scholarly journals Pursuing the Horizon of Penal Abolition in Seth Kwame Boateng’s Documentaries

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-130
Author(s):  
Abena Ampofoa Asare
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Award Winning

Two recent documentaries by award-winning journalist Seth Kwame Boateng, Locked and Forgotten (2015) and Left to Rot (2016), have played an important role in recent Ghanaian prison reform efforts. This paper identifies the ways these documentaries extend beyond a reformist agenda and move towards a more radical vision of penal abolition. By creating a dialogue between Boateng’s documentaries and the analyses and frameworks of penal abolitionism, this paper calls for a remapping of global abolitionist discourse to include critiques of ‘criminal justice’ that are articulated in diverse geographical, cultural and rhetorical locations.

Norfolk’s “Model Prison Community”: Howard Belding Gill and the Social Process of Prison Reform

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Matthew DelSesto
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
Spatial Design ◽  
The Social ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Prison Community ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the social process of criminal justice reform, from Howard Belding Gill’s 1927 appointment as the first superintendent of the Norfolk Prison Colony to his dramatic State House hearing and dismissal in 1934. In order to understand the social and spatial design of Norfolk’s “model prison community,” this article reviews Gills’ tenure as superintendent through administrative documents, newspaper reports, and his writings on criminal justice reform. Particular attention is given to the relationship between correctional administration and public consciousness. Concluding insights are offered on the possible lessons from Norfolk Prison Colony for contemporary reform efforts.

scholarly journals Making the Unwanted Visible: A Narrative on Abdülhamid Ii’s Ambitious Project for Yedikule Central Prison in Istanbul

Prostor ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2 (60)) ◽  
pp. 360-377
Author(s):  
Ceren Katipoğlu Özmen ◽  
Selahaddin Sezer
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Ottoman Architecture ◽  
New Perspective

This study aims to investigate three architectural projects proposed for constructing a central prison inside the Yedikule Fortress in Istanbul during the end of the 19th c. Ottoman State assigned the famous architects of the era for this mission such as August Jasmund, Alexandre Vallaury, and Kemaleddin. The narration on the projects shows that there was a strong intention for constructing a central prison in the capital of Ottoman Empire as a sign of success for the overall penalty and prison reform that was one of the main goals for Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909). The interpretation of these distinctive projects is significant since this interpretation helps us both to understand the transformation of the criminal justice spaces of the Ottoman Empire and to provide a new perspective for reading 19th c. Ottoman architecture.

scholarly journals Curative, regenerating, redemptive and liberating? The systematic production of ignorance in Michael Gove’s rhetoric on prison reform at a time of crisis

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-105
Author(s):  
Chloe Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Conservative Government

Prisons are in a moment of crisis, with a number of recent high-profile scandals receiving substantial media attention and threatening to undermine the hegemony of the institution. At the same time, the work of the current Conservative Government on criminal justice policy as a whole, and on prisons in particular, has been seen by many as a marked departure from their previous penal policy agenda, heralding a new, progressive and broadly liberal direction. Focusing on Michael Gove’s rhetoric on prison reform during his term as Justice Secretary (May 2015 to July 2016), this article uses critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine how Gove employed a variety of discursive strategies to create an impression of a liberal, progressive reform agenda, while simultaneously reinforcing the need for an expansive and punitive prison system. Building on recent work on agnotology, it shows that Gove strategically selected, deflected, distorted and ignored the available evidence on prisons. In doing so, he effectively legitimized and reinforced the central role of the prison in the criminal justice system despite increasing evidence of its inefficacy, foreclosing discussion of genuinely radical alternatives.

The Rise of Juvenile Courts and the Consolidation of Child Removal

2021 ◽  
pp. 59-79
Author(s):  
Peter Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Juvenile Court ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Juvenile Courts ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Protection Legislation

In the late nineteenth century, demands to curb parental sovereignty merged with campaigns for prison reform. As a result, calls gathered pace for juvenile courts which would remove children from the adult, criminal justice system and protect children from abusive parents and adults. The juvenile-court movement developed in the context of the growth of child-protection societies and child-protection legislation. Nevertheless, reformers remained frustrated by the enduring power of parental sovereignty and pushed for greater change. In 1899, reformers in Illinois achieved their ambition of creating courts that removed children from the criminal justice system, ensured children could be placed in reformatories, and empowered judges to curb guardianship rights. The courts also worked with family visitors and frequently preferred to place families and children on probation rather than move directly to child removal. Spaniards followed these developments in the USA and countries such as Belgium, and created their own courts.

Fears of Contagion, Strategies of Containment

2020 ◽  
pp. 31-59
Author(s):  
Robert T. Chase
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Prison System ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Agricultural Enterprise ◽  
Reform Plan ◽  
The Social ◽  
Labor Camps ◽  
Work Model ◽  
The U.S

The first chapter offers an analysis of prison reform through the lens of sexualized containment, where elite northern reformers sought to replace the notorious 1940s prison farm and open dormitory system with the best practices of northern criminal justice and blended with a southern work model to create an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. During the 1940s and 1950s, postwar criminologists employed metaphors of disease and contagion that warned that prison sex and sexual violence between men could spread from one prisoner to another. In the U.S. South, the practice of housing prisoners in labor camps and shared dormitories contributed to the metaphor of disease and contagion, a particular fear that the South’s open living spaces hastened the southern prison’s production of homosexuality. The chapter argues that such a Cold War–era reform plan stressed the social quarantine of prisoners through the adoption of the northern penitentiary’s design of cells and wings as a way to contain the sexual violence that occurred all too frequently in open southern dormitories. Such an external emphasis on prison space and containment had profound consequences, as it enhanced the spatial power and reach of an internal trusty where the prison system relied on prisoners as guards.

scholarly journals Leaving the Shining City on a Hill: A Plea for Rediscovering Comparative Criminal Justice Policy in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 105756772098162
Author(s):  
Alessandro Corda ◽  
Rhys Hester
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Criminal Justice Policy ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Reform Initiatives ◽  
Criminal Justice Reform ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Phase ◽  
Policies And Practices

Over the past several decades, American penal exceptionalism—the tendency for U.S. penal policies and practices to proudly diverge from those of other Western countries—has severely limited the development of comparative criminal justice research from a U.S. perspective. However, in recent years, a growing consensus that America’s criminal justice policies and practices are too expensive, ineffective, excessively punitive, and often inhumane has laid the ground for a new phase of soul-searching. This article argues for an explicit rediscovering of comparative criminal justice policy in America, which would prove extremely helpful in providing bold yet practicable solutions in the current commendable but unimaginative era of criminal justice reform. We first contend that American exceptionalism is not as embedded in U.S. penal policy and culture as the past few decades might seem to suggest. Second, we discuss the main causes of the gradual demise of the comparative criminal justice enterprise in America. Finally, we discuss two areas of U.S. criminal justice reform suggesting mechanisms of comparative criminal justice policy that should be nurtured: (1) new prison reform initiatives pointing to renewed openness to comparative insights and (2) the growing chorus calling for prosecutorial reform, showing how many of the reform ideas proffered tap into characteristics found in continental systems.

Reflections on I Just Didn't Do It, the Lay Judge System, and Legal Education in and out of Japan

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Kent Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Legal Education ◽  
Wrongful Conviction ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
The Past ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Japanese Law ◽  
Japanese Criminal Justice

AbstractIn 2007 the Academy Award winning director of Shall We Dance released his new film, a critique of the Japanese criminal justice system from a wrongful conviction perspective. In this article, I use the filmas avehicle to serve three disparate goals. First, I provide the firstlegal critique of the film, a genre of legal scholarship developing over the past 15 years. Second, I use the film to reflect on criminal justice reforms in Japan, in particular the introduction of the Lay Judge System (quasi-jury saiban-in seido) from 2009. Third, I critically ask whether use of film as a legal text assists or distracts from my primary pedagogical objectives in teaching comparative Japanese law. I conclude with a cautious recommendation of I Just Didn't Do It as legal cinema, as a catalyst for reform of the Japanese criminal justice system and as an educational text.

Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
State Power ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Regulatory State ◽  
The North ◽  
Jim Crow South

This collection of nine original essays explores the development of a modern criminal justice system in the Jim Crow South, from the 1890s through the 1950s. It covers key transformations surrounding the practices of policing, incarceration, and capital punishment, as municipal police departments became professionalized and as authority over criminal punishment shifted from local jurisdictions to the state. The collection’s essays address the history of segregated police forces, black-on-black crime, police brutality, organized crime and government corruption, restrictions on ex-felons’ rights, convict labor, prison reform, and the introduction of the electric chair. Together, they make a case for southern distinctiveness. Criminal justice in the Jim Crow South looked quite different than it did in the North due to white southern demands for racial control, as well as white southerners’ suspicions of centralized state power and modern bureaucracies. This collection examines these relationships between white supremacy, the modernizing state, and crime control. In doing so, it provides a more nuanced portrait of the dynamic between state power and white supremacy in the South beyond a story of top-down social control. The essays reveal stories of state institutions grappling with their expanding authority, stories of political leaders and reformers anxious to render that power modern and efficient, and stories of African Americans appealing to the regulatory state in order to push back against racial injustice.

scholarly journals A qualitative investigation into the impact of domestic abuse on women’s desistance

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 416-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Úna Barr ◽  
Natalie Christian
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Prison Reform ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Justice Practice ◽  
Desistance From Crime ◽  
And Control ◽  
The Impact

While criminological literature, criminal justice practice, and to a lesser extent, state policy have acknowledged a link between women’s criminalisation and gendered violence (MoJ, 2018; Österman, 2018; Prison Reform Trust, 2017; Roberts, 2015), there has been much less acknowledgement of the role of historical and contemporaneous experiences of violence in the desistance scripts of criminalised women. Combining findings from two research projects exploring gender and desistance, this article argues that (i) criminalised women’s experiences of gendered violence are such that any exploration of gender and desistance which does not acknowledge this is incomplete, (ii) coercion and control can inform women’s entry into the criminal justice system, (iii) expressions of agency and resistance in abusive interpersonal relationships can also inform women’s offending, yet (iv) women’s experiences of desistance from crime can mask the harm they face in coercive, controlling, and violent relationships. Thus, the article argues for a reframing of desistance from crime as desistance from harm both theoretically and in practice, and considers what this might entail.

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