How is order produced in prisons where formal authority is weak, fragmented or strategically constrained? Drawing on 85 handwritten edicts of the Russian criminal fraternity vory-v-zakone and interviews with former prisoners, this article analyses the production of extra-legal order in Russian penal institutions. We show that the vory-v-zakone constitute a durable, institutionalised and trans-local system of criminal governance that coexists with, and at times supplements or contests, state authority. Their governance relies on reputation, communication networks, coercion and redistributive mechanisms, producing a form of authority that many inmates perceive as more predictable and, paradoxically, more humane than formal prison administration.
As the death penalty declines in sub-Saharan Africa, capital treason laws endure, with several countries passing death sentences for treason in recent years. This paper addresses the significance of the death penalty for treason in sub-Saharan Africa. While treason exceptionalism survives beyond Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa, capital treason has acquired penal-political salience, with its retention and use shaped by the interaction of postcolonial insecurity, military interventions and sovereign anxiety. Drawing on scholarship in punishment studies, the article conceptualises capital treason as a form of penal governance through which states symbolically assert sovereignty and manage perceived threats to political authority. Capital treason also contributes to shaping the legal and coercive repertoires through which state power is defended. By tracing how different colonial legacies produced uneven processes of nation building, civil-military relations and political legitimacy, this article demonstrates that capital treason laws have played a central role in responding to threats to state power. It argues that capital treason laws acquired particular penal-political significance where postcolonial authority remained vulnerable to coups, insurgencies and challenges to state power.
This article examines public attitudes towards punishment in Kazakhstan through a Global East lens. Drawing on focus group data from settlements historically shaped by Soviet penal colonies, the study finds that punitiveness in Kazakhstan is structured by the memory and material legacy of Soviet convict-settler colonialism. In contrast to findings from the Global North and South, fear of crime and hostility towards ethnicised or racialised ‘others’ do not drive preferences for harsh punishment in the data. Instead, respondents primarily expressed a desire for offenders and penal institutions to fulfil economic functions that had been embedded in the Soviet penal philosophy of ‘internal colonisation’. Penal colonies were intended to build towns, develop local economies, and form the basis of identities in communities that were striving ultimately to bring about global revolution. Respondents’ preference for prison thus represented a desire for a return to this penal productivism. The article argues that these findings require expanding conventional definitions of punitiveness to account for the distinctive penal political economy of the Global East.
How do judges respond to torture committed by law enforcement officers against court-involved youth apprehended in flagrante delicto ? Although such violence remains under-reported and courts rarely act decisively, this paper directly examines how magistrates address these allegations during initial hearings. Drawing on non-participant observation of 185 initial hearings and 19 semi-structured interviews with juvenile court judges from six Brazilian capitals, the analysis identifies three mechanisms through which the judiciary sustains impunity for police torture: judicial silence, through which allegations are left unrecorded or procedurally bypassed; moral displacement, through which attention is redirected from police conduct to the character and behaviour of adolescents and their families; and bureaucratic neutralisation, through which formal legal language transforms reports of violence into administratively inert records. Together, these mechanisms reveal that the problem is not one of institutional failure but of institutional functioning: Courts do not merely fail to prevent police abuse – they participate in its normalisation by absorbing it into bureaucratic routine.
Incarcerated veterans are a unique segment of the prison population, but despite growing research, the voices of incarcerated veterans remain largely absent from literature. Drawing upon Narrative Identity Theory, this study examines how veterans construct and negotiate their military identity while incarcerated. Analyzing 91 essays from 48 incarcerated veterans who voluntarily submitted to the American Prison Writing Archive, we identified three key themes. First, veterans actively identify with a service member mindset, using rank, combat experience, and service records to distinguish themselves from other inmates and assert status. However, they also feel conflicted, as the status of a soldier is one to be respected but the status of a prisoner is often stigmatized. Second, veterans express mixed reflections on their service experiences, noting feelings of pride about their specialized roles, but also recognizing feelings of regret, discontentment, and disillusionment. Third, veterans draw comparisons between military and prison institutions, finding similarities that impact their institutional adjustment and identity. Overall, the findings reveal that military identity remains central to veterans’ meaning-making process during incarceration, which underscores the importance of recognizing military identity and its conflict with carceral stigma in rehabilitation and reentry interventions for justice-involved veterans.
Analysis of incarceration in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) has largely focused on the influence of penal populism. The role of progressive politics in NZ's significant carceral build-up has, by contrast, mostly escaped critical examination. Using Waikeria Prison as a case study, set to become the country's largest by 2030, this article investigates how successive NZ governments are ‘selling’ prison expansion to the public. Using critical discourse analysis, we show how this prison expansion project has been revised and sustained over the past decade in part due to Labour politicians’ abilities to reposition prison expansion as a means to deliver not simply retribution and incapacitation, but also mental health services and ‘indigenised’ corrections. Attending to NZ's distinct brand of carceral humanism, we show how various ideological defences of imprisonment can be combined, recycled and reinterpreted by decision-makers in shifting political conditions. The analysis highlights the durability and flexibility of carceral expansionism in settler colonial and neoliberal capitalist contexts and draws attention to the contradictions and struggles inherent to NZ's carceral crisis.
Prison life is often described as inherently painful, including within less punitive prison settings. This study explores the ‘pains of freedom’ in a low-security, or ‘open’, prison context, drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in Leira, a Norwegian open prison. Although Leira is widely regarded as preferable to other penal settings, the data shows that pains persist, even in low-security institutions that are, in many ways, not very prisonlike. This article challenges the presupposition frequently underlying the ‘pains of imprisonment’ literature, that pains necessarily are only harmful or destructive. Processes of positive change and personal growth will often involve a certain measure of pain or discomfort. Contributing to ongoing theoretical development of the concepts ‘pains of imprisonment’ and ‘pains of freedom’, this study explores whether the pains experienced in open prisons such as Leira can, under the right circumstances, be constructive or transformative. The analysis identifies five aspects – transparency, tolerance, trust, empowerment and engagement – that help residents and staff navigate the ‘pains of freedom’.
Prison education programs shape the interactions that incarcerated students have not only with faculty and fellow students, but also with prison staff. Research on college-in-prison, however, has focused on post-release outcomes such as recidivism, with less attention to how college-in-prison shapes everyday prison life. In this paper, we ask: How does college-in-prison participation influence incarcerated students’ perceptions of relationships with correctional staff? We draw on a longitudinal mixed-methods survey of 56 applicants to a college-in-prison program, half of whom were ultimately admitted. This design allows for comparisons between admitted and non-admitted applicants over time. Before admission, most participants described their relationships with staff as positive and expressed optimism that college-in-prison would humanize them in the eyes of staff, foster mutual understanding, and alleviate stress for staff. After a year, admitted students’ positive perceptions declined and negative perceptions increased. Many described staff resistance toward higher education. Others felt education posed a threat to the prison system's long-term viability. Overall, admitted students became less positive about staff relationships, while non-admitted students showed little change. The findings suggest the importance of fostering a shared investment in college-in-prison programs in order to ensure success.
Parole in South Africa, formally framed as a mechanism of rehabilitation, functions for foreign nationals as an extension of immigration enforcement. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 26 parole board members in Gauteng Province and analysis of legal and policy texts, this article shows how non-citizens are excluded from correctional supervision, placed in higher security facilities, denied access to work programmes and often detained beyond their lawful release dates because of bureaucratic failures. On release, undocumented parolees are transferred to Lindela Repatriation Centre, where parole dissolves into immigration detention. Lindela is theorized as an anomic crimmigration zone, a space where legal categories collapse and rights protections evaporate. Within this zone, the article develops the concept of the peregrinum homo sacer to capture how foreign parolees lose both penal protections and migration rights and reduced to bare deportability. The analysis advances debates on bifurcated justice, adiaphorization and bordered penality by showing how parole becomes a site of crimmigration control. The article contributes empirically by documenting exclusionary practices within South Africa's parole system and theoretically by introducing the concepts of anomic crimmigration zone and peregrinum homo sacer to global scholarship on punishment, borders, and migration.
This article contributes to diversifying women's voices in desistance research by exploring how self-identified minority positions shape the experiences of female desisters. The study draws on 12 qualitative interviews with women in Sweden who identify as belonging to a minority group and are currently desisting from crime. Following a critical discussion of the term ‘minority’, the article presents three empirically derived findings: (a) Subjective experiences of minoritisation at the intersection of constructions of femininity: carrying an ‘ex'-identity, visible minority status and identity passing; (b) Minority positions as hindering desistance: loneliness, triple stigma and mistrust and (c) Minority positions supporting desistance: a ‘hook’ for change and a return to the authentic self. While emphasising that sex and gender remain vital categories for understanding women's lived experiences of desistance, the article stresses that desistance must be situated within interlocking structural conditions of power and oppression, that in turn are shaped by time and place. Finally, the article aligns with existing scholarship in calling for the development and use of equality data in Swedish criminal justice and social work to make intersecting inequalities visible within systems engaging with current and potential desisters.
This paper centers Arizona as a critical site in the racialized criminalization of immigrants—a practice known as “crimmigration”—and the associated adaptive reuse of prison infrastructure. Focusing on a closed prison facility in the Town of Marana that is slated to reopen as an immigration detention center, we propose the concept of a “carceral fix,” wherein declining incarceration rates are offset by expanded civil immigration detention. Expanding Gilmore's theory of the “prison fix,” we show how political and legal adaptations enable private and public actors to repurpose existing prison space for immigrant confinement amid unprecedented federal investment and intensified racialized enforcement. “Carcerality” names this expansive system of cordoning, confinement, control of which immigrant detention is part. In doing so, we situate Marana within Southern Arizona's long history of punitive prison politics and anti-Mexican social and legal sentiment, demonstrating how criminalization, racialization, and gang labeling continue to generate and profit from imprisoned populations in a state that has long served as a model for punishment.
Despite increasing public concern over caregiver homicides, little research has examined how judges characterize and rationalize these crimes in sentencing. This article investigates how Japanese courts narrate and justify punishment in cases of eldercide committed by family caregivers. Drawing on 91 district-court sentencing decisions between 2000 and 2024, retrieved from the LEX/DB database, the study employs qualitative content analysis of the "reasons for sentencing" sections. Two dominant narrative frames emerge. The first, denouncing act, constructs caregiver eldercide as a grave moral and legal wrong, an egregious breach of familial duty and, in some cases, an affront to the social order that threatens wider public trust in caregiving norms. The second, compassionate tragedy, situates the homicide within cumulative caregiving burdens, highlighting motives of mercy or despair, offender vulnerabilities such as age, illness, and psychological fragility, and systemic shortcomings in support. These findings illuminate how Japanese courts oscillate between condemnation and compassion, portraying eldercide either as a selfish betrayal of trust or as a tragic outcome of structural and emotional strain. The study contributes to socio-legal scholarship by showing how judicial narratives make sense of homicide in contexts where familial care and state responsibility intersect.
Drug crimes are socially and politically constructed phenomena that are frequently embedded in narratives about foreign threats and national security. Yet research on how nationality structures sentencing outcomes, particularly in China, remains limited. Analyzing 2804 first-instance drug crime judgments (2017-2019) from the Peking University Law Database, this study reveals a patterned and stratified relationship between nationality and punishment. Foreign defendants generally receive harsher sentences than Chinese citizens, but this disparity varies across groups. Defendants from certain Asian countries face the most severe penalties, whereas African and European/American defendants often receive comparatively lenient outcomes. These results challenge a simple "alien penalty" account and instead point to a differentiated and crime-contingent mechanism in which national origin intersects with security narratives and stereotypes surrounding transnational drug trafficking. The study advances focal concerns theory beyond Western contexts by demonstrating that nationality operates as a hierarchically structured and situationally activated status cue in judicial decision-making.
This article examines the execution of forced removals in Italy. Drawing on the analysis of original sources, it explores which factors affect the use of force during return operations and how that use is rationalized. Offering a unique empirical perspective, the article documents the operational strategies in an area of administrative action where use of force is notably intense. After a brief methodological introduction, the analysis focuses on the logistics of forced returns, exploring the intricate relationship between the spatial and temporal dimensions that shape this distinct exercise of state coercive power. Our research indicates that the use of force is a constant element in forced returns. However, we contend that the high level of coercion involved should not be attributed solely to individual misconduct. Instead, it reflects a form of systemic violence that normalizes and institutionalizes subjective violence, embedding it within the very structure of the return process.
Rehabilitation is a central but contested objective of contemporary punishment. Drawing on rehabilitation, labelling, and life course theories, this study examines the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated young people from Ghana's Senior Correctional Centre. The research investigates whether the centre reforms or hardens individuals. The findings challenge the binary framing of punishment as either rehabilitative or punitive, demonstrating that carceral spaces produce contingent and divergent outcomes. Three interrelated experiential patterns are identified: rehabilitative or transformative experiences, associated with education, vocational training, reflection, and supportive staff relationships; punitive or criminogenic experiences, characterised by survivalism, mistrust, emotional hardening, and informal peer-based criminal learning; and ambivalent experiences, where rehabilitative opportunities coexist with criminogenic institutional cultures. By analysing post-release narratives from a Global South context, this article advances critical punishment scholarship on carceral power, subjectivity, and identity change. 1
