Beyond American myopia: The state of theorizing in Punishment & Society

Introduction

Body horror, existential dread, and unresolvable moral dilemmas. These are enduring features of the human condition and central to the study of crime and punishment across time and space. What makes the field of punishment and society so compelling is its collective effort to try to understand and explain these dilemmas with academic rigor, discipline, and sincerity. It takes as its object of study suffering, pain and violence but also excavates traces of human dignity, stories of emancipation, and ongoing struggles for justice. Although the field coalesced over thirty years ago on the question of mass incarceration in the USA, punishment and society scholarship now includes a wider range of topics as scholars document the proliferation of state violence and rising authoritarian tactics across a range of societies, which ensnare more people, particularly those of color and noncitizens, within its grasp. This essay examines the current state of theorizing in the field, how and why it is up to the task at hand and why and where it may fall short. I will go on to argue the field's shortcomings are not due to claims of normativity but rather its myopic gaze of American exceptionalism. I call for better integration of more global, historical, and comparative work that pushes geographic, methodological, and theoretical boundaries. Below, I highlight the field's pressing empirical challenges, significant empirical and theoretical contributions, its gaps and limitations, before suggesting future research.

A view from a former editor: the role of theory in Punishment & Society

In the five years that Alessandro de Giorgi and I served as co-editors in chief of the journal Punishment & Society, 2020–2024, we were shepherds to over 125 articles, ¹ including work that continues to be widely read, cited and asks new kinds of research questions. Our tenure coincided with a global pandemic, so we are eternally grateful to all the contributors, peer reviewers, readers, and community of scholars who not only kept the journal afloat during this time but pushed the journal into exciting new directions.

That is why it was so baffling and disheartening to read two recent essays (Rubin, 2025; Rubin and Shalaby, 2025; for critique, see Levine, 2025) that disparage the state of the field as one dominated by normative claims, atheoretical approaches, minor contributions, possible stagnation, and instead wax nostalgic for grand theory. I am unconvinced that punishment and society need another “big theory” to guide our research questions and answers—do we really want to wade through another decade of articles about how one central factor, such as neoliberalism or penal populism, explains everything we need to know about criminal justice? There is a reason that scholars have left grand theory behind as its promise to explain punishment in all times and places cannot contain empirical reality, it tends to flatten or hollow out complexity, and it often obscures the experiences of those subject to punishment across time and space. In the adjacent field of sociology, some scholars have argued we should abandon theory and instead develop thicker description, rich empirical detail, and narratives as a better way to gain an understanding of the phenomenon under investigation (Besbris and Khan, 2017; Mears, 2017). In the field of punishment and society, scholars, students, and researchers already provide much richer, deeper, more nuanced, and innovative approaches that integrate empirical research into theorizing and theory building. Of course, no journal, discipline, or subfield is beyond reproach, criticism, internal debate, or calls to change direction or bring in new people and fresh ideas. All those things are necessary for intellectual growth, recruitment of new scholars, and renewal of the field.

There is a serious discussion to be had about what is theory and what is the state of theory in punishment and society. Based on my experiences as a former editor of the journal Punishment & Society, I have come to see the role of theory in the field in three distinct ways:

as an internationalizing and collective effort rather than as a parochial tool of American scholarship;

Theorizing, discussed in more detail below, is often built from the ground up, from the data, interpretations, and local contexts and is not restricted to testing other people's ideas or searching for universal truths of social life. Scholars in punishment and society are innovating new ideas but connecting them to a shared body of knowledge through dialogue and exchange. In addition, theorizing about punishment often, but not always, entails raising, analyzing, and even stating moral claims. As scholars examine the practices of criminal justice, which is by definition violent, or the imposition of violence in Cover’s (1986) classic formulation, their work often raises questions about the normalization of violence, popular support for violence, asymmetrical use of violence, targets of violence, and moral underpinnings of violence. Yet, this does not mean that scholarship can be reduced to “activist logics” or normativity claims by studying the phenomenon or even by criticizing the practices, as Rubin (2025) has argued. The point is for scholars to be transparent about their aims, intentions, and how these different elements function in the analysis. There is more than enough publishing and intellectual space to have a transparent dialogue and exchange about normative implications of the research and develop criteria for assessing it (also see Abbott, 2018; Barker, 2024; Burawoy, 2004; Loader and Sparks, 2011)[0][0]. In our field, there are lives on the line that demand moral clarity from our scholarship. As De la Rosa (2025) has written about migration, it is a luxury of academic life to withdraw from public conversations rather than make the effort to connect our research to public debate or reform.

In punishment studies, many of our peers have met the moment to challenge state violence even when they may disagree about reform (see Brown and Schept, 2017; Shelby, 2022)[0]. For instance, Cobbin-Dungy and Jones-Brown’s (2023) review essay “Too Much Policing: Why calls are made to defund the police” is one such example in which scholars explain the role of policing through lived experience, engage with a set of moral dilemmas intrinsic to state violence, and discuss community reform efforts to bring about social change. Likewise, Bosworth’s (2023) ethnographic research in British immigration detention centers has challenged conventional approaches to confinement for over a decade. In the “Politics of Pain,” she shows how the distress experienced by detainees is part and parcel of a broader political project to exclude and punish outsiders; it is a form of pain and harm which can only be alleviated through a political rather than criminological response that recognizes noncitizens, migrants, and mobile populations and their treatment as integral to the shared values of liberal democracy. She calls for a normative theory based on applied research to address this shortcoming in prison research and contest the politics of immigration. Theoretical advancements and normative and public engagement are not mutually exclusive, and the field is richer for these efforts, even when they are messy, controversial, or fail.

What is noteworthy is that even as the field has developed into new directions, it has maintained a core set of questions that provide coherence, community, and debate that animate the field. Many of these central questions revolve around the following: how to interpret and explain the character of penal regimes; how do different societies define and implement punishment; what are the boundaries of punishment; what are the reasons for penal change; how to explain variation in form and functions of punishment; how to study, convey, and interpret the lived experience of confinement; and how to characterize and explain punishment in relation to the complexities of social life. From these debates, scholars have asked new kinds of questions that will sustain the field going forward.

There is much to say about all of the above, but for now, I take up an under-explored issue that may be hindering theoretical advancements and highlight significant contributions. What follows is not an exhaustive but illustrative review with references limited for the most part to articles published in the journal between 2020 and 2025. To reiterate this point, I refer to scholarship published in the journal Punishment & Society rather than the vast literature published in the field of punishment and society, save for some exceptions to make a particular point. This focus on the journal is to keep the review and citations manageable. It is to share my perspective specifically as a former editor during this time period, to highlight patterns and trends in submissions and publications.

American myopia: decentering American experiences and perspectives

American myopia entails reading the field as if all research questions on or about the USA produced by scholars based in the USA are at the center or represent the general or universal in all things criminal justice. America is a particular place culturally, economically, socially, and historically that has led to specific kinds of penal outcomes. Some of the basic terminology of criminal justice is not even translatable in other contexts—that is, sheriff, jail. What happens in American small towns is not necessarily generalizable even when they reflect or intersect with global trends. In contrast, scholars writing on developments outside of the USA are often burdened by peer requests to justify, motivate, explain why anyone in the US would know anything about their case and provide a brief history of the topic in question. This is not bad advice, yet it is a kind of gatekeeping that has implications for how knowledge is shared, developed, challenged or confirmed. It contracts rather than expands the universe of what we know and how we know it about punishment, which is a loss for the field. A colleague was recently advised by a referee at a nominally international journal to submit her paper on a legal practice in Sweden to a Swiss journal. I am not sure what to make of this advice: whether the reviewer thought that Sweden and Switzerland were the same because of the Sw/Europe or whether legal systems outside of the US should be consigned to regional journals or regional knowledge. Either way, this kind of patronizing view is not an isolated incident, and it narrows the field.

For editors and peer reviewers, especially those working in international journals, some level of awareness about the practices of ethnocentrism in knowledge production and some level of curiosity and openness to submissions outside of the USA could at least give potential contributors a fairer chance during the review process. These and other similar points have long been made by southern criminologists, feminists and post-colonial scholars about the normalized sources of bias and exclusion built into academic institutions and practice (on relevance for punishment, see Aliverti et al., 2021; Brangan, 2023; Carrington et al., 2016; Goyes and South, 2021)[0]. In the recent past, for example, scholars writing about punishment practices in Latin America have been pressured vis à vis the review process to foist ill-fitting Anglo concepts and theories onto cases with distinct legal, economic, and political histories (see critique in Fonseca, 2018; Sozzo, 2023).

To counter these practices, broader referee panels and editorial boards with regional, local, comparative and globalized knowledge would allow for a fairer assessment of a wider range of submissions. Broader review panels could also catch minor or major errors about a particular context. Editors could more easily head off myth making about other countries as familiar tropes and national stereotypes are reproduced without question, and sometimes even encouraged to “sell” the paper (i.e., Sweden as a pillar of gender equality, as one colleague conveyed to me). For authors writing in and about the American context, some effort to communicate how their key findings relate to or are relevant for an international audience would increase the exchange of ideas, providing intellectual pathways to advance the field, potentially break up silos, and dent hegemonic tendencies. Journal editors often include a checklist or guideline for feedback; international exchange could become one of them, including questions about data sources, legal contexts, and potential international or transnational contributions.

The point about American myopia is not to dismiss research and scholarship about the USA. After all, US-based scholars make up a majority of the published articles in the journal, consistently contributing important and well-read articles, regularly conducting peer reviews, organizing panels and workshops—they show up for the field and journal in invaluable ways.

What I want to highlight here is how much scholarship outside of the USA has advanced the field and has become some of the most downloaded articles in the journal (e.g., Aliverti et al. 2021; Brangan, 2024; Jiang and Liu, 2022; McGuire and Murdoch, 2022; van de Rijt et al., 2023,[0] discussed below) but seems to have been disregarded in recent critiques (see Rubin, 2025). In their critique of the field as stagnant, Rubin and Shalaby (2025) do provide a paragraph on geographical variation and developments outside the USA, but criticize this scholarship for lacking a coherent theory from which to generalize. As noted, concepts or theories developed in one place do not always fit or explain much in another. Sometimes, generalization can be overrated or miss compelling interpretations and explanations rooted in local contexts and histories. And sometimes, a general trend or development may first be identified in sites and sources outside of the US. Like Rubin and Shalaby (2025), I agree that more synthesis of existing scholarship can advance the field, but I argue that international scholarship is necessary for this endeavor. That work has built on, modified, or challenged taken-for-granted assumptions, offering new theoretical perspectives, along with a novel set of cases, contexts, regions, institutions and power dynamics.

Punishment and society as a field of study, to its credit, is increasingly international and engaged in questions that are not only relevant to American scholars but have yielded novel theoretical insights that could be applied or modified elsewhere. Histories of state violence have been a central feature of the field and may help explain increased reliance on coercive but legal instruments, particularly in times of social upheaval and political polarization. For example, this international scholarship has a lot to say about rising authoritarianism and the misuse of coercive means for social control, especially as it has been harnessed and mobilized against noncitizens, racialized and ethnic minorities.

For instance, Hamilton’s (2023) agenda setting article on right-wing crime politics was prescient, calling for a better integration of scholarship on right-wing populism with that on crime and punishment, and has become essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the paradigm shift in European penal regimes today.

When we shift our attention to Europe, for example, we can see the proliferation of hard borders even in nominally open societies. In Europe, member states have spoken up for Ukraine, self-determination and democracy, while at the same time, they have rebuilt walls, barbed wire fences, and deployed the military in the seas to keep unwanted migrants out. Once lauded for human rights norms and social solidarity, the European Union has constructed a carceral archipelago that confines and contains unwanted migrants at distant borders. Designed to protect democratic conditions, free movement, and high quality of life for those on the inside, European societies are increasingly relying on coercive means that are expansive rather than selective. How does this shift erode the very same values they are meant to uphold, and why would it matter?

Border criminology scholars have been at the forefront of identifying, documenting, and explaining these developments and have published this leading work in Punishment & Society. Bosworth et al. (2018) published their breakthrough piece calling for punishment studies to incorporate migration control to understand how criminal justice is shifting under conditions of globalization. This article expanded the boundaries of punishment, what we understand as punishment and how it works and why. It remains a significant reference point in the field and sparked the flourishing of research on the topic, much of which appears in the journal and covers developments in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, the UK, and the Nordic countries, among other contexts (Ballesteros-Pena et al., 2024; Könönen, 2024; Weber and McCulloch, 2019). Rereading this set of work can provide tools and insights into the current American drift towards authoritarianism and the central role migration control plays in exercising this new scale of brutality, violence and repression. How has it become possible to arrest protestors for free speech or for government agents to wear masks while removing people from the streets, putting them in detention centers, and deporting them to third countries, including some US citizens?

Moreover, this international work, based on ethnographic, historical, and archival case studies, has brought in a more global and comparative perspective necessary for the growth of punishment and society scholarship. For instance, Black et al. (2021) in their Special Issue on Legacies of Empire document and explain the long-term consequences of global empire and colonialism, specifically its physical, institutional, and symbolic infrastructure that continues to shape contemporary penal regimes. This collection, noted below, not only contributes to a new global history of punishment, analytically, it provides a model to move away from the default position of studying and explaining punishment within the borders of a nation-state and takes on a transnational lens to study justice and injustice.

Many of the advancements, moreover, have been based on theorizing from lived experiences, a corrective to grand or macro accounts which can miss fine-grained conditions and how such experiences can change our understanding of the phenomenon itself (e.g., pains of imprisonment; the boundaries of punishment; gendering experience of the prison, discussed below). This work asks us to rethink taken-for-granted histories, the social dynamics and boundaries of punishment. The journal's most read and cited pieces are in line with this approach.

Internationalization and theorizing from empirical research

Recent studies build on but go beyond punishment and society scholarship by pushing the field into new empirical and theoretical terrain, a development that has been well received, as measured by readership and citation metrics based on figures published on the journal's homepage between October 4 and 22, 2025. References to journal metrics, while limiting and imprecise, are used here to illustrate interest in and support for the internationalization of theory development. The number of downloads, readership, and citations is only a partial guide and, of course, can create unrealistic expectations for scholarship and can be self-perpetuating. That said, I refer to some of these metrics to reframe how we understand recognition, engagement, and theoretical contributions.

For example, one of the most read articles (over 50,000 views) and winner of the Inaugural Best Article Prize in Punishment & Society is McGuire and Murdoch’s (2022) article “(In)-justice: An exploration of the dehumanization, victimization, criminalization, and over-incarceration of Indigenous women in Canada.” By bringing attention to the lived experiences of Indigenous women, the authors provide a set of rich narratives, powerful stories, and a critical and historical account of how and why colonialism has led to the erasure of and continued harm to Indigenous women. For punishment and society scholarship, McGuire and Murdoch (2022) contribute a new case, new dimensions of penal harm, and a succinct theoretical perspective on penal continuity. Their work further disrupts the taken-for-granted notion that mass incarceration is an American phenomenon and one reserved for men, poor, white, brown or Black. Indigenous women's experiences are not marginal to the phenomenon but central to its logic and effects. Based on the metrics, readers clearly want to know more about the experiences of Indigenous women.

Indeed, the most cited articles over the past three years in the journal reveal a wide range of scholarship in punishment and society, all of which break new empirical and theoretical ground. In one of the first articles on trans prison experiences in Punishment & Society, “Trans architecture and the prison as archive: ‘don’t be a queen and you won’t be arrested,’” Sanders et al. (2023) compare the lived experiences of trans women who have been housed in men's prisons in Australia and USA. Again, methodologically, we see the careful attention paid to the lived experiences of trans women as they navigate oppressive gender regimes built into the cultural, legal, and institutional settings of the prison, but also how trans women perform gender in innovative ways in order to survive prison and challenge those very same institutional structures. The Sanders et al. article builds on Yarbrough’s (2023) top cited article “The carceral production of transgendered poverty,” together forming an emergent literature on trans experiences with criminal justice. Through ethnographic research, Yarbrough shows how criminalization processes, especially in public spaces, not only is a consequence but a cause of trans women's poverty, tapping into core themes of punishment and society scholarship on policing, poverty, class, inequality, but identifying exponential effects on trans women, an understudied and underserved population.

In terms of internationalization, several of the top-read and top-cited articles focus on China, the Netherlands and Norway, Australia, Ireland, and comparative work on Mexico, Myanmar, and Mali, just to name a few key pieces. In their highly cited article, “Penal Welfare or Penal Sovereignty? A Political Sociology of Recent Formalization of Chinese Community Corrections,” Jiang and Liu (2022) are at the forefront of bringing in-depth research on China into punishment and society scholarship. They adapt, modify, and challenge core theoretical constructs such as penal welfarism, penal sovereignty, and the penal field in the context of China. By examining the development of Community Corrections, they show how an authoritarian state comes to rely on penal welfarism not out of concern for the well-being of offenders or as part of social democracy but rather as a strategic form of power. Jiang and Liu's theorizing about state power and penal regimes is classic punishment and society scholarship but their novel setting leads to important findings that can be applied or adapted to a range of contexts within and outside of the USA.

Likewise, van de Rijt et al. (2023), in another top read article, all based in the Netherlands, offer a comparative penology analysis of the principles of normalization in Norwegian and Dutch prisons, key reading for prison reformers trying to understand how daily lives are organized, how practices of reintegration work or not, and the limits and variation of the normalization concept itself. From Australia, Eriksson (2023) similarly examines the internal workings of the prison to show how prison officials manage and experience the stigma of doing the “dirty work” of confinement. Eriksson expands the labor concept of “dirty work” to the context of punishment and makes important empirical and theoretical contributions by doing so. In another comparative breakthrough, Carolyn Strange (Australia), Daniel Pascoe (Hong Kong) and Andrew Novak (USA) (2025) investigate the politics of abolition across the Global South and North and offer a theoretically sophisticated account that challenges the progressive human rights history of the death penalty. By examining penal reforms in the Philippines, Mexico, Myanmar and Mali, they show how abolition of the death penalty and its continued use were a result of shifting power dynamics in postcolonial social order. Moreover, they go on to question the state-centric view of the monopoly of violence as frontier justice and death squads still operate in nominally abolitionist states (on extrajudicial violence in South Africa, see Super, 2022). Their comparative account is likely to become foundational to any subsequent accounts of the complex history of abolition and the death penalty in the Global South and Global North. And theoretically, it shows how taking a global perspective on a familiar penal practice (i.e., capital punishment) can fundamentally shift our understanding of it and change our taken-for-granted explanations. It prompts new kinds of questions, such as what other penal practices may look different from a global perspective? And how would that change our current explanations of the phenomenon?

And finally, one last example in this section that speaks to the significance of internationalization of punishment and society scholarship and its breakthroughs in theorizing and empirical research is Brangan’s (2024) work on the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. In “States of denial,” Brangan, based in Scotland, conducts archival research and oral histories of women who had been placed in the Irish laundries as young women in the early part of the twentieth century and survived. From these accounts, she develops a concept of punishment that, while connected to classic theories of degradation, extends beyond it. She argues that placement in the laundries, conventionally understood as the loss of liberty, is better conceptualized as the loss of self and erasure. Brangan's research shows the blurring boundaries between prison life and social life as the repression of women helped to produce norms of citizenship, purity, conformity, and obedience, especially to the Catholic church. This work contributes in important ways to how we identify, conceptualize and explain penal regimes, and how they reproduce, reflect, and constitute social order. And interestingly, Brangan's main concept of erasure connects with McGuire and Murdoch’s (2022) research on Indigenous women as this line of scholarship seeks to bring women back into a shared history and center their experiences. It has been downloaded or viewed over 8000 times since its publication in 2024.

When I read this work, I do not get the impression that the field is stagnant, small-scale, or lacks core organizing questions as Rubin and Shalaby (2025) have claimed, far from it. All of this research builds on but goes beyond classic accounts in punishment and society scholarship as they grapple with key questions about the nature and character of punishment, the experiences of imprisonment, the borders of punishment, penal change and penal variation, and importantly, how and why punishment looks the way it does as it reflects and reproduces social order in the societies under investigation. This scholarship takes seriously the project of theorizing from the data, local contexts, fine-grained histories, comparative and global perspectives—they use and develop theoretical tools to interpret, explain, and solve empirical problems. These insights may be used to generate generalizations, but only when approached with caution, nuance, and attention to variations when faced with multiple and different contexts, past and present (on embeddedness, see Melossi, 2001). This is how new knowledge is constructed rather than simply reiterating other people's ideas (see Swedberg, 2014). Swedberg (2014) refers to this process as the art of social theory. Likewise, I tend to think of theorizing as a craft, learned through collaboration and workshops, where narratives, logic, counterfactuals, and a high tolerance for uncertainty help to sort and make sense of empirical evidence (also see Reed, 2011; Timmermans and Tavory, 2022). In “The Work of Theory,” Garland (2004), the founder of the journal Punishment & Society, argued that the role of theorizing is to solve empirical problems. This approach is especially relevant during moments of social change, which help to expose the underlying structural and cultural processes that make punishment meaningful and take its shape, particularly as it varies across time and space. Taken together, recent scholarship provides thick description, more empirical data to assess, and historical context, and connects these developments to existing scholarship to produce fresh perspectives and novel insights. The field is stronger for it. Together, this set of Punishment & Society articles shows the strengths of comparative, global, international research and research that builds theories from the ground up rather than from the top-down.

New directions: climate studies, global histories, global south

The role of theory in punishment and society is not only a collective and internationalizing effort that draws upon rich empirical details to tell us something meaningful about punishment, but it is also becoming much more globalized and globalized in different ways. Below, I highlight new developments in climate studies, global histories, theorizing from the global south, and emergent transnationalism, with illustrative examples rather than a full inventory.

Climate studies have made an impact on punishment and society, as evident from two well-cited and well-read articles. Toman’s (2023) “Something in the air: Toxic air pollution in and around US prisons,” offers a novel take on prison siting research by integrating data on health outcomes and environmental factors in and around US prisons. By analyzing nationwide data from the Environmental Protection Agency on Toxic Release Inventory, American Community Survey data, and Census data on State and Federal Adult Corrections, Toman found that communities inside and near prisons are routinely exposed to higher levels of toxic chemicals with increased risk for negative health outcomes. She argues that environmental justice is integral to understanding and explaining the persistent inequalities of punishment. Similarly, Perdue (2023), in his award-winning article “Trashing Appalachia: Coal, prisons and whiteness in a region of refuse” shows how policymakers in Appalachia replaced the extractive coal mines with exploitative prison industries, both forms of environmental and social degradation that have wreaked havoc on the land and its people. And like Toman, Perdue integrates ecology as a critical component to prison studies, an analytical and empirical insight likely to influence future research on the expanding concept of environmental justice.

While the climate studies have used local examples to tackle a global problem, several scholars have made theoretical and methodological advancements through global studies of punishment. Global histories of punishment challenge taken-for-granted explanations of the prison as they shift our accounts from prison as factory to prison as penal colony; they shift the function of the prison from disciplining the working classes to exploiting and repressing colonial subjects. Political economy still matters for punishment but clearly this has been a racialized political economy (also see Anderson, 2018; Pfingst and Kimari, 2021). With historical details, new cases, conceptual overviews of the field, and attention to colonial power dynamics, across fifteen articles in two special issues, Black et al.’s (2021) “Legacies of Empire” and Braatz et al.’s (2022) “African penal histories in global perspective” make significant contributions to rewriting the sociology of punishment with sensitivities to the lived experiences and histories from below. These special issues should have a lasting influence on the field as they become key reference points, including the journal's best article award in 2021, Pfingst and Kimari’s (2021) “Carcerality and the legacies of settler colonial punishment in Nairobi,” which relies on ethnographic and visual methods to document and explain control and containment of the city's poor neighborhoods in the aftermath of empire. Agozino (2021) rounds out the collection with the possibility of reparative justice as the last phase of decolonialization.

And finally, scholars working on Latin America have made major contributions to punishment and society by theorizing modernity from the global south (see Fonseca, 2018), examining under-explored histories such as the Portuguese military and moral crusades in Brazil (Darke and Khan, 2021), and generating new lines of research inside and outside prisons. In “Decolonizing the Criminal Question,” Aliverti et al. (2021) offer an analytical strategy that challenges the knowledge structures of mainstream criminology. Instead, they provide new questions and methodologies that take into account the legacies of colonialism, race, sovereignty, and lived experiences in Latin America in ways that continue to shape crime and punishment in contemporary society. To date, their review essay has been viewed or downloaded over 15,000 times. Perhaps more importantly, this group of scholars has inspired and supported the next generation by building community into a truly globalized network that belies geopolitical labels of North, South, East and West. The erasure of regional labels may turn out to be one of their most important accomplishments. This move towards a globalized network helps scholars shift away from nationalized containers of research and take up theoretical and empirical questions about shared processes while accounting for distinctive histories, institutions and cultural contexts. Explanations of prison conditions in Argentina, penal reform in Chile, or penal extraction in Peru (Tuesta and Paredes, 2025) contribute to a broader understanding of political economy while adding nuance and variation. Theories about why and how societies punish cannot be restricted to geographical lines on a map, especially as contemporary punishment practices cross borders. Nationalism itself is a social process that crosses borders. A global perspective can change how we think about penal practices and challenge conventional understandings.

Gaps and future directions: moral geographies of justice

Given the content outlined above, it is a difficult task to point out gaps and limitations of the field. It seems gratuitous. Nevertheless, there are oversights and weaknesses in the field. For example, much more research could systematically examine the emotional landscape of punishment in ways that go beyond assuming penal populism is driven by antipathy or anger. What are the cultural and structural dimensions that enable certain emotional expressions over others? What prompts mercy? What is forgiveness and how does it work? How does love of country support repression or violence against others? How do emotional possibilities vary across time and space or across social hierarchies and what is their impact on punishment? What drives decarceration? How and why does it vary across time and space. What are the sources of fairness, decency, moderation, humanity and humanness in these institutions? Is that possible? What are the conditions for significant change? These topics, in addition to more synthesis of existing accounts, would help to clarify what we know already, what is missing, and why it matters.

On the horizon, there are some exciting developments in border criminology that examine the moral economy of borders (Aliverti, 2021; Bosworth, 2024). Based on rich ethnographic research and more micro-level analyses, these insights into the moral and emotional landscape of bordering practices, agency, and institutions are relevant for punishment studies. On that related note, Tripkovic (2023) has been on the forefront of theorizing the central role of citizenship in punishment practices (also see Wacquant, 2026), which could be more widely adopted. Likewise, Lohne’s (2021) innovative research has brought international relations and transnationalism to punishment studies. Her work provides novel empirical cases and an analytical strategy to break away from the confines of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002), the idea that is the object of study, and criminal justice is intrinsic to the nation-state. Methodological nationalism plagues the field as the study and conceptualization of justice has been reduced to the domestic realm rather than to global processes (see Fraser, 2008). Based on these emergent trends, I think a concept such as moral geographies of justice could go a long way to integrate the emotional, moral, political, and geographic realm of punishment that avoids fixed entities or essentializing people and places. This work lies ahead.

In closing, I will just say, having spent most of my academic life immersed in this field, I feel fortunate to have been part of this intellectual movement. I have been inspired by friends, colleagues, mentors, and students who have sought to document, explain, and understand some of the bleakest moments in human relations but still find compassion, dignity and possibility in justice.