Building, Staffing and Insulating: An Architecture of Criminological Complicity in the School-to-Prison Pipeline The concept of the school-to-prison pipeline illuminates and dissects the continuum between education and incarceration. Most often, the concept is deployed to call attention to the criminalization of youth of color in urban schools and the mechanisms that facilitate their entry into […]
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Lizbet Simmons
Profiting from Punishment: Public Education and the School Security Market This article charts the invigoration of the penal state in an unlikely place: the American public school system. The US educational system and the US correctional system are quintessential representations of the social welfare state and the penal state respectively and are typically configured as […]
Randolph R. Myers and Tim Goddard
Pyrrhic Victory? Social Justice Organizations as Service Providers in Neoliberal Times Beginning in the late 1990s, the United States witnessed a proliferation of grassroots organizations focused on dismantling, and providing alternatives to, the contemporary justice system-challenging laws, their enforcement, and mobilizing for youth justice and criminal justice systems that are both effective and fair to […]
Judah Schept
“Keep Local Kids Local”: Departed Capital, Derelict Land, and (Neo)Liberal Detention Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a small and progressive Midwestern city, this article examines discourses and practices of juvenile justice policy that purport to reject the politics of mass incarceration and yet which embrace local carceral expansion. In a community otherwise […]
Alexandra Cox
Responsible Submission: The Racialized Consequences of Neoliberal Juvenile Justice Practices This article focuses on the racialized consequences of neoliberal juvenile justice practices. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork inside of one state’s secure residential facilities and alternative to incarceration programs, the article scrutinizes contemporary intervention practices used with young people. These practices emphasize […]
Justin Turner
Being Young in the Age of Globalization: A Look at Recent Literature on Neoliberalism’s Effects on Youth This article presents new literature concerning recent trends involving the lived experiences of youth within a society seemingly focused on the axiomatic logics of neoliberalism. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement, youth have been involved in […]
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 […]
Justin Piché
Playing the “Treasury Card” to Contest Prison Expansion: Lessons from a Public Criminology Campaign This article explores how Canadian abolitionists have sought to tap into public anxieties about the economy to contest the further entrenchment of imprisonment through campaigns emphasizing the impact of punishment measures on the pocketbooks of taxpayers. Building on Loader’s discussion on […]
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 […]
Mick Ryan and Tony Ward
Prison Abolition in the UK: They Dare Not Speak Its Name? This article discusses the history, achievements, and prospects of the movement for prison or penal abolition in the United Kingdom, and in particular the ideas promoted by RAP (Radical Alternatives to Prison) in the 1970s and 1980s. The authors argue that while RAP patently […]
Vincenzo Ruggiero
Utopian Action and Participatory Disputes Is abolitionism a utopian posture in the face of social events, problems, and their solution? After specifying the type of utopianism implicitly embraced by penal abolitionism, this article traces some key features that constitute the religious, philosophical, and political underpinning of this school of thought. It then discusses how proponents […]
Ruth Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada
Grassroots Peacemaking: The Paradox of Reconciliation in El Salvador This article challenges the premises of “reconciliation” for state-led processes that reunites post-conflict societies. Based on ethnographic research in El Salvador, it is argued that such efforts entail condemning human rights violations and celebrating the transition to peace, yet overlook socio-economic disparities. The result is a […]
J. Patrice McSherry
The Víctor Jara Case and the Long Struggle against Impunity in Chile The judicial case concerning the 1973 torture and murder of Víctor Jara, beloved Chilean singer-songwriter and pioneer of Chile’s New Song movement, has continued for almost 40 years. Víctor Jara was a celebrated musician, theater director, and composer. His songs spoke stirringly of […]
Kevin Steinmetz and Jurg Gerber
“It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way”: Hacker Perspectives on Privacy The article examines hacker perspectives on privacy by analyzing the content of the widely circulated hacker zine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Four major themes emerge (dualisms, responsibility to protect privacy, ubiquity of threats, and the role hackers perform or should perform in privacy issues) […]
John F. Wozniak, with Francis T. Cullen and Tony Platt
Book Symposium: Richard Quinney’s The Social Reality of Crime: A Marked Departure from and Reinterpretation of Traditional Criminology Three authors address the influence of Richard Quinney’s The Social Reality of Crime on their work and on progressive criminology more generally. commentary Citation: Social Justice Vol. 41, No. 3 (2014): 197-215
Rachel Herzing
“Tweaking Armageddon”: The Potential and Limits of Conditions of Confinement Campaigns This commentary compares the discipline regimes in Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened its doors in 1829, with that faced by prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of Pelican Bay State Prison in California, where inmates have initiated a hunger strike. commentary, Pelican Bay […]