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While there exists a broad political consensus about the unnecessary overuse of short custodial sentences for non-violent women a number of obstacles to the successful realisation of this strategy persist. Based on empirical data gathered from interviews with Directors of national penal reform organisations, former Justice Ministers and senior civil servants, social commentators and journalists from across the spectrum, this chapter will critically explore the role of the national print news media in the reform of women’s penal policy. Highlighting the peripheral status of women’s penal reform on the policy agenda, it will shine a spotlight on the relations between penal reform campaigners, policymakers and journalists, before considering some practical tips for those working in this area.

This chapter discusses the capacity needed to give and receive gifts. It considers the restrictions imposed by legal systems on gift giving by minors, adult incompetents, those suffering civil death, married women, government entities, and business associations. The chapter then examines the limits imposed by legal systems on the ability to receive gifts. In civilian systems, the limitations raise some of complex questions. There are three principal concerns. First, capacity to receive is denied to individuals or entities that do not exist, or are not determinable, at the moment the gift is made. Second, capacity is denied to implement protective or penal policies. Finally, gifts are prohibited within specified relationships.

This chapter employs discourse analysis to study changing cultural penal sensibilities and penal culture. It draws upon the political science literature on knowledge utilization to show how the range of existing knowledge relevant to penal policy debates is constrained both by the language used to describe it, and the political and organizational demands in a given time and place. This chapter thus provides the theoretical groundwork upon which the textual analysis of the press coverage of the Bulger and Redergård cases is built.

This chapter offers a brief introduction to how one might think about penal policies in an abstract context. Having rejected the desert thesis, it argues that “an entitlement to proportionality in sentencing” is not an independent principle, but is—as with all “entitlements”—determined by the wider theory of justice. For this reason, policy proposals have to be thought through; they cannot simply be rejected as incompatible with desert or proportionality. Twenty-first century punishment will be post-desert, but that is not a recent change. The best theories of punishment (and much else) are post-desert, and have been since long before the retributive revival at the end of the twentieth century. That revival was not about desert, but was about sweeping away many practices that resulted in actual injustices. It has left us with a principle of proportionality that is important, but insufficient.

Retributivism, the idea that what justifies criminal punishment is that it is deserved for past criminal wrongdoing, famously (or notoriously) underwent a revival in the 1970s—a revival whose influence is still evident both in penal philosophy and in penal policy. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now more clearly identify a number of problems with that revival: what we must then ask is whether those problems are fatal. Can a robust version of retributivism be rendered plausible in our contemporary penal and philosophical climate, or is it time to move on beyond retributivism to some quite different kind of penal philosophy? This chapter argues that penal philosophy and policy should retain a central place for a suitably understood idea of retribution. This argument involves paying closer attention than penal theorists often pay to the criminal process that precedes punishment and to the conception of responsible citizenship that should structure such a process. It also involves showing how a practice of appropriately retributive punishments can meet some of the main concerns of advocates of “restorative justice” by providing a better account than they often provide of what needs to be restored in the aftermath of crime, and how it can be restored. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the problems that impaired the retributivist revival.

This chapter examines the broader impact of neoliberalism on welfare and penal policy, arguing that there has been an ideological and culture shift, which can be summarised as follows: the War on Poverty to a War on the Poor. It first considers three types of welfare states — liberal welfare states, conservative/corporatist welfare states, and social democratic welfare states — and the neoliberal argument against welfare systems before discussing the government's policy of welfare retrenchment known as austerity. It also analyses the rise of the penal state, the trend called ‘governing through crime’, some of the inherent contradictions within the penal state, issues surrounding penal policy, and prison conditions as a key area of concern for social work as a profession.

This chapter introduces the core claims, concepts, and contributions of the book. It argues that mass incarceration was not inevitable. Policymakers had to choose to build state capacity to arrest, process, and punish people deemed criminal. Examining decisions to build carceral capacity provides a new way to understand the development of the carceral state, or the network of people and institutions responsible for the United States’ system of criminal punishment. A political developmental perspective draws attention to the interaction of national and subnational policy and politics in creating the carceral state. It also contributes to current debates about the role of crime, media, and public opinion in fostering politicians’ support for punitive policies. Finally, this perspective incorporates the role of race in the development of the carceral state through the device of racial projects, or collective actors’ response to historical racial hierarchies, which inform policymakers’ penal policy decisions.

This chapter focuses on the concept of abolitionism. Abolition as a stance and academic abolitionism are two forms of theoretical abolitionism present in a time where the actual abolition of prisons lies in the future, out of our reach. Both are viable and important. But there is also another possibility, a third form of abolitionism, which is as viable and important as the others. It brings in a third dimension, where a retreat to the safe haven of the academy or a mere dimension of a staunch no is combined with ‘expeditions’ and actions favouring basic change in the outside world, notably at key points in prison and penal policies and culture. This third form of abolitionism crosses boundaries with stamina and resolve, brings in deep and prolonged interaction with those who are subject to the so-called criminal justice system — the prisoners — and is, up to a point, practical. The chapter also proposes a different way of looking at the relationship between victim and offender.

In 2006, the UK government initiated a wide-scale restructuring of both its migration control apparatus and its prison system, culminating in a broad new policy on foreign national prisoners, which establishes special prisons for ‘non-citizens’ and deputizes prison staff to act as quasi-immigration agents. Dubbed ‘hubs and spokes’, the new policy also ‘embeds’ immigration officials in penal institutions and obliges prisons to hold prisoners beyond the length of their criminal sentences. This chapter examines how such an expansive penal policy came to pass and what it can tell scholars about the meaning of imprisonment. It argues that the prison is a key — and too often overlooked — site for migration control.

Since the King's College seminar, several proposals on sentencing and imprisonment have emerged. Some of these emerged during the height of the political and media concern about violent crimes. The most significant of the proposals was discussed in Chapter 4, wherein it is proposed that sentencing commissions should be established. This endnote summarises and assesses the impact of the results of the consultation launched by the Sentencing Advisory Panel on the future development of penal policy. This consultation centred on key questions such as: what custodial sentences should be imposed, what impact previous convictions should have on sentences, what weight should be given to all different factors of an offence, and whether the vulnerabilities of women offenders should affect sentencing. The result of the consultation is believed to have had a great impact on prison numbers and the prison crisis. In addition to assessing the impact of the consultation on penal policy, the endnote also discusses: the growing criticism of government policy on imprisonment and the Carter Report; the four policy areas of the government that focused on the aspects of community sentences, women offenders, juvenile offenders, and mentally disordered offenders; and the political and social climate during 2008, wherein there was an upward pressure on imprisonment owing to the emergence of violent crimes involving young people.

This chapter examines prisoner enfranchisement in the Republic of Ireland. As with many other jurisdictions, the issue was historically, socially and politically charged, with the debates and outcome reflecting local characteristics. The chapter begins with an outline of prisoners’ involvement in politics pre-independence, and later in that part of Ireland that achieved independence. Although prisoners were not allowed to vote for much of Irish history, this did not prevent them from engaging with, and at times, challenging the political system, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, despite using their prison experience for political advancement, on release, few political leaders became vocal advocates of penal reform in general, or prisoner enfranchisement in particular. This chapter considers why there was relatively little change in the prison system with almost no penal reform and no desire for enfranchisement from many of those who had experience of imprisonment. The final section examines the low-key introduction of legislation to allow prisoners to vote.

This chapter looks towards the conflict between the issues of risk and human rights in penal policy and prison law in Great Britain. It provides a summary of literatures on risk and discusses the widespread lack of engagement by human rights lawyers in Britain with theorizing the concept of risk or studying its uses in the fields of risk assessment and management. It also attempts to answer the question of why the criminological focus on risk in prison governance has not generated investigations into the relationship between risk and prisoners' human rights.

This chapter puts bodies of social theory assembled in chapter 2, and a history of moral sensibilities in chapter 3, to work within the interrelated fields of probation, criminal justice, and penal policy. The argument advanced is that disparate bodies of social theory, in addition to a remaining vestige of religion, personalism, and ethico-humanitarian impulses, combine to excavate to provide an explanatory account of the political dynamics of modernisation and transformation. This is the central academic task of this chapter that puts to work a nuanced and multi-textured theoretical grid.

This chapter discusses how public attitudes help shape penal policy. It argues that law enforcement and the public have ambivalently embraced an instrumental approach, that is, the threat of or actual punishment as a mechanism through which to shape the behavior of both wrongdoers and people in general. This is not to say that other approaches do not exist, or that people do not disagree; however, the dominant model clearly follows instrumental approaches. Not only does empirical research show that this approach is not particularly effective in determining behavior, but it also is very costly in terms of both resources and negative side effects. Hence, there is a widespread disconnection between policy and empiricism. This has led to a dramatic growth in the American prison population and has soured the relationship between the law, legal authorities, and members of society. It has had a particularly negative impact on the minority community.