Punishment & Society

This article explores the nature and function of trials and sentencing rallies as mediums of propaganda in Chinese criminal court work. It looks at trials and rallies as two means through which courts project images and messages outwards to a community of onlookers, spectators and participants. The theatrics of adjudication and sentencing carry images and messages about the State, order, legitimacy and the consequences of punishment. The educative and deterrence tasks of the court in trials and sentencing rallies are therefore perceived as part of a wider program of social control and socialization in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The main period under examination is a pivotal stage of legal history in the PRC, the first years of the post-Mao reform period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This examination of trials and sentencing rallies will show that despite the two-decade long push to effect a new modernist legal culture based on professionalism, regularity and bureaucratic rationality, criminal justice practices in China have continued to rely on the crude theatrics of expressive punishment that have been employed since the days of revolution.

This article reviews the primary claims made for restorative justice as a response to offending. It summarizes Home Office research published in 2001 which evaluated seven restorative justice schemes operating in England during the 1990s. The narrative sets the recent resurgence of interest in the potential of restorative justice within Great Britain in a wider context of successive state responses to victimization. The article highlights recent national and European initiatives and links the findings of the Home Office research to evaluations of other schemes in England and Scotland. It addresses basic questions concerning the proper measure for the evaluation of the success or otherwise of restorative justice schemes, and draws attention to the recommendations of the Review of the Criminal Justice System, that there should be a national strategy for the implementation of restorative justice initiatives.

This article formulates a theoretical framework that helps to explain the origins of prison riots. Our explanation builds on existing theories, taking the integrative theory outlined by Useem and Kimball (1989) as a starting point. It shows how a variety of causal factors interact to create an institutional environment in which routine incidents can develop into full-fledged riots. We illustrate our framework with an analysis of the Strangeways prison riot in Manchester, UK (1990).

The focus of this article is to investigate how Latino Americans have been historically racialized in popular culture, key state legislative iniatives, and jurors’ death sentencing decisions. While the bulk of the literature on the death penalty and criminal punishment more broadly focuses on racial disparities in sentencing outcomes, far less is know about how the sentencing process is itself racialized. Drawing on the stories of former jurors who served in death penalty cases involving Latino American defendants, we argue that such agents of the state are racially disciplined to punish in capital murder trials. Finally, we comment on directions for a more culturally-centered study of penal action.