Understanding the Attraction: Prison Tourism and the Public Gaze

Research undertaken in three decommissioned English prisons offers fresh insight into public attraction. Employing interviews with prison tourists, it reveals dark incentives rooted in historical and cultural representations of punishment, an inherent desire to look beyond the prison walls, and a fascination towards a concept I define as Abstract Death and Suffering.

‘Killing Is Just The Best Solution’: Lynching As Informal Incapacitation

This article highlights two overlooked drivers of lynching violence: the will to ensure that caught offenders will no longer victimize anybody, and the need for perpetrators of lynching to mitigate the risks associated with their participation. It uses the concepts of lethal and non-lethal informal incapacitation to explain lynching outcomes (‘killing’ and ‘serious beatings’) that are otherwise unintelligible. Evidence is drawn from individual and group interviews with more than a hundred key informants in Nigeria.

Rethinking Prosecutorial Discretion: Towards A Moral Cartography of Prosecutors

This article examines the justifications that a group of prosecutors employs when coordinating human trafficking investigations in the Amazon. The study is based on interviews with officials who work in Madre de Dios, Peru, a region affected by small-scale gold mining, whose demand for labour has increased the incidence of human trafficking. I draw from Boltanski and Thévenot’s polity model to elucidate three moral principles regularly endorsed by prosecutors in the course of criminal investigations: efficiency, civic and domestic values. Together these comprise a moral cartography of prosecution. This study from the Global South contributes to a more holistic—and pragmatic—understanding of prosecutors’ charging decisions, complementing research approaching this topic from the perspective of bounded rationality.

Exception, Symbolism and Compromise: The Resilience of Treason as a Capital offence

This article explores the causes, forms and consequences of the resilience of treason as a capital offence. Though generally overlooked by the literature on the death penalty, treason has been the second most common capital offence—after murder—in states’ law books in the post-WWII world and has had tangible effects on abolition trajectories. The article first traces the transformation of treason from the paradigmatic capital offence in the pre-modern era to a peripheral yet persistent component of contemporary death penalty. It then analyses and explains the dynamic of ‘exempting’ treason from abolition for common crimes. The third section examines situations where treason remains a capital offence on the books but is rarely used, functioning as ‘symbolic law’ with important consequences and spillover effects. In the conclusion, I argue that treason laws could become a central obstacle in the path to full global abolition of the death penalty.

Parental Migration and Children’s Problem Behaviours in Rural China: Testing an Integrative Theoretical Model

This study aims to investigate the social mechanism underlying the associations between parental migration and left-behind children’s delinquent and deviant behaviours in rural China. Using a middle school student sample, our results reveal that the effects of parental migration on children’s delinquency differ across caretaking arrangements. Specifically, compared with children living with non-migrant parents, those cared for by a remaining father (with a mother migrated) or by one grandparent (with both parents migrated) had weaker bonding with primary caretakers and schools, which led to delinquency and deviance directly or indirectly through more frequent association with deviant peers. In contrast, children living with a remaining mother or with two grandparents did not differ significantly from those living with non-migrant parents.

‘Covid-19 has caused a dramatic change to prison life’. Analysing the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on the pains of imprisonment in the Scottish Prison Estate

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the impact of COVID-19 in the Scottish Prison Estate. During the 2020 lockdown in prison in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, all face-to-face research was paused. In response to this methodological challenge, a participatory correspondence methodology was designed, enabling project participants to influence the direction of this project through suggesting research questions. The main project findings relate to the analysis of ways in which the COVID-19 enhanced the pains of imprisonment for participants, exploring the challenges that the participants faced in relation to communication, feelings of heightened isolation and detachment from family, friends and the normal rhythms of life in prison. Analysis of the letters received as part of this study provides unique insights into the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic in custody has added an additional layer or enhancement to pre-pandemic pains of imprisonment, increasing the ‘tightness’ ‘depth’ and ‘weight’ of participants time in custody.