Penal incarceration is an ongoing experiment in individual separation and detachment from the social body with the aim of producing morally autonomous persons. Drawing upon fieldwork in a Portuguese prison and literature from moral anthropology, this article explores the relationship between the liminal nature of imprisonment and the ethical reflections produced by inmates. It reveals how these reflections have outside social relationships as their focus, instead of personal dispositions, beliefs or values, as intended by prison staff. This points to the need to understand sociality as constitutive of processes of ethical reflection, even in contexts where people are forcibly detached and separated from their personal relationships.
This article explores how we might imagine, discover, and rehearse a ‘lived sense of justice’. It moves beyond insisting that law and justice are distinct, positing the promise of justice-in-the-making as a necessary counterpoint to notions of justice tied only to law, legality, and punishment. The article gestures towards the humanities – to poetry, the arts, literature – as a potential antidote to contemporary political and criminological paradigms that privilege punishment as an adequate response to injustice. Drawing on work by poet and literary critic Andrea Brady and political philosopher Charles Taylor, it looks to an emergent genre of self-conscious fiction being crafted by activists and organizers from within social movements. Based on discussion of this new genre, the article examines the extent to which ‘the poetic act’ can be understood to ‘both anticipate the future and speed its coming’.
The recent legal enactment of Chinese Community Corrections (CCC) typically meshes punishment and welfare principles in Chinese penality. Few studies, however, have addressed how these principles are applied in the daily activities of the correctional workgroup, mainly correctional officers and social workers. Drawing on ethnographic data from China's urban community corrections, this study examines how the ideal of rehabilitation or penal welfarism is interpreted and embodied in the collaboration between correctional authorities and social workers, as well as negotiated within the organizational dynamics related to rehabilitation. The analysis reveals an observed pattern of ‘pride and prejudice’ that emerges from the daily practices of the correctional workgroup when handling offenders. The ‘pride’ dimension signifies that the CCC's institutional leitmotif is continual punitiveness and latent strict supervision over the stated goal of promoting offenders’ welfare. The prejudice aspect of the penal-welfare nexus indicates the ingrained notion of offenders as evil and the social impulse to exclude them. The CCC's pride and prejudice are marshaled and configured in a process termed ‘strategic coupling’ of punishment and welfare tenets to garner legitimacy. Correctional officers wield ultimate power and strategically conjure penal and benevolent elements to legitimize the CCC as the Chinese state's capacity to deliver the People's welfare.
Narrative criminology illuminates identity change but less often examines how accounts mobilize moral resources across moral orders. This article reads arrest narratives through a moral-economy lens and introduces co-legibility: the capacity of stories to be readable both in drug-market rules and mainstream respectability. Data are life-course interviews with 18 former heroin dealers and 6 former drug enforcement officers in China, analyzed narratively and thematically. Three practices structure arrest accounts: betrayal (being led in or sold out), loyalty (refusing to implicate others) and “the last time” (intent to stop framed through calculation and restraint). Narratives align drug-market norms—anti-informing, non-implication, reputation, calculation, and self-control—with mainstream notions of keeping one's word, responsibility, care for kin, and not harming others, assembling a morally acceptable self. The analysis treats credibility as a relational fit with a moral order of obligation and sanction, rather than textual style, and offers moral resources and co-legibility as tools for comparing such accounts across settings without judging their real-world acceptance.
Connecting penology and theology, this paper aims to explore how universal prisoners’ legal rights are vernacularised and localised within a specific cultural context. Building on qualitative interviews from Israeli prison officers, we argue that despite being subject to a modern prisoners’ rights paradigm, prison officers vernacularise prisoners’ dignity and humanity through the theological lens of the ‘Image of God’ discourse (in a direct or hybridised way) to (1) re-enchant carceral humanity and (2) humanise carceral legality. The findings illuminate the potential contributions and limitations of vernacularisation work in the carceral context for theorising prison officers’ professional ethics and identity, and the cultural dimensions of the making of prisoners’ rights.
Criminology has examined impression management and moral discourse but has paid limited attention to hypocrisy as an interactional practice. This article analyzes televised interviews featuring Carmine Schiavone, a senior member of the Casalesi clan, who became a state witness and later re-entered public discourse through national and regional broadcasting. Using pragmatically informed discourse analysis, hypocrisy is treated as a situated strategy for managing conflicting moral identities and shifting responsibility and blame across mafia-state relations. Five analytical themes organize the analysis: honor, legitimacy, complicity, betrayal, and resistance. The findings show how contradictory positioning is used to preserve symbolic authority after defection, frame collusion as routine governance, and produce ambiguity about responsibility for harm. Hypocrisy is distinguished from neutralization, moral disengagement, and lying by its cumulative, relational, and temporally extended structure. A zemiological framing specifies how ambiguity-making can generate social harms in mafia-affected settings, including institutional distrust and reputational contamination.
This article argues that addressing climate change requires abandoning state-centered punishment models as our response to harm and violence. The focus here is not environmental justice per se, but a consideration of how the impacts of climate change may alter criticisms of incarceration and western punitive practices in a broad sense. An approach centered on climate change can promote alternative models of justice that go beyond punishment. To support this central argument, the article has three steps: it first critiques superficial “greening of penology” efforts, advocating for ecological, participatory conflict transformation. It then delineates an ecocentric justice framework drawing on two fundamental tenets: decoupling accountability from harsh treatment through punishment and fostering non-state reparative practices. Lastly, it critically reviews the appropriation of Indigenous thought in western restorative justice, yet emphasizes other transformative, community-based harm responses from Brazil rooted in ecological principles as promising for reimagining non-punitive, climate justice.
The article explores the challenges of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in intensely surveilled carceral spaces, specifically Polish guarded detention centres for foreigners. It examines how institutional surveillance, including electronic monitoring, and direct observation and interrogative interactions, impact the researcher's position, positionality, data collection, and the establishment of trust with informants. The article builds on autoethnographic experiences of a young researcher to illustrate key difficulties, discussing surveillance not merely as an obstacle but as a powerful and inherent force, shaping fieldwork and collected data. It points out that there are important differences in how institutional surveillance affects young and senior researchers, outlining pitfalls as well as strategies for navigating the surveilled field.
From the emergency laws used to suppress resistance in Southern Italy during the country's unification in the mid-nineteenth century to the detention centres in Libya that Italy funds today, confinement has served as a persistent instrument of governance. Yet how carceral institutions produce the very categories that justify their own expansion remains among the least theorised feature. This article introduces the concept of carceral hegemony and its operative mechanism, constitutive power: the capacity of legal technologies, spatial strategies, and epistemic practices to produce the categories of the dangerous, the deviant, and the excludable that carceral governance then claims merely to manage. Drawing on four historical phases of Italian state formation, the article demonstrates that the populations to which carceral power claims to respond are not pre-given facts about the social world but are produced through governance itself. This has a direct implication for reform: interventions that accept those categories as given risk reproducing the very logic they seek to challenge.
At the centre of this paper is the question of how selves take on durable forms within transient and unpredictable environments. Drawing on material culture studies and Science and Technology Studies, this paper explores the ways in which durable objects and commodities contribute to the construction of stable adaptive states. Drawing on 30 interviews and 9 months of ethnographic observation in a men's local prison, the paper explores the ways in which the properties and use of objects serve as a way of enduring the 'liminal' stages of imprisonment. Within the distinctly transient and unpredictable context of the local prison, objects can take on a range of important roles, providing a form of adhesion around which ways of living can be formed.
This article examines how sentencing discretion in Brazil operates as a mechanism for reproducing authoritarian legal rationalities under democratic rule. It traces the origins of Brazil's discretionary sentencing to the 1940 Penal Code, enacted during Estado Novo, and shows how this architecture has persisted across political transitions. The article argues that discretion, forged under authoritarian conditions, has been normalized within democracy and facilitates institutionalized punitiveness. Judicial discretion sustains a punitive consensus and operates as a vector of penal selectivity, particularly against certain populations. By distinguishing between the authoritarian genealogy of discretionary sentencing and its contemporary punitive effects, and situating Brazil within Latin American and global patterns, the article contributes to debates on penal governance, institutional continuity, and post-authoritarian legal orders.
In at least 18 states in the USA, law enforcement officers draw blood from motorists they suspect of driving while impaired. This article presents a conceptual and theoretical investigation of law enforcement phlebotomy, a novel example of the blurred boundaries between healthcare and policing in the medico-legal borderland. As law enforcement's logics of security collide with healthcare's logics of care, the impaired driver becomes the patient/suspect, a fraught subject position produced by the coalescence of two dissimilar professional dispositions in the law enforcement phlebotomist. The vulnerability of the patient/suspect subject position demands from the law enforcement phlebotomist the same level of care provided by clinicians in healthcare settings. Although curbing impaired driving should continue to be a national priority, this tool of police power deserves scrutiny.
This article introduces Bourdieusian criminology to Naples, with the aim of re-examining the local nexus between street culture and urban crime. Drawing on a year-long ethnography conducted between 2016 and 2017, it focuses on the performance of violence and its symbolic value in the Quartieri Spagnoli, a disadvantaged neighbourhood long infiltrated by the Camorra (Naples' local mafia) that has, in recent years, witnessed a dramatic surge in tourism amid the city's broader transformation. The article argues that, as a result of this transformation, symbolic returns on violence are diminishing, as illustrated by an ethnographic case of failed criminal distinction. Beyond offering an original insight into the workings of street fields 'from off the map' of the extant literature, the article also shows how Bourdieusian criminology can serve as a powerful antidote to stubbornly persistent essentialist readings of organised crime in southern Italy.
This article picks up the trail of the wolf-in-police, from its European origins to the western frontiers of the United States and, finally, to the imaginaries of contemporary police power. We describe the role of the wolf as a prototypical criminal "enemy" of European and early American law, order, and civilization, the police obsession with the wolf as a mythical symbol of American indigeneity and a material threat to settler colonial order, and the moments in which cops adopt the image of the wolf as an avatar through which to articulate a police vision of natural order. Through an interdisciplinary reading of some key texts and cultural artifacts, we contribute to theoretical understandings of police power's role in the fabrication of settler colonial order by illustrating the unique durability and centrality of the wolf in the police imagination.
