Theoretical Criminology

This article examines the ways in which sustainability discourses intersect with carceral policies. Building new prisons to ‘green’ industry standards; making existing prison buildings less environmentally harmful; incorporating processes such as renewable energy initiatives; offering ‘green-collar’ work and training to prisoners; and providing ‘green care’ in an effort to reduce recidivism are all provided as evidence of ‘green’ strategies that shape the experience of prisoners, prison staff and the communities in which prisons are located. Although usually portrayed positively, this article proposes an alternative, potentially more contentious, interpretation of the green prison. In the context of mounting costs of incarceration, we suggest that green discourses perversely are fast becoming symbolic and material structures that frame and support mass imprisonment. Consequently, we argue, it may be the penal complex, rather than the environment, which is being ‘sustained’. Moreover, we suggest this is a topic worthy of attention from ‘green criminologists’.

Restorative justice has been the subject of much theoretical criminological debate and policy innovation. However, little consideration has been given explicitly to issues of temporality and the challenges they raise. Yet, at its heart, restorative justice provides a rearticulated understanding of the relationship between the past and future; one that seeks to marry otherwise tense and ambiguous dynamics of instrumental and moral reasoning, along with risk-based and punitive logics. This article explores a number of dimensions in which questions of time, timing and time-consciousness are implicated in conceptions and practices of restorative justice. It highlights the social, plural and contested nature of time and temporalizations with relevance to restorative justice. It points to new lines of enquiry and analysis with inferences for the implementation of restorative values and conceptions of justice. It concludes with reflections on the multiple temporalities inferred in shifts of scale in the application of restorative justice.

Expressions of masculinity in prison are most often characterized as being structured in response to an environment that encourages displays of stoicism, bravery, physical prowess and violence/aggression. However, we found that the antagonistic, precarious and risk-prone environment of the prison shapes prisoners’ behaviours and the constitution of ‘normative’ and hegemonic masculinities in more nuanced ways than prior research suggests. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 56 male parolees, we explored how these men perceived and responded to risk while incarcerated, as well as how prison masculinities are linked with experiences and management of risk to their personal (legal, physical and emotional) safety. In this article, we focus on how prisoners mobilized and negotiated their masculine subjectivities to handle the uncertainty of imprisonment and the various risks they encountered in prison. We argue that penal risks and prison masculinities are mutually constitutive; risk is linked to perceptions of physical and emotional vulnerability, which shape prisoners’ masculine embodiment. Simultaneously, prisoners try to respond to uncertainty and perceived risk in ways that present their masculinity as empowered rather than submissive. Our findings advance the conceptualization of prison and hegemonic masculinities, penal environments and risk/uncertainty.

Increasingly, state crime scholarship frames criminality as a social property that attaches to particular illegitimate state practices through a mediated process of struggle from below. Building on this foundation, the following article presents a comparative study of two cases—using a range of primary materials—where sabotage was deployed by social movements to stigmatize, dramatically, illegitimate state–corporate conduct. In order to understand the symbolic and practical significance of this exchange, a theory of indifference will be developed. It will be argued that in the cases observed sabotage acted as a device which social movements could employ to impose a sense of consequence on organizational actors otherwise indifferent to, and alienated from, the significant harms their operations’ produced.

This article brings the concept of incorporation as used in studies of citizenship into the analysis of the reception of ex-prisoners by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). I introduce the concept of ‘prisoner incorporation’ to illustrate the ways in which NGOs, tasked with reentry work through devolution policies, include ex-prisoners as citizens. I use data from policy and organizational documents, interviews with staff at 18 NGOs, and program observations to demonstrate that incorporation varies by religious and political orientation and the receipt of Department of Corrections (DOC) funding. I distinguish between NGOs focused on ‘classic reentry’, which emphasizes treatment and work-focused economic incorporation, and those focused on ‘broader incorporation’, in which domestic labor, culture, religion, and politics warrant the inclusion of ex-prisoners as citizens in particular communities. Based on the results, I reconsider arguments that NGOs have a limited ability to shape the citizenship of criminalized people.

This article examines the enduring ways that racial politics are masked by discourses of place and family in the history of juvenile justice in the USA. The tropes of place and family have been invoked since the inception of the USA’s juvenile justice system and have influenced the processes of policing, removal, and return, even as the latest incarnation of reforms focus on building juvenile justice facilities and alternatives to incarceration within urban areas. By pointing to recent manifestations of this rhetoric in New York, the article identifies the thread that links these claims together: the desire by social control agents for submission by the primarily impoverished and young people of color who defy legal authority.

Communications technologies are being used in varying ways to perpetrate and extend the harm of sexual violence and harassment against women and girls. Yet little scholarship has explored the uses of communications technologies, to support reporting, investigation and prosecution of sexual assault, nor indeed less formal mechanisms of justice. In this article, I contend that communications technologies are not simply new tools for conventional formal justice, but rather that these technologies are mediating new mechanisms of informal justice outside of the state, in turn challenging meanings of justice in western liberal democracies. In so doing I employ concepts of technosocial practices operating in counter-public online spaces, to explore the potential (and limits) of communications technologies as mediators of rape justice.