Punishment & Society

In the last years there has been a growing effort from different theoretical perspectives to interrogate critically the impact of colonialism in the past and present of institutions and practices of crime control, both at the central and peripheral contexts, as well as in the production of knowledge in the criminological field. In this feature piece we examine this debate. We offer a critical account of key themes and problems that emerge from the intimate relationship between colonialism and punishment that directly challenge the persistent neglect of these dimensions in mainstream criminological scholarship. We aim to foreground the relevance of this relationship to contemporary enquiries. We highlight that decolonization did not dismantle the colonial roots of the cultural, social and political mechanisms informing contemporary punishment. They are still very much part of criminal justice practice and are thus also central to criminological knowledge productions.

Recent work in postcolonial and border criminologies has called for more extensive consideration of the complex temporal and geographic dimensions of penal authority. This article explicates new dimensions of the modern state’s penal authority by analyzing the execution and remembrance of Mewa Singh, a Sikh anticolonial activist convicted of killing Canadian immigration agent William C Hopkinson in Vancouver in 1914. Because Hopkinson was embedded in racial immigration enforcement against Indian populations as well as intelligence gathering about anticolonial activities, his death galvanized fields of penal authority that spanned the imperatives of the Canadian nation-state and the British Empire. Using archival and observational data, this article tracks how the significance of Mewa’s execution has been articulated through these penal fields as well as through recent practices of memorialization undertaken by local Sikh and Indian communities. Insofar as these mnemonic practices frame Mewa’s death as a sacrifice necessitated by state racism, my analysis illuminates the complex temporal parameters of penal fields of authority as well as the manner in which they are conditioned by racial borders and boundaries.

Based on a large, comparative study of prisoner experiences in England & Wales and Norway, this article explores the concept of the ‘depth of imprisonment’ – put most simply, the degree of control, isolation and difference from the outside world – in two stages. First, it sets out the various factors that contribute to ‘depth’ i.e. its core components. Second, it outlines the most frequent metaphors used to communicate depth, highlighting the ways in which these metaphors bring into focus a range of ways in which the basic fact of imprisonment – the deprivation of liberty, and the removal of the individual from the community – is experienced. In doing so, the article also makes a case for the adoption of conceptual metaphors as a means of describing prison systems and regimes, and thereby attending to the ways in which prisoners experience some of the most fundamental elements of incarceration.

Snitching is the act of providing information to the authorities in exchange for rewards. Although snitching is, strictly speaking, a taboo among street offenders and prison inmates worldwide, offenders regard some types of snitching as relatively more acceptable than others. Studies regarding the social meaning of snitching have mostly been conducted with reference to American and European contexts, while the situation in the Asian or Chinese context has not been thoroughly explored. This paper helps to fill a research gap by examining the characteristics of the social meaning of snitching in a severely under-researched context—the inmate culture within Chinese drug detention centers. Our discussion is based on data collected from semi-structured interviews with 28 former inmates of drug detention centers, and it endeavors to explore how offenders conceptualize snitching and why they perceive snitching in the way they do. Our findings show that, while inmates in Chinese drug detention centers generally despise snitching, they see some specific forms of snitching as normal or even necessary. We analyze how inmates rationalize snitching behavior in these specific cases, and argue that this process is shaped by the collective control system implemented in the detention centers: (1) the collective merit system that connects each person’s well-being to the collective well-being, and (2) the informant mechanism that divides inmates into competing factions. Finally, theoretical implications are provided.

Retributivism is one of the most prevalent theories in contemporary penal theory. However, despite its popularity it is frequently argued that too little attention has been paid to the implications of retributivism for prison management and prison life, including prison visits and furlough. More so, it has been questioned both whether the various forms of retributivism found in the philosophical literature on criminal punishment have anything to say about what prison life ought to be like and whether they are able to criticize deeply contested rules and practices, such as those that deny inmates contact with family-members for the sake of prison discipline. In this paper, we argue that prison visits and furlough have a crucial role in a prison system based on retributivist principles. In particular, we argue that the communicative theory of punishment has important theoretical resources for proving a strong and compelling rationale for both furlough and visitation on retributivist grounds. Besides exploring this rationale, we also discuss the practical implications of this view for the penal policy.

This article draws on interview data with women in two prisons in the UK to understand the emotionally nuanced and sensorially attuned relationship between confined individuals and carceral space. The article presents an ‘emotional map’ comprising: (i) living or ‘being’ spaces; (ii) free places; and (iii) ‘therapeutic spaces’ in prisons.This tri-spatial thematic analysis enables us to use Victor Turner’s concepts of ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’ to uncover the complex, contradictory and sometimes transient emotions that permeate spaces in prison. This in turn allows us to explore the particular challenges that accompany transitional periods of adjustment to prison life, the environmental constraints that women in prison live with and navigate, and the careful ‘spatial selection’ strategies they implement in order to seek or avoid particular emotional states.

This article explores the relationship between supervisory approaches to governance, punishment, and poverty among people with drug convictions. Tying government assistance to supervision could improve employment and economic outcomes. However, if experienced as punishment, recipients may forgo financial assistance and be more likely to experience poverty. Using information on policies that restrict access to welfare for people with drug felony convictions in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP), this paper makes two contributions. First, it documents state variation in the balance between supervision and punishment in these bans. Second, using data from NLSY97, it estimates how individuals’ likelihood of being in poverty is related to state SNAP drug ban policies. States have shifted away from overtly punitive policies denying access to welfare toward policies that increase supervisory requirements, especially for SNAP. This shows that punitiveness extends beyond work activation programs like TANF. Additionally, poverty among people with drug convictions is almost half in no ban states compared to those in full ban states. While poverty is lower in states that include supervisory requirements than in those for which a drug conviction fully blocks access to welfare, this difference was not statistically significant.