scholarly journals Post-release reforms for short prison sentences

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 302-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Cracknell

Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) promised a ‘revolution’ in the way offenders are managed, providing a renewed focus on short sentence prisoners. The TR reforms extends mandatory post-release supervision and tailored through-the-gate resettlement provisions to a group that has predominantly faced a ‘history of neglect’ yet often present with the most acute needs within the criminal justice system. However, existing literature underlines that serving short sentences lacks ‘utility’ and can be counter-productive to facilitating effective rehabilitation. This article explores the purposes of providing post-release supervision for short sentences, firstly exploring a previous attempt to reform short sentences, the now defunct ‘Custody Plus’ within the 2003 Criminal Justice Act, and then the Offender Rehabilitation Act (ORA) 2014 within the TR reforms. This article contends that both post-release reforms have sought to re-affirm and re-legitimise prison as the dominant form of punishment in society – or what Carlen refers to as ‘carceral clawback’. This article will also use Cohen’s analysis on social control to establish that post-release supervision will serve to ‘widen the net’, extend the period of punishment and oversight and will only reinforce a form of enforced ‘state-obligated rehabilitation’ that will undermine efforts made to resettle short sentence prisoners.

Author(s):  
Mary Angela Bock

Seeing Justice examines the way criminal justice in the United States is presented in visual media by focusing on the grounded practices of visual journalists in relationship with law enforcement. The book extends the concept of embodied gatekeeping, the corporeal and discursive practices connected to controlling visual media production and the complex ways social actors struggle over the construction of visual messages. Based on research that includes participant observation, extended interviews, and critical discourse analysis, the book provides a detailed examination of the way these practices shape media constructions and the way digitization is altering the relationships between media, citizens, and the criminal justice system. The project looks at contemporary cases that made the headlines through a theoretical lens based on the work of Michel Foucault, Walter Fisher, Stuart Hall, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Nick Couldry, and Roland Barthes. Its cases reveal the way powerful interests are able to shape representations of justice in ways that serve their purposes, occasionally at the expense of marginalized groups. Based on cases ranging from the last US public hanging to the proliferation of “Karen-shaming” videos, this monograph offers three observations. First, visual journalism’s physicality increases its reliance on those in power, making it easy for officials in the criminal justice system to shape its image. Second, image indexicality, even while it is subject to narrative negation, remains an essential affordance in the public sphere. Finally, participation in this visual public sphere must be considered as an essential human capability if not a human right.


Fundamina ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-336
Author(s):  
Lewis Chezan Bande

This contribution traces the historical development of the criminal justice system in Malawi, from the pre-colonial period, through the colonial and independence periods, to the contemporary democratic period. It highlights the major political hallmarks of each historical period and their impact on the development of the criminal justice system. The contribution shows that all aspects of the current criminal justice system – substantive criminal law, procedural law, criminallaw enforcement agencies, courts and correctional services – are products of political and constitutional processes and events of the past century. Their origins are directly traceable to the imposition of British protectorate rule on Nyasaland in the late nineteenth century. The development of the Malawian criminal justice system since then has been heavily influenced by the tension and conflict of colonialism, the brutality of one-party dictatorship and the country’s quest for a constitutional order that is based on liberal principles of democracy, rule of law, transparency and accountability, respect for human rights, limited government and equality before the law. To properly understand Malawi’s current criminal justice system, one has to know and appreciate its historical origins and development.


1995 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 908
Author(s):  
Diana Ginn

The author reviews the response of the criminal justice system to the problem of wife assault by focusing on the key players within the system. The way the criminal law applies to wife assault affects battered women's access to that area of law known as family law, with negative repercussions for them and their children. Several myths about the nature of wife assault help ensure an inappropriate response. These include the myths that the woman is to blame, that by just leaving the abusive situation she can resolve it, and that if she does not leave it is because she enjoys the abuse. The author reviews current methods used by police, prosecutors and judges for dealing with wife assault and discusses the inadequacies of those methods. She concludes that despite many recommendations for change, there have been no significant improvements in the way the criminal justice system deals with wife assault. It is incumbent upon the legal profession to demonstrate professional responsibility by ensuring that wife assault is taken more seriously than it is now and than it has been in the past. This is a necessary reform before battered women can rely on the criminal justice system.


2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 386-398
Author(s):  
Taufik Mohammad

The method of community organization can be used to implement restorative justice within the community. This study aimed at understanding whether members from seven communities in Malaysia would assume responsibility for restorative justice initiatives, accept various elements of restorative justice, and welcome offenders back into the community. The findings are mixed. Some community members believed that the community setting may offer resources for offender rehabilitation that the criminal justice system does not have; others raised concerns over various limitations such that communities may not be equipped to deal with criminal cases.


2021 ◽  
pp. 273-307
Author(s):  
Neena Samota

This chapter explores the broader context and history of race-related issues in the UK, considering why racial disparities persist in diverse societies like the US, Australia, Canada, and the UK, before narrowing the focus to race and ethnicity in the sphere of crime and criminal justice. The concepts of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ have long played major roles in both classroom and broader societal discussions about crime, punishment, and justice, but they have arguably never been more present and visible than today. The chapter looks at the problems with the statistics available on race, ethnicity, and crime, noting the ways in which they may not tell the whole story, before considering the statistics themselves as the chapter discusses the relationships between ethnicity and victimisation and offending. It then moves on to how ethnic minorities experience the various elements of the criminal justice system and the disadvantages they often face, before outlining the attempts that have been made to address these disparities at a state level. Finally, the chapter discusses critical race theory, a key theory in modern criminological examinations of race and its relationship to crime and justice, which grew out of the US but has much broader value and relevance as a framework of analysis.


Author(s):  
Steve Case ◽  
Phil Johnson ◽  
David Manlow ◽  
Roger Smith ◽  
Kate Williams

This chapter examines a range of perspectives which question the assumptions underlying the concept of ‘punishment’. It first explains what is meant by the idea of critical perspectives on punishment before discussing a number of critical perspectives on the justice system including abolitionism, social control theories, community justice, and transformative justice. It then explores unjust punishment and problems for criminal justice of discrimination and inequality, focusing on the disparities in treatment between white, BME, and other sectors of the population in the criminal justice system. It also considers how ‘crimes of the privileged’ and state crimes can remain unseen or unpunished and concludes with an evaluation of the limitations of critical analyses of crime and punishment.


Author(s):  
Tim Newburn

It is often assumed that the criminal justice system is crucial in determining crime levels, but the available evidence does not bear this out. In fact, it is the processes of socialization underpinned and reinforced by informal social control that play a vital role in controlling crime. ‘How do we prevent crime?’ considers the various crime prevention techniques that have contributed substantially to recent apparent reductions in crime. It describes the distinction between social crime prevention, which tends to focus on fairly broad and deep issues, and situational crime prevention, which is narrower in focus, is pre-emptive, and seeks, through a variety of means, to reduce the opportunities for crime.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-241
Author(s):  
Heather Ann Thompson

AbstractThe United States today has the highest incarceration rate, as well as the largest number of people living under correctional control more broadly (including probation and parole), than any other country on the globe. The size of the American criminal justice system is not only internationally unparalleled, but it is also historically unprecedented. This apparatus is also deeply racialized. African Americans, Latinos, and indigenous populations (Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Native American), are all represented in U. S. jails and prisons in numbers dramatically disproportionate to their representation in the population as a whole, and every non-White population is incarcerated at a rate far surpassing that of Whites. Notably, however, while the scale of today’s criminal justice system is unsurpassed and unprecedented, its severe racial disproportionality has always been a defining feature. Only by taking a close look at the long and deeply racialized history of the American criminal justice system, and more specifically at the regularly discriminatory application of the law as well as the consistent lack of equal justice under the law over time, can we fully understand not only why the American criminal justice system remains so unjust, but also why prison populations rose so dramatically when they did.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-36
Author(s):  
Jarosław Warylewski

The study includes reflections on the history of punishment and other means of a criminal reaction, their effectiveness and their impact on the criminal justice system. It indicates the limited “repertoire” of the mentioned measures. It draws attention to the real threats to the most important legal interests, especially to life, such as war and terrorism. It doubts the effectiveness of severe penalties, especially the death penalty. Indicates the dangers of penal populism and the perishing of law, including criminal law. It contains an appeal to criminologists and penal law experts to deal with all these dangers in terms of ideas rather than individual regulations.


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