Punishment & Society

This article draws on the findings of an ethnographic study of social enquiry and sentencing in the Scottish courts. It explores the nature of the practice of social enquiry (that is, of social workers preparing reports to assist sentencers) and explores the extent to which this practice is being reconfigured in line with the recent accounts of penal transformation. In so doing, we problematize and explore what we term the ‘governmentality gap’; meaning, a lacuna in the existing penological scholarship which concerns the contingent relationships between changing governmental rationalities and technologies on the one hand and the construction of penality-in-practice on the other. The findings suggest that although policy discourses have, in many respects, changed in the way that these accounts elucidate and anticipate, evidence of changes in penal discourses and practices is much more partial. Drawing on Bourdieu, we suggest that this may be best understood not as a counter-example to accounts of penal transformation but as evidence of an incompleteness in their analyses which reflects the ‘governmentality gap’ and requires the development of more fully cultural penology drawing on ethnographies of penality.

Despite heated debate over levels of convergence and diversity, risk assessment and behaviour management have become central themes of international youth justice strategies in several jurisdictions. However such strategies represent more than a new formula for the governance of delinquent youth as they also offer a novel framework for articulating class discipline within the context of a reconfigured style of socio-political and economic leadership. Postmodern social theory has rendered old-fashioned any attempts to meta-theorize about class in criminological research and it is therefore not intended to rekindle the grand narratives generated form orthodox Marxism. Nevertheless, class inequalities, along with those generated by other social forces, continue to structure many social relations and this article will explore the complex micro-processes by which class interests are articulated in youth justice relations through the twin processes of the individualization of risk and the responsibilization of young offenders. The argument is illustrated through research on the outcomes of government sponsored education, training and employment programmes for young offenders in England and Wales.

The importance of order maintenance in prisons has generated numerous studies of the correlates to inmate misconduct. Very few of these studies, however, have focused specifically on the correlations between inmates’ race/ethnicity and prison rule breaking. Race and ethnicity could be relevant to an understanding of prison rule breaking if inmates bring their ecologically structured beliefs regarding legal authority, crime and deviance into the institutional environment. Using data from two nationally representative samples of males incarcerated in state facilities, we examined the individual-level effects of an inmate’s race and ethnicity on his likelihood of engaging in various forms of misconduct during incarceration, as well as the contextual effects of the racial/ethnic composition of inmate and correctional staff populations on levels of rule breaking. Findings reveal that the effects of an inmate’s race and ethnicity differ by offense type, and the racial/ethnic composition of inmates and correctional staff have both main and conditioning effects on levels of misconduct. Implications of these results are discussed within a social control framework.

This article argues that the media frames utilized in the first month after Hurricane Katrina legitimated punishment as disaster policy through lurid reports of individual crime. The application of prevailing state policies led to a quick embrace of punitive policing and incarceration, and journalistic routines ended up supporting this process. Although journalists openly expressed their disgust with state neglect, news conventions nonetheless criminalized much of the New Orleans population and suggested militarized policing and imprisonment as fundamental to restore order. Lacking credible sources, reporters relied on rumors and helped create a racialized ‘looter class’ that aided state efforts to regain control through existing policies of mass incarceration rather than mutual aid or state welfare. Even though various media outlets recanted the more extreme elements of this coverage, the tropes they employed created a lasting effect. Building off Stuart Hall et al.’s (1978) analysis of a moral panic over mugging in 1970s England, this article examines both the conventions and consequences of this crisis coverage. The result, I argue, bolstered the existing crisis of incarceration.