Punishment & Society

In this study, we address two observed gaps in existing accounts on Chinese community corrections (hereafter CCC): 1) lack of multilevel understanding of this penal institution’s local variations in a highly centralized penal regime; 2) inadequate scrutiny of political logics of, and the authoritarian state’s significance in, its recent formal introduction. Those limits may inhibit adequate understandings of state power and punishment in an authoritarian polity like China. To that end, we argue for a multilayered and hybrid conceptualization of CCC as an assemblage of penal welfare and penal sovereignty to understand CCC’s formation and function. Fracturing the holistic entity of CCC, our study challenges the approach to viewing it as a system of singular logics and unifying structure, and contrasts three modes of operational practices across localities—bureaucratic, professionalization, and technology-dominant models. Moreover, our analysis of its political functions suggests that in effect penal sovereignty subjugates penal welfare within contemporary Chinese penality. Far from heralding the full-fledged rise of Chinese penal welfare, this legal formalization represents a space created for the authoritarian state to penetrate political ideologies, and to reclaim, consolidate and exercise sovereign power through managerial penal strategies in a rapidly developing and differentiating society.

Indigenous women are vastly overrepresented in Canada’s federal prisons and represent the fastest growing prison population in Canada. This critical commentary utilizes a decolonial framework to examine how being Indigenous and female increases one’s risk of being victimized, murdered, and subject to colonial control by exploring the connections between the construction of Indigenous women as less than human and the use of carceral space to control, destroy, and assimilate this population. Specifically, the authors apply Woolford and Gacek’s notion of genocidal carcerality to the intersectional forces of systemic racism and discrimination that result in their overincarceration. Further, the article critiques the Indigenization of Canada’s federal correctional service for failing to meet the needs of this population and for perpetuating an assimilative and stereotypical portrayal of Indigenous women that perpetuates colonial harm.

The criminalization of migration-related acts, rather than simply strengthening state authority, also represents a risk of exposing legal legitimacy deficits. By drawing on juridical analysis of court judgements, legal documents, and case law, together with ethnographic observation in court and analysis of media coverage, the article argues for acknowledging the extra-legal aspects of criminalization. By employing the concept of legal consciousness, we bring attention to how bordering processes are challenged from below by using the courtroom to expose potential legitimacy deficits concerning crimmigration enforcement. The article shows how the courtroom is not merely a place for convictions but also a site for resistance and social mobilization: a platform that may give marginalized groups voice and visibility, invoking a complex picture of state power, involving the ability to use force as well as reluctance and ambivalence connected to the questionable legitimacy of criminalization strategies.

This study examined the cases of women on death in which evidence of the defendant’s intellectual disability or mental illness was presented at trial. Of the total population of 52 women on death row at the beginning of 2020 and seven recently-executed women, over 50% qualified for the study. According to expert testimony, most of the women in the sample had a below-average IQ score and/or a neurological deficit, and all but three suffered from a serious mental illness. Almost all had abusive and dysfunctional backgrounds. Recent Supreme Court rulings have banned the execution of defendants with intellectual disability and opened the door to a consideration of execution exemption for defendants with severe mental illness or brain abnormalities. However, considerable judicial equivocation over the meaning and measurement of mental impairments remains. Even as a mitigating factor, the mental health problems of the defendants in this study were given little weight.

In the United States, Catholics make up more than 50 million members of the adult population, or about one in five Americans. It is unclear whether their religious affiliation shapes Catholics’ views on public policy issues, ranging from the legality of abortion to criminal justice practices. Capital punishment is especially salient, given that Pope Francis announced in 2018—as official Catholic Church teaching—that the death penalty is “inadmissible” under all circumstances. Based on two national surveys, the current project explores Catholics’ support for state executions before (2017) and after (2019) the Pope’s momentous change in the church’s Catechism. At present, little evidence exists that Pope Francis’s doctrinal reform has impacted Catholics, a majority of whom—like Americans generally—continue to favor the death penalty for murderers. Data from our additional 2020 MTurk survey show that only 17.0% of Catholic respondents could correctly identify the Church’s position on capital punishment. Despite these results, Pope Francis’s teachings provide Catholic leaders and activists with a compelling rationale for opposing the death penalty and holding Catholic public officials accountable for espousing offenders’ execution. Further, for the next generation of Catholics, instruction in the inadmissibility of capital punishment, as part of the Church’s consistent ethic of life, will be integral to their religious training.

Australia’s detention-deportation regime is setting the agenda for New Zealand’s domestic criminal justice system, with implications for criminological understandings of ‘crimmigration’ and ‘bordered penality’. In response to recent changes in Australian migration law which have seen an increased number of deportations to Aotearoa New Zealand, the New Zealand government introduced legislation, the Returning Offenders (Management and Information) (“ROMI”) Act 2015, which created a monitoring regime for returning New Zealanders convicted of criminal offending in an overseas jurisdiction. The sentence an individual is subject to in Australia is extended, both geographically and temporally, creating multiple punishments for this particular group of offenders. While ostensibly modelled from domestic parole arrangements, in practice the ROMI regime entails greater restriction while offering less in the way of legal protection. The differential treatment of returning New Zealanders is sustained through their discursive construction as both “criminals” and de facto “aliens”. By treating returnees as threatening outsiders to be contained, rather than vulnerable people to be supported, the New Zealand state also extends the risk logics underpinning the Australian regime. Although the ROMI Act is novel, the regime conforms to the racialised patterns of exclusion and criminalisation which have persisted in Aotearoa New Zealand since colonisation.

The article analyses an original dataset on policies adopted in 47 European countries between December 2019 and June 2020 to prevent coronavirus from spreading to prisons, applying event-history analysis. We answer two questions: 1) Do European countries adopt similar policies when tackling the COVID-19 pandemic in prisons? 2) What factors are associated with prison policy convergence or divergence? We analyze two policies we identified as common responses across prisons around the world: limitations on visitation rights for prisoners, and early releases of prisoners. We found that all states in our sample implemented bans on visits, showing policy convergence. Fewer countries (16) opted for early releases. Compared to the banning of visitation, early releases took longer to enact. We found that countries with prison overcrowding problems were quicker to release or pardon prisoners. When prisons were not overcrowded, countries with higher proportions of local nationals in their prisons were much faster to limit visits relative to prisons in which the foreign population was high. This research broadens our comparative understanding of European carcerality by moving the comparative line further East, taking into account multi-level governance of penality, and analyzing variables that emphasize the ‘society’ element of the ‘punishment and society’ nexus.

Nationwide, prison populations have declined nearly 5% from their peak, and 16 states have seen double-digit declines. It is unclear, though, how decarceration has affected racial disparities. Using national data, we find substantial variation in state prison populations from 2005–2018, with increases in some states and declines in others. However, although declines in the overall state prison population were associated with declines for all groups, states with rising prison populations experienced slight upticks in prison rates among the white population, while rates among Black and Latinx populations declined. As a result, greater progress in overall decarceration within states did not translate to larger reductions in racial disparities. At the same time, we do not find evidence that a decline in prison populations is associated with a rise in jail incarceration for any racial/ethnic group. In additional exploratory analyses, we suggest that recent incarceration trends may be driven by changes in returns to prison for probation and parole violations, rather than commitments for new crimes. Our results make clear that while efforts to reverse mass incarceration have reduced the size of prison populations in some states, they have not yet made substantial progress in resolving the crisis of race in American criminal justice.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are released from prison every year. Drawing on interviews conducted in the mid-2010s in the context of the Multi-site Family Study on Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration, this article explores how the strains of prisoner re-entry interact with those of poverty and family life, and how these combined strains condition proactive engagement with the legal system among re-entering individuals and their intimate and co-parenting partners. We focus our analysis on problems, tensions and struggles for control in parenting and partnership, including inter-parental violence, as these often led to calls or actions that clearly allowed for coercive intervention by parole authorities, courts, child support enforcement, or child protective services. We identify the precise circumstances and motives that lay behind such requests or allowances, and explain how these related to the cynical regard in which former prisoners and their partners typically held the coercive apparatus of the state. Through bringing our empirical findings into an interplay with scholarship on the role of punishment in the governance of poverty under neoliberalism, we examine how the strains faced by former prisoners' households and the tactics they used to deal with them pertain to broader politico-economic arrangements.

Over the past decade, the political landscape in the realm of criminal justice policy has shifted towards broad support for prison reform. Recent calls for defunding as a solution to the problems of mass incarceration are gaining traction from a diverse group of political actors. The case of prison reform in Mississippi provides important insight on the effects of a reform model that prioritizes cutting costs. This article examines the consequences of pursuing penal reforms in the broader context of fiscal austerity. First, the case of Mississippi shows how local context shapes austerity driven reforms in ways that make them particularly unsuited to address mass incarceration. The development of the carceral state in Mississippi created labor and public-sector dependencies on the correctional system and overcoming these interests will require public investments. Second, the article shows how austerity driven reforms fail to adequately staff and support public sector correctional workers which has rendered prisons in Mississippi even more dangerous and deadly. The Mississippi case indicates that until there are more significant drops in incarceration rates and robust alternatives to the functions of the carceral state, reductions in correctional budgets do not signal downsizing, but rather mass incarceration on the cheap.