ABSTRACT Documenting how judges explain child sexual abuse (CSA) perpetration is an important task as sentencing decisions are informed by their explanatory understandings. Despite this, the research into judges’ explanations for CSA perpetration is piecemeal and dated. Moreover, some of the extant scholarship does not differentiate judicial understandings of CSA specifically from sexual offending more broadly. In light of this, the research presented in this article involved a qualitative and quantitative content analysis of all relevant judicial transcripts relating to CSA in the state of Queensland, Australia, and published online between 1 January and 28 August 2025 ( n = 42). The study found three previously undocumented judicial narratives (cognitive impairment of perpetrators, pornography and misogyny). Despite the criticisms of prior scholars that judges’ explanations tend to condone perpetrators’ conduct, this was not found to be the case in the current study.
ABSTRACT In spite of a substantial rise in academic, policy and research interest in life after prison worldwide, people often face acute, compounded and permanent adversities on release. Despite this growing interest, our knowledge on re/integration and life after prison remains limited, and we lack a thorough and in‐depth conceptualisation of what re/integration means. Hence, this article aims to present, develop and elaborate a complex, nuanced and comprehensive conceptualisation of re/integration: the 6‐form ecological model of re/integration. It does so by first outlining the model that has inspired this conceptualisation: McNeill's four‐forms of rehabilitation model. It is only then, when the 6‐form ecological model or re/integration is introduced and examined in depth. The article concludes by discussing the implications and potential uses of the 6‐form model for society, theory, research and policy and practice.
ABSTRACT Discourses of ‘brotherhoods’ prevail in public safety sectors and remain empirically limited regarding correctional officers (COs). We nuance the CO ‘brotherhood’, referred to as the CO collectivity, to avoid the gender‐exclusion of the term ‘brotherhood’, specifically to interpret the solidarity (or lack thereof) shaping relationships between COs. Drawing on qualitative interviews with federally employed COs in Canada ( n = 62), we focus on nuancing the definition of the CO collectivity, explaining how the collectivity is constructed, and what constitutes inclusion. By interpreting the boundaries of inclusion in the CO collectivity, we show how officers, of all genders, feel obliged to perform to varying degrees the conventions of the collectivity that strengthen the likelihood of their inclusion. We show how CO embodiment of gendered traits must be in flux within prison and strategically reconstructed based on occupational challenges. We conclude by putting forth considerations for increasing inclusivity, safety, and pro‐social comradery within CO and prison workspaces.
ABSTRACT Current legislation and safeguarding principles are bound by narrow and inflexible constructions of childhood and adulthood. The criminal age of responsibility in England and Wales has been criticised for the responsibilisation of children from age 10 years. Criticisms have also been extended to the criminal age of majority and entry into adult institutions and services at age 18 years. There is a growing evidence base demonstrating the ongoing neurological development and complex needs of young adults (aged 18–24 years), particularly for those within the criminal justice system. This situates young adults as having vulnerabilities similar to children, thus making their criminalisation and ‘adulterisation’ as harmful. Drawing on national and international literature, this article contributes to a growing literature base by critically considering an extension of the youth justice system against a distinct young adult approach.
ABSTRACT Most incarcerated women have histories of trauma, victimisation, poor mental health, and disadvantage, and most also have mothering roles. Their support needs differ markedly from those of incarcerated men, yet most correctional settings are designed for men. This paper sets out how we co‐created a new model of service combining a systems change focus (Transforming Corrections) with holistic, individualised support for incarcerated mothers and their children (Transforming Lives). The process drew on Ghate's approach to implementing services that meet the specific needs of families and the Design Council's Systemic Design Framework to developing social services. Input by imprisoned mothers and service stakeholders was central throughout. This paper contributes to the limited research on co‐creation within correctional settings and sets out a comprehensive transformational service delivery model for imprisoned mothers and their children that aims to break intergenerational disadvantage and support improved life outcomes.
ABSTRACT New Urbanist ideas promoting walkability have many benefits. But they are criticised by proponents of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), who blame street connectivity for facilitating target recognition, providing access and escape routes and weakening informal surveillance. In this article, we challenge the consensus portraying walkable neighbourhoods as criminogenic by highlighting two issues overlooked by CPTED and environmental criminology. First, the focus on crime counts which confounds crime risk with the number of human interactions in the physical world. Second, the neglect of how walkable neighbourhoods reduce crime beyond their borders, something that becomes clear once motoring offences are brought within the analytic frame. By indirectly promoting car dependency crime prevention programmes such as Secured by Design inadvertently promote criminal harm. Finally, we explore the intersections between CPTED and walkability and suggest that neighbourhoods can become more vibrant, sustainable and safe by reducing road—not street—connectivity.
ABSTRACT Court custody is an overlooked but significant site of incarceration that holds tens of thousands of individuals each year in England and Wales. Providing one of the first scholarly investigations of court custody, we find that insurmountable bureaucratic barriers make it impossible to conduct interview‐based empirical research within court custody in England and Wales. We motivate a critical discussion about the gatekeeping role that state processes play in determining criminal justice research topics. We present a thematic analysis of 16 interviews and 26 reports by regulators. We identify three inter‐related groups of problematic experiences in court custody—poor cell conditions, the pains of waiting and the pains of judgement—that begin to characterise the dynamics of court custody. We argue that court custody is a distinct form of imprisonment and critical site of criminal justice transitions that significantly impacts other sites of incarceration and has escaped scholarly attention for too long.
ABSTRACT This article examines capital punishment in civil court cases in Mandatory Palestine (1920–1948), focusing on the British High Commissioner's role in confirming or commuting death sentences. Drawing on a newly constructed dataset from archival records and newspaper reports, it provides the first systematic analysis of executive clemency in non‐political capital cases during the Mandate. Although death sentences were formally mandatory upon conviction, their implementation depended on executive confirmation, making clemency a central arena of discretionary political decision‐making. I show that outcomes varied systematically by motive. Crimes perceived as threatening state authority were more likely to result in execution, whereas killings embedded in ‘family honour’ or blood‐feud contexts were often commuted. Rather than reflecting humanitarian restraint, these patterns reveal a political calculus in which officials assessed the social and political costs of execution. Capital punishment thus functioned as a flexible instrument of colonial governance rather than as a fixed legal sanction.
ABSTRACT Making Good ’s 25th anniversary offers an opportunity to revisit one of criminology's most consequential texts through the lens of lived experience scholarship and convict criminology. Few works have done more to transform the epistemic landscape. Maruna's landmark study repositioned the formerly imprisoned subject as a meaning‐making actor, legitimised experiential narrative within mainstream criminology and lent scholarly gravitas to a movement whose claims had long been dismissed or marginalised. This article argues that Making Good prefigured many of the epistemic and political commitments later developed within the lived‐experience turn, while its redemptive framework also reflects the limits of its early desistance context. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital, it develops the concept of a legitimacy economy of lived experience to examine how redemptive testimony continues to shape, and sometimes constrain, the terms on which experiential knowledge achieves institutional recognition.
ABSTRACT Desistance research promotes intimate relationships without recognising the gendered expectations of support. Desistance Emotional Work (DEW) is a novel framework that helps to address this oversight by identifying the impacts on women of supporting a partner to desist. This co‐authored case study expands DEW by incorporating a pains of desistance lens to this theoretical framework, exploring a woman's experience of supporting her partner's desistance and identifying respective pains of desistance for women as affected others. Recommendations emphasise the need for holistic, trauma‐informed and gender‐sensitive support for women aiding desisters, to enhance their agency and reduce desistance‐lapse risks.
Restorative justice (RJ) is associated with offenders’ movement away from crime and victim recovery. However, little is known about the circumstances under which RJ can simultaneously achieve the dual objectives. Using secondary data from the South Australian Juvenile Justice study, this research examines how RJ conferencing shapes short-term youth offending trajectories and victim recovery through relational analysis. Drawing on 60 case observations as well as 60 paired interviews and 60 paired follow-up interviews, totalling 240 interviews, the study demonstrates that outcomes are shaped less by offence characteristics than by relational alignment, emotional readiness, and meaning-making during RJ conferencing. While some encounters support both short-term non-offending and victim recovery, others produce asymmetrical benefits or fail to generate meaningful change. The study highlights the value of paired relational analysis and cautions against treating RJ as a uniform or universally effective intervention in youth justice.
ABSTRACT The cultures and governance of security markets in the United Kingdom are often characterised through a paradoxical narrative of simultaneous state retreat and progressive advance . In the face of repeated recent high‐profile security failures, and global changes in material political economy, we argue that UK security governance is adapting to further manage the security market in new ‘strategic’ ways. We explore the beginnings of a series of changes in the orientation of security governance, with the state re‐asserting scientific and symbolic authority over a wider range of security arenas. Through new bodies—the National Technical Authorities—the UK state is mobilising the security services (GCHQ and MI5) to shape security markets and cultures directly. It is doing this through co‐ordinating information flow ; researching and setting material standards ; shaping the education, public research, and skills environment; and finally through deploying the symbolic power and authority of the spy agencies, the sovereign state, and empire.
ABSTRACT This article explores the lived experience of imprisonment in Spain's open prisons, where prisoners spend most of the day in the community and return to the institution at night. Based on semi‐structured interviews with 18 people in three Spanish open prisons, it examines how this Southern European form of open conditions is experienced and situates it within broader international debates. The findings show that open imprisonment is deeply ambivalent—both liberating and painful—with narratives that diverge between predominantly positive and predominantly negative orientations. The study refines the understandings of the pains and ‘liberations’ of open prisons, showing how daily community contact fosters autonomy while generating specific challenges such as the ‘wandering situation’ and intrusive forms of supervision in personal life. It also illustrates that openness varies across and within countries, reflecting different penal logics and institutional practices that shape how freedom and control are balanced in everyday life under open conditions.
ABSTRACT This essay revisits Shadd Maruna's Making Good from a Global South perspective. Widely recognised as a landmark in desistance research, Maruna's work shifted the analytical focus towards narrative identity, agency and the subjective processes through which individuals move away from crime. The essay reflects on how these ideas travelled beyond their original empirical context and were interpreted within the Latin American criminological field. At the same time, examining Making Good from the Global South highlights important theoretical tensions, particularly regarding the role of structural inequalities, gendered pathways into crime and the limits of identity‐based explanations of desistance in contexts marked by social exclusion. By situating Maruna's work within debates in Southern criminology, the essay argues that engaging with Global South contexts can extend and refine desistance theory, opening the possibility of developing a more globally grounded and ‘southern’ perspective on processes of desistance from crime.
ABSTRACT Drawing on qualitative data among a sample of people leaving prison in Aotearoa New Zealand, this article explores how post‐prison transitional housing impacts desistance from crime and motivation to desist. While transitional housing is designed to support reintegration, our findings reveal that it can also produce unintended impacts—or ‘pains’—which may hinder desistance. Specifically, we identify four key ‘pains’ of transitional accommodation: the pain of unwanted company; the pain of extended carceral reach; the pain of inhibited familial relations; and the pain of financial precarity and housing insecurity. These experiences could undermine residents’ wellbeing, ontological security and capacity to construct and maintain desisting identities. The article contributes to desistance literature by demonstrating how well‐intentioned support mechanisms can inadvertently produce barriers to desistance. We conclude with recommendations for policy and practice aimed at reducing these pains and creating post‐prison housing environments which support desistance processes.
ABSTRACT This article explores a period during which the Scottish Prison Service aspired to a ‘golden age’ for imprisonment, tracing how a narrative of progress shaped a decade of struggle to close Scotland's national prison for women: ‘Cornton Vale’. It provides new insights into how a project of prison modernisation resulted in widespread disappointment for both those centrally involved and those who felt excluded from decision‐making. The paper employ's Pat Carlen's ‘imaginary penalities’ to frame how powerful penal actors who genuinely desired change acted in ways that contradicted not only the lived realities of those imprisoned but their own working realities and sense of the possible. Drawing from narrative interviews with actors central to both designing and opposing the new women's estate, this study has implications for our understanding of Scottish imprisonment, as well as contributing to debates over the meaning of ‘progress’ in imprisonment more broadly.
