Theoretical Criminology 16(3)

Theoretical Criminology, August 2012: Volume 16, Issue 3

When punishment and philanthropy mix: Voluntary organizations and the governance of the domestic violence offender
Rashmee Singh

This article examines the administration of community based punishment in Toronto’s specialized domestic violence courts. Voluntary organizations play an integral role in the Ontario government’s strategy to manage domestic violence. Currently, an array of ‘mainstream’ and ‘ethno-specific’ community agencies operate as quasi-criminal justice organizations to rehabilitate and supervise court mandated offenders. Despite their categorization however, both types of organizations largely cater to the same demographics. The discussion explores the techniques of governance service providers deploy when counseling their clientele. The emergence of two differing regimes of power, one emphasizing care and the other discipline, along the mythological categories of the ‘mainstream’ and ‘ethno-specific’ illuminate the constitutive effects of organizational habits on the delivery of punishment.

Ornery alligators and soap on a rope: Texas prosecutors and punishment reform in the Lone Star State
Michael C. Campbell

This article presents historical data on changes in punishment policy in Texas, examining how Texas’s prosecutors played an important role in shaping law and policy. This article helps parcel out the relative influence of various factors in driving more punitive policies by examining an unsettled period of legal and policy change when some state leaders were pushing back against the growing tide of prison expansion. Ultimately this period resulted in a new penal code that retained most of the harshest punishments for offenders, and created an additional layer of prison facilities to manage lower-level offenders. My findings emphasize how these legal changes reflected conflict between state and local government. It also suggests that important contextual factors deeply embedded in Texas’s history helped establish conditions more likely to lead to mass incarceration. These findings suggest that ‘top–down’ and ‘bottom–up’ theoretical accounts of punishment might omit important intervening institutional factors.

History, criminology and the ‘use’ of the past
Paul Lawrence

This article considers why, despite an apparent congruence of subject matter and methodologies, the disciplines of sociological criminology and criminal justice history are not more closely aligned. It contends that intellectual traffic between the two fields is not usually limited by institutional barriers, nor is it a legacy of the disciplinary antipathy which existed between history and sociology in Britain during the mid-twentieth century. Rather, it is due to the different ‘purposes’ with which sociological criminologists and criminal justice historians imbue their work and to the differing disciplinary perceptions of the relationship between the past, present and future which result from this. These different ‘purposes’ are traced via a consideration of the paths of development of the two disciplines from the 1940s. The article concludes by proposing an arena for future collaboration between criminal justice historians and sociological criminologists.

I do what I’m told, sort of: Reformed subjects, unruly citizens, and parole
Robert Werth

Although parole and the processes of prisoner reentry have received considerable attention, how individuals on parole respond to the State’s efforts to regulate their conduct and govern their personhood remains under theorized. Drawing from ethnographic research with individuals on parole, this article examines how parolees navigate the social control inherent in this penal practice. Parole entails both productive and repressive power; responsibilizing and de-responsibilizing elements. The parole agency’s efforts to govern up-close—through supervision and regulation of everyday conduct—are frequently met with subversion, resistance, and hostility, while efforts to govern-at-a-distance are more productive. In general paroled subjects reproduce the injunction to transform their lives, becoming committed to ‘going straight’, ethical reformation, and responsible citizenship. This ‘reformed subjectivity’ guides how individuals enact parole, but does not reflect subjection or their full acquiescence to penal power. Rather, by engaging selectively with the rules, they render their conditions of parole malleable. These individuals on parole are committed to going straight but doing so, as much as possible, on their own terms. In this way, the reformed subjectivities they display both reflect and resist penal power.

Post-welfarist risk managers? Risk, crime prevention and the responsibilization of community-based organizations
Tim Goddard

Numerous scholars have observed that neo-liberal rationalities have resulted in the replacement of interventionist State-run welfare initiatives with community-based risk managing schemes in a process called responsibilization. These risk management policies have become influential in the domain of crime prevention and in the shaping of the future conduct of the ‘at-risk’ youth. This article details, ethnographically, the goals and activities of 10 responsibilized community-based organizations and the conceptualization of ‘risk’ by practitioners from these organizations. The findings suggest that social abandonment and surveillance-centered risk management schemes co-exist with welfarist notions. The findings have implications about whether crime prevention is as post-welfarist as some theorists maintain.