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This chapter draws upon the personal experiences of the author and a diverse range of published works on the cultural and natural histories of night-time in Western societies. Night-time is revealed as a social setting of highly ambivalent status, symbolising the times and places of restful recuperation, as well as those of restless hedonism, escape, and ‘dark deeds’. It explores how security concerns, fortification, and policing of the night have accompanied the governance of cities throughout history. Since the onset of industrialized urbanization, the night-time has been progressively colonized by the forces of commerce, and given over to forms of consumption and commodification which often challenge the contradictory will to impose order on the night-time streetscape.

This chapter considers how convict criminologists offer something new and distinctive to criminology in general, and the study of imprisonment in particular. Inspired by C Wright Mills classic work, The Sociological Imagination, its point of departure is his advocacy for sociological craftwork that links personal biography with social history, and personal experience with social structures. The chapter discusses the role of reflexivity in this project and presents personal reflections on imprisonment, masculinities and ethics.

In the US criminal justice system, sentencing determinations are frequently divorced from the social history of the individual accused of a crime and are rarely informed by our empirical knowledge about what forces may lead an individual to desist from offending. Yet, this knowledge can help drive key decisions to grant mercy to individuals at all stages of the criminal justice process, from plea to parole. This chapter argues that comprehensive life histories about individuals accused of crimes can shape sentencing practices in a way that facilitates the achievement of social justice through the attention to the ultimate reintegration of the person at the heart of the sentence.

The chapter examines the causes of the formation of two different penological identities in Europe and the United States and their characteristics, focusing on the distinction between US pragmatism and European doctrinarism. It analyses the foundation of the International Union of Penal Law, the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, the International Prison and Penitentiary Congresses, and other congresses and publications to show how the peno-criminological reform movement was driven by a renewed interest in legal comparison. The chapter also investigates how penal reformers and criminologists such as Liszt, Saleilles, Cuche, Pound, Ferri, and other adherents to the Italian Positivist School made a different use of legal history to uphold and legitimize their new proposals.