Editorial

As we introduce the 30th volume of Theoretical Criminology, we would like to take stock of the exciting work published over the past year. We had 265 submissions from 35 countries, an 8% increase from the previous year. Fifteen of those countries were from the Global South. At a time of ongoing wars and mounting authoritarian trends, we continue to promote the journal as an open space for debate and critical engagement with key questions around violence, crime, punishment and justice. Energy within the editorial team has been put to promote the work by upcoming scholars and to expand the issues where criminological inquiry matters most: from prisons, sentencing and policing, to migration, environmental harms and criminal governance in both national and transnational contexts. We introduced an Editors’ Choice section on the journal’s website to make featured work from each volume accessible to all, with the article being open access for four months.

The journal relies on the expertise of peer reviewers who are critical for maintaining integrity, robustness and fairness. In 2025, 143 scholars reviewed new and revised manuscripts for the journal; their names are listed on the following pages. We are incredibly grateful for their work, time and collegiality to make this all happen.

We also want to congratulate our 2025 Article Prize winner, Samuel Singler, for his article “Surveillance evangelism: Private technology companies and the digital futures of crimmigration control.” Building on work on private security companies in Africa, the article pushes the conceptual and empirical boundaries in digital surveillance studies and border criminology, and raises important questions about privatized knowledge production and control across the global south/north divide. The article is open access and is part of the special issue “Private Economies of Knowledge in Criminal Justice” guest edited by Katja Franko and Heidi Mork Lomell.

Looking forward to 2026, we are excited to welcome our incoming board members:

Seán Columb (University of Liverpool), Sebastian Cutrona (Liverpool Hope University), Alistair Fraser (University of Glasgow), Kate Gooch (University of Bath), Steffen Bo Jensen (Aalborg Universitet), Andrea Leverentz (North Carolina State University), Dominique Moran (University of Birmingham), Conor O’Reilly (University of Leeds), Anna Sergi (Università di Bologna), Samuel Singler (University of Essex), Milena Tripkovic (University of Edinburgh), Irene Vega (University of California, Irvine), Zoha Waseem (University of Warwick), Valeria Veigh Weiss (Universität Konstanz) and Verónica Zubillaga (Universidad Simón Bolívar). Thanks to our outgoing members for their service to the journal: Sora Han, Susanne Krasmann, Lisa Miller, Chan Suh and Maggy Lee.

We also welcome our new book review editors: Rimple Mehta and Heather Schoenfeld. Rimple is a senior lecturer in social work and communities at Western Sydney University. Her research broadly focuses on women in prison, refugee women and human trafficking. She has worked with women in prisons and detention in India, Australia and the Netherlands. She is author of the book Women, Mobility and Incarceration: Love and Recasting of Self Across the Bangladesh-India Border (Routledge, 2018). Her latest co-edited volumes include Women, Incarcerated: Narratives from India (Orient BlackSwan, 2022), Handbook on Border Criminology (Edward Elgar, 2024), and Re-imagining Social Work: Towards Creative Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Heather is an associate professor of sociology at Boston University. Her work lies at the intersection of politics, policy, race and the law. Her book, Building the Prison State: Race & the Politics of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2018), explores how and why the United States became the world’s leading jail, and she was the 2019 winner for the Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History. She is currently working on a new book project with Michael Campbell, entitled The Changing Tides of Mass Incarceration: State Variation in Decarceration Reforms.

At the same time, this means we must say farewell and a huge thank you to our outgoing book review editors, Maggy Lee and Patrick Lopez-Aguado, for leading this work in the last few years.

We also look forward to publishing a special issue guest edited by Anastasia Chamberlen and Silvia Gomes from the University of Warwick, on “Punishment beyond the prison and justice beyond punishment,” which is well underway. Then in 2027, Demar F. Lewis IV (University of Maryland) and Korey Tillman (Northeastern University) will guest edit the special issue on “Abolition: Critical empirical perspectives on materializing a world beyond carcerality.” From February 2026, we will be accepting proposals for the 2028 special issue with the same deadline of April 15 (see the submission guidelines on our website).

Ana and Leslie look forward to continuing Theoretical Criminology’s longstanding commitment to publish innovative and critically engaged scholarship.

We want to thank the following people for reviewing manuscripts in 2025:

Aitken, Dominic

Alaniz-Salas, Heather

Albert, Allely

Allum, Felia

Annick, Prieur

Aziani, Alberto

Bakko, Matthew

Ballesteros-Pena, Ana

Bandyopadhyay, Mahuya

Barker, Vanessa

Berger, Eirik

Booyens, Karen

Boutros, Magda

Bridges, Tristan

Brisman, Avi

Budo, Marilia Nadin

Burrell, Stephen

Campesi, Giuseppe

Carvalho, Henrique

Chamberlen, Anastasia

Chiarello, Elizabeth

Christian, Johanna

Cole, Simon

Copes, Heith

Corcoran, Mary

Corda, Alessandro

Crewe, Ben

Cutrona, Sebastian

Daechsel, Stefan Mazzilli

Dal Santo, Luiz

Duff, R.A.

Ewald, Alec

Fatsis, Lambros

Fili, Andriani

FitzGerald, Sharron

Fong, Kelley

Fonseca, David

Fraser, Alistair

Gallo, Zelia

Geva, Maayan

Glasbeek, Amanda

Gleason, Shane

Gooch, Kate

Goodmark, Leigh

Gual, Ramiro

Guler, Ahmet

Gundur, Rv

Gurusami, Susila

Hadjimatheou, Katherina

Hannah-Moffat, Kelly

Hatton, Erin

Haynes, Amanda

Higgins, Ethan

Horowitz, Veronica

Hubschele, Annette

Huey, Laura

Ievins, Alice

Iturralde, Manuel

Jackson, Emily

Jahnsen, Synnøve

Jarman, Ben

Jauregui, Beatrice

Jefferson, Andrew

Kammersgaard, Tobias

Karlsson, Björn

Karstedt, Susanne

Kaufman, Nicole

Kaufmann, Mareile

Khan, Omar

Kirk-Werner, Gabriela

Koch, Insa

Koehler, Johann

Kuldova, Teresa

Kupchik, Aaron

Lantz, Brendan

Laterzo-Tingley, Isabel

Lee, Maggy

Leverentz, Andrea

Leverso, John

Lewis, Demar

Light, Matthew

Lindberg, Annika

Loader, Ian

Loftus, Bethan

Lohne, Kjersti

Luk, Sharon

Lundgaard, Jenny Maria

Lynch, Michael

McClanahan, Bill

McQuade, Brendan

Messerschmidt, James

Miao, Michelle

Midgette, Greg

Miller, Johanne

Moran, Dominique

Morash, Merry

Müller, Markus-Michael

Nellis, Mike

Norrie, Alan

Patriarca, Gabriel

Petersen, Amanda

Phelps, Michelle

Phillips, Jake

Pinto, Mattia

Poechhacker, Nikolaus

Presser, Lois

Raynor, Peter

Ribeiro, Ludmila

Rodriguez Goyes, David

Russell, Emma

Ryo, Emily

Sandberg, Sveinung

Sandhu, Ajay

Sausdal, David

Schweitzer Smith, Myrinda

Scott, Daniel

Seddon, Toby

Sergi, Anna

Sertdemir Özdemir, Seçkin

Shim, Yunhee

Simpson, Rylan

Skinns, Layla

Slade, Gavin

Spalding, Amanda

Spena, Alessandro

Spencer, Dale

Spicer, Jack

Steinmetz, Kevin

Stott, Clifford

Stuart, Forrest

Super, Gail

Sweet, Paige

Tripkovic, Milena

Ugelvik, Thomas

Ullrich, Leila

Valverde, Mariana

van Brakel, Rosamunde

Van der Woude, Maartje

Walby, Kevin

Welch, Levin

Wilson, Amanda

Zedner, Lucia

Zhang, Ao