‘This is not what I signed up for’ – Danish prison officers’ attitudes towards more punitive penal policies

A humane approach to punishment has been integral to the work of the Danish Prisons and Probation Service. However, Danish penal policy has recently taken a punitive turn. What happens when punitive policies are adopted by a penal regime built on a humane approach to punishment? To address this question, this article focuses on prison officers at Vestre prison and how they adapt to punitive political decisions and prison policies. The increased focus on security in Danish prisons is considered, together with limitations set on welfare services available to non-citizen prisoners. Examination of officers’ subjectivities at Vestre prison shows that punitive penal policies have produced an environment fraught with tensions that affect prison work, institutional culture, and the officers’ professional identity. These findings also raise questions about the shifting nature of Danish penal power.

Surviving cell-sharing: Resistance, cooperation and collaboration

For decades, researchers have sought to understand the impact of imprisonment; yet we have a limited understanding of the lived experience of cell-sharing. To address this gap in knowledge, this paper draws on 37 semi-structured interviews with imprisoned adult men in Northern Ireland. While demonstrating that, for most, cell-sharing was a negative experience, imbued with discomfort, unease and distress, a new conceptual framework is presented that seeks to understand the tactics people use to manage cell-sharing, influences on their choice of tactics and the potential repercussions of these tactics. Potential implications for policy and practice are also discussed.

Within-race variations in sentencing outcomes: Nationality and punishment among Asians in United States federal courts

There is robust evidence that Asians are not treated differently from Whites and receive greater leniency than Blacks and Hispanics in criminal punishment. Some research findings even suggest that Asians receive the most favorable sentencing outcomes among all racial/ethnic groups. This line of research, however, has not paid attention to Asian nationality groups. Particularly, it is unclear whether there is within-race variation among offenders from different Asian countries. Using the data compiled by the United States Sentencing Commission to examine whether and how an Asian's nationality affects criminal punishment, this study focuses on sentences imposed on offenders who are Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean, Pakistani, and Vietnamese nationals. Results from logistic, ordinary least squares, and Tobit regression analyses indicate that with legal and extralegal factors held constant, Asians of different nationalities face varying odds of incarceration or downward departures, and they receive dissimilar sentence lengths.

The Politics of Pain in Immigration Detention

In this paper I draw on qualitative material from the first complete data set of the ‘ Measure of the Quality of Life in Detention’ (MQLD) survey in the UK to reflect on its implication for understanding and challenging these sites. While similarities between immigration detention centres and prisons make it tempting to place the testimonies from people in detention within the framework of the ‘pains of imprisonment’, I propose an alternative reading of these first-hand accounts. Rather than approaching them as sociological statements of suffering, caused by the loss of liberty, I interpret them as political statements which, in turn, demand a political response. Immigration removal centres (IRCs), these people assert, are fundamentally at odds with key values of a liberal democracy. Those detained within them are not considered to be equal members of a shared community of value; rather, their incarceration marks them out symbolically and, quite practically, as outsiders to these ideas. The pain people describe illuminates the need for a new politics of detention.

The effects of language on the stigmatization and exclusion of returning citizens: Results from a survey experiment

Although the use of person-centered language has increased in recent years, its usage remains limited within the field of criminal justice, wherein terms such as ex-offender are frequently used to describe formerly incarcerated individuals. Research suggests that person-centered language matters for public opinion, but prior work has not examined the effect of language on support for the social reintegration of returning citizens. The present research experimentally manipulates the effects of the language used to describe individuals released from incarceration and the race of a hypothetical returning citizen on the following outcomes: negative stereotype endorsement, attitudinal social distance, and support for reintegrative initiatives. I find that person-centered language significantly reduces stigmatization of returning citizens, which ultimately increases support for reintegrative services. These findings suggest that humanizing changes to criminal justice discourse may have the capacity to shift public opinion and create a social context more conducive to reintegration after incarceration.

Imperial legacies and southern penal spaces: A study of hunting nomads in postcolonial India

Southern penal spaces are marked by resemblances and affinities with colonial regimes of control, yet they also reflect quite distinctive postcolonial social and political dynamics found in the global south. Here, legacies of control, forms of exile, status reductions, hierarchical social stratifications and other like forms come together in robust modes of containment suitable for managing ‘marginal’ and ‘suspect’ populations. We draw on ethnographic empirical work with two hunting nomadic groups in India by two of the co-authors who are working with the Kheria Sabar community in Purulia district in West Bengal and Pardhi community in Mumbai. The latter were subject to notification under the notorious Criminal Tribes Act 1871, marking them out as ‘criminal tribes’ until their de-notification shortly after India's independence in 1947, yet the Kheria Sabars too feel its effects. We draw attention here to the continual negotiation and (re)fabrication of both state and citizen at the point of their everyday contact. Our notion of southern penal spaces contributes to penal theory by breaking from northern societies’ focus on institutional carcerality and capturing instead both the variety and the dispersal of penal and punitive practices found in postcolonial societies of the south.

Talking punishment: How victim perceptions of punishment change when they communicate with offenders

The myth that restorative justice is the opposite of retributive justice persists, despite a long history of rhetorical challenges. Only empirical evidence can advance the debate, so this article investigates the relationship between punishment and victim–offender communication from the victim’s perspective. Interviews with 40 victims of crime established that some victims saw victim–offender communication and punishment as alternatives, and others saw them as independent. However, more than half the participants expected that communicating with the offender would increase their satisfaction with the offender’s punishment or reported afterwards that this was in fact the case, suggesting that some victims fulfil punishment objectives through communication with the offender. The changes occurred when victims received information about the offender’s punishment, received feedback from the offender or used communication with the offender to impose a mild punishment of their own. Victims were not excessively punitive, but this study demonstrates the existence of an association between punishment and victim–offender communication from at least some victims’ perspectives. This article argues that we should not ignore or attempt to eliminate this relationship. Rather, acknowledging and examining the existence of punishment within victim–offender communication would improve practice and generate better outcomes for victims, offenders and society.

Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi

From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized Kenyans. Even now, colonial modes of punishment, incarceration, closure, interrogation, curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement, and detention without trial are deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya. Initially assumed to herald a rupture from colonial modes of criminalization and punishment, the post-colonial period instead normalized them. Through ethnographic, scholarly, and visual encounters, the paper engages five interconnecting structures that engendered the legacy of a seamless system of control, containment, and punishment evident in the ‘afterlives’ of empire. These are settler colonialism, violence, racism, colonial corporeality, and capitalism. The paper attends to the violence and brutality that endures in the very geographies that were the urban targets of colonial siege and links the carceral practices of settler colonialism and the everyday post-colonial governance of Nairobi’s poor neighbourhoods, encounters with the debris and ruination of empire found in the material and spatial fabric of Mathare. We take up a critical encounter with colonial files to both discern the continuity and lineage of carceral practices and to disrupt the authorial totality and continuity the colonial archive files assembled. The paper includes archival and authored photographs: