Advocacy and Academia: Considering Strategies of Cooperative Engagement This article examines the various dimensions of the “border regions” of the penal field, in which, despite the militarized borders erected by the penal state to segregate criminalized populations, encounters take place, connections are established, and alliances are created. This includes the production of policy-relevant criminological knowledge […]
Archives
Adela Beckerman
Women in Prison: The Conflict between Confinement and Parental Rights In the United States and Canada most female prisoners are mothers. In the United States, women prisoners can be permanently separated from their children if they are unable to provide arrangements for childcare, or are unable to maintain regular contact. This article addresses the obstacles […]
Alessandro De Giorgi
Reform or Revolution: Thoughts on Liberal and Radical Criminologies De Giorgi argues in this essay that despite political affinities and a shared critique of “mass imprisonment,” significant theoretical and strategic differences between liberal and radical perspectives persist. mass imprisonment Citation: Social Justice Vol. 40, Nos. 1-2 (2013): 24-31
Alessandro De Giorgi
Five Theses on Mass Incarceration This essay provides a critical overview of the discursive field that has consolidated in recent years around the prison crisis in the United States. Written in the form of “five theses” on mass incarceration, the essay charts some emerging vectors of the current penal reform discourse, outlining their promises and […]
Alessandro De Giorgi
Book Review: Hadar Aviram, Cheap on Crime This review of Hadar Aviram’s Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment (2015) examines another important recent contribution in the field of punishment and society. book review, punishment, imprisonment Citation: Social Justice Vol. 42, No. 2 (2015): 195-200
Criminal Justice & Globalization at the New Millennium, Vol. 27: 2, 2000
Robert P. Weiss, ed. Edited by Robert P. Weiss, this 300-page special millennium issue of Social Justice highlights the negative impact of neoliberal globalization on criminal justice, including escalating personal and business crime, growing corruption, heightened antiforeign sentiment and scapegoating that comes with labor migration, greater worker insecurity, and the expansion of a marginalized, contingent […]
Critical Resistance to the Prison-Industrial Complex
Edited by the Critical Resistance Publications Collective. 240 pp., paper. ISBN: 978-0-935206-03-6. $14.95 This special issue of Social Justice, edited by Critical Resistance, focuses on prison abolition as a goal and theme. The issue is broadly divided into system analyses and articles centering on organizing for change, that is, reports of struggles against the system and […]
Critical Resistance to the Prison-Industrial Complex, Vol. 27: 3, 2000
ISSUE OUT OF PRINT — DIGITAL COPY AVAILABLE Rose Braz et al., eds. This special issue of Social Justice, edited by Critical Resistance, focuses on prison abolition as a goal and theme. The issue is broadly divided into system analyses and articles centering on organizing for change, that is, reports of struggles against the system […]
David Gilbert
“These Criminals Have No Respect for Human Life” Gilbert provides a first-hand account of a May 1990 disciplined and widely supported protest action at Attica over the killing of a black prisoner. The article also assesses changes in the values and attitudes of guards and prisoners at Attica since 1971. The author argues that “prisoners […]
Deaths in Custody and Detention, Vol. 33: 4, 2006
Jude McCulloch and Phil Scraton, eds. This is a special issue on the investigation of, and inquiry into, deaths in custody and detention (including state hospitals and mental health, police and prison custody, and young offenders’ institutions). The volume sets out to consider how advanced democratic states inquire into and investigate deaths in controversial circumstances. […]
Dragan Milovanovic and Stuart Henry
Constitutive Penology The authors argue that critical attention should be paid to the ways in which discourses and ideologies of penology reproduce “free world” forms of domination. Critical criminologists need to go farther to reveal how even oppositional discourse may be constitutive of existing reality. Victims may contribute to their own domination-even when they think […]
Eileen Baldry, Bree Carlton, and Chris Cunneen
Abolitionism and the Paradox of Penal Reform in Australia: Indigenous Women, Colonial Patriarchy, and Cooptation The authors explore abolitionism in the context of the Australian colonial project and the paradoxes and challenges presented to the abolitionist vision by the project of penal reform. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Australia witnessed the emergence of a […]
Elmer H. Johnson
Managing Prisoners in Japan: “Attica” Is Not Probable The author provides a national example that differs greatly from the situation in the UK, Canada, and the United States. Japanese prisons are relatively tranquil; aggression against staff and other convicts is rare, and riots are unheard of. Certainly, the very close supervision, ritualism, and severe sanctioning […]
Erica R. Meiners
Trouble with the Child in the Carceral State This article examines how the child frames transactions within the US carceral state. Part one defines the frameworks of prison abolition that shape this analysis. Part two identifies the flexibility of the contemporary category of the child using three examples of current tropes of the child within […]
Jason Vick
“Putting Cruelty First”: Liberal Penal Reform and the Rise of the Carceral State Why are so many people in prison today? How do we make sense, more generally, of the fact that all the world’s liberal democracies rely on incarceration as an essential tool of punishment? Specifically, why is it that the discourses and practices […]
Joe Sim
“We Are Not Animals, We Are Human Beings”: Prisons, Protest, and Politics in England and Wales, 1969-1990 This article discusses the policy implications of the disastrous road of warehousing a growing underclass. In both the UK and United States, understaffing, gross overcrowding, and a general deterioration in the quality of prison life have made prisoners […]