A guilty pleasure: The legal, social scientific and feminist verdict against rap

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.

Reimagining access to justice through the eyes of rural domestic violence survivors

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.

Drill, discipline and decency? Exploring the significance of prior military experience for prison staff culture

Building on prior theorization of the prison–military complex and critiques of Foucault’s claim of similarities between the prison and the military, this article uses the example of ex-military personnel as prison staff to consider the nature of this relationship. In a UK context in which policy discourse speaks of ‘military’ methods as an aspiration for the Prison Service but where critical prison scholars use this term more pejoratively, it draws on a unique survey of current and former prison staff to explore the perceived characteristics of ex-military personnel, and the relationship between military service and prison staff culture. The article finds that although some ‘military’ characteristics recall more negative ‘traditional’ cultures, others point towards more professional and compassionate attitudes, challenging the notion that ‘militarism’ necessarily engenders authoritarian and punitive prison regimes.

The social dynamics of group offending

Theoretical explanations of group offending have been hindered by a focus on rational actor models of social relationships. One consequence of this has been a neglect of the dynamics of social relations and their role in group offending and desistance. Drawing illustratively on two studies conducted in the West of Scotland, this article advances an integrated theoretical framework for the comparative study of group offending that moves beyond either individualizing or ‘gang’ frames dominating existing discourse, towards a thick understanding of situated social relations. By integrating Bourdieu’s concept of habitus with Donati’s relational realist framework, this article theoretically and empirically examines the dynamics of group offending relationships, what shapes them and the way they can, in turn, shape and affect offending and desistance trajectories.

Boundaries, obligations and belonging: The reconfiguration of citizenship in emergency criminal regimes

In national emergencies, states may establish special criminal regimes that criminalize behaviours legal under ordinary law, use more oppressive measures of enforcement and reduce procedural rights. Scholars associate such regimes with the exclusion of offenders from the political community. However, in some emergency criminal regimes, often dealing with economic crises and recently with pandemics, the reduction of rights can also imply inclusion. By examining two emergency regimes in Israel in 1948, a military regime imposing movement restrictions on the Palestinian minority, and an austerity regime imposing restrictions on trade in food products on all citizens, the article argues that different emergency criminal regimes can affect two different tenets of ordinary criminal law: the reinforcing of the boundaries of the community, and the set of obligations between members of that community. Hence, such regimes can foster multiple configurations of citizenship. When simultaneously enforced on marginalized groups, they render their citizenship equivocal.

Biometric statehood, transnational solutionism and security devices: The performative dimensions of the IOM’s MIDAS

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.