number of accomplished ethnographers who have been exploring the performative nature of transnational criminal justice issues around the world, considering both international bodies such as Frontex, Europol, UNODC, the ICC as well as the many national actors involved in the prevention, policing and prosecution of border-crossing issues.","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"25 1","pages":"361 - 378"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/13624806211029562","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45205693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-08-01DOI: 10.1177/13624806211031245
Samuel Singler
This article contributes to border criminology and transnational criminal justice research into the role of transnational actors in shaping practices of global justice, punishment and control, as well as to the criminological analysis of penal technologies. I examine the performative effects of the Migration Information and Data Analysis System (MIDAS) developed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and I argue that these effects are multidimensional. For beneficiary states, the deployment of MIDAS constitutes a performance of sovereign territorial power, affirming membership in the international society of (biometrically capable) states. For the IOM, the development and deployment of MIDAS and carrying out training sessions operate as pedagogical interventions legitimizing the organization as a neutral, technical expert of migration management. Finally, MIDAS itself performatively acts upon its targets, constituting ‘the migrant’ as a governable, potentially risky subject and constituting ‘migration’ as a problem amenable to depoliticized techno-solutionist interventions.
{"title":"Biometric statehood, transnational solutionism and security devices: The performative dimensions of the IOM’s MIDAS","authors":"Samuel Singler","doi":"10.1177/13624806211031245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806211031245","url":null,"abstract":"This article contributes to border criminology and transnational criminal justice research into the role of transnational actors in shaping practices of global justice, punishment and control, as well as to the criminological analysis of penal technologies. I examine the performative effects of the Migration Information and Data Analysis System (MIDAS) developed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and I argue that these effects are multidimensional. For beneficiary states, the deployment of MIDAS constitutes a performance of sovereign territorial power, affirming membership in the international society of (biometrically capable) states. For the IOM, the development and deployment of MIDAS and carrying out training sessions operate as pedagogical interventions legitimizing the organization as a neutral, technical expert of migration management. Finally, MIDAS itself performatively acts upon its targets, constituting ‘the migrant’ as a governable, potentially risky subject and constituting ‘migration’ as a problem amenable to depoliticized techno-solutionist interventions.","PeriodicalId":47813,"journal":{"name":"Theoretical Criminology","volume":"25 1","pages":"454 - 473"},"PeriodicalIF":2.2,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45906249","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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