Critical Criminology 20(4)

Critical Criminology, November 2012: Volume 20, Issue 4

Cross-Examining the Race-Neutral Frameworks of Prisoner Re-Entry
Olaoluwa Olusanya & Jeffrey M. Cancino

Prisoner re-entry literature has primarily been framed as a problem that affects all types of ex-offenders, regardless of race. Surprisingly, the issue of race has been ignored in most of the literature on prisoner re-entry. In this paper, we maintain that the effect of contextual racial stratification is so powerful that for the majority of White ex-offenders the large social capital at their disposal might buffer against the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction. By contrast, Black ex-prisoners might be more vulnerable to the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction precisely because of their greater individual-level, accumulated disadvantage. We contend that structural-level factors have more explanatory power than individual-level factors and identify causal mechanisms that link social context with the large Black-White disparity in recidivism. Finally, we propose a racial/ethnic integration model for successful re-entry and reintegration.

Rehabilitation, Risk, and the Carceral Mother: Subjectivity and Parenting Classes in Prisons
Marilyn Brown

Parenting education classes are ubiquitous in the correctional system, particularly for female inmates. This approach to reforming women embodies a maternal subjectivity far removed from the poverty-stricken, criminalized, largely Native Hawai‘ian population in Hawaii’s prisons. Neoliberal governance views poor parenting as the reason for crime, poverty, and a host of social ills. Parenting classes, while well meant and popular among female inmates, foster a reality grounded in notions of middle-class family life. Prisons and other disciplinary systems (such as child welfare) target women’s maternal concerns in order to manage risk, both among female inmates and, potentially, among their children through parenting education. Using data from 240 prison case files and 25 in-depth interviews of mothers on parole supervision, this study finds that the white, middle-class notions embodied by the parenting class are largely at odds with the lived experience of parenting women who are incarcerated.

Punishing from a Sense of Innocence: An Essay on Guilt, Innocence, and Punishment in America
Mike Rowan

This essay explores the connections between, on the one hand, how Americans conceive of their society’s moral culpability for historical transgressions like slavery and Jim Crow segregation and, on the other hand, the hyper-punitive policies and practices which have come to define the American criminal justice system over the past four decades. The essay offers two arguments. First, it submits that, beginning in the late 1960s, the politics and everyday rituals of punishment functioned to reaffirm a “sense of innocence” about American society in the wake of what arguably was and still remains the society’s most self-critical moment. Second, the essay contends that this sense of collective innocence, once reestablished, has functioned as a firm ideological foundation for hyper-punitive criminal justice policies. In essence, the society that imagines itself as innocent may punish offenders with impunity, since neither it nor the criminal justice machinery that operates on its behalf has to trouble itself with guilty second-guessing.

“Society Must be Protected from the Child”: The Construction of US Juvenile Detention as Necessary and Normal
R. Ross Myers

Scholarship on televised representations of juvenile punishment is missing from the literature. By way of an ethnographic content analysis of forty US representations, the current work fills this void. Through three related themes, I argue that these representations paint the US system, one unmatched in either size or punitiveness, as a necessary and normal social institution. First, coverage depicts detained youth as worthy of incarceration through a focus on their supposed violent nature and rationality. Second, it normalizes the practice of juvenile incarceration by tacitly accepting harsh custodial tactics. Finally, by using detention centers as backdrops for comedy and drama, representations relegate juvenile justice to a position outside the political arena. This work serves as a reminder that in the age of mass incarceration, it is not only media moments that incite fear or spur panic that are of importance: those that normalize the peculiar policies of the United States may be just as consequential.

Debunking the Myths of American Corrections: An Exploratory Analysis
Jeffrey Ian Ross

This article briefly reviews the literature on the myths of corrections and then identifies sixteen of the most prominent misrepresentations about jails, prisons, correctional workers, and convicts in the United States. It then systematically examines the reality of each. The article uses scholarly research, governmental and news reports, and personal experience of former inmates to cast doubt on many of the myths that have been developed. It argues that most of the misrepresentations about corrections can be called into question.

Across Crimes, Criminals, and Contexts: Traps Along the Troubled Path Towards a General Theory of Crime
Eric Madfis

In the search for the etiology of transgression, one theoretical venture is prized above all others: a general theory of crime. However, the term itself is inconsistently defined and its feasibility rarely questioned. This paper forms an explicit definition of general theory as that which purports to explain one or more of the following: (1) all types of crime, (2) crime committed by all types of people, and (3) crime across all contexts. While the search for a general theory has refined theoretical thinking and guided decades of empirical research, each of these three goals constitutes a conceptual trap wherein the desire for parsimonious universality inherently discounts the complex and multifaceted nature of human behavior. Thus, theorists of the etiology of crime must begin to explicitly acknowledge and further explore the justifications for and ramifications of general theories of crime.

The Empire of Scrounge Meets the Warm City: Danger, Civility, Cooperation and Community among Strangers in the Urban Public World
Thaddeus Müller

This article offers alternative views on scrounging—looking through garbage to find valuable objects—as a disorderly activity, and on urban public life as dangerous because of disorderly people. The European micro sociological perspective on the fleeting but positive moments of urban public life, as developed in’ The Warm City’ (Müller in De warme stad: betrokkenheid bij het publieke domein. Jan van Arkel, Utrecht, 2002), is used to reread and reconstruct Ferrell’s ethnographic work in the ‘Empire of Scrounge.’ The focus of my article is to more deeply examine the public interactions scroungers have with scroungers and non-scrounging citizens. Ferrell’s interest in, and presentation of, his material leaves out this kind of micro analysis of stranger-interactions while scrounging in public space. My article shows that, in contrast to the belief that scroungers disrupt social order (and therefore need ‘policing’), scroungers often interact in a civil and careful way with strangers in order to purposively sustain public order, which allows them to continue their informal waste management. The overall image of urban public life which comes with these interactions is that of a ‘Warm City’, a social environment that consists of civility, cooperation and community among strangers.

Young White British Men and Knife-Carrying in Public: Discourses of Masculinity, Protection and Vulnerability
Marek Palasinski & Damien W. Riggs

Whilst quantitative research to date gives us some indication of the prevalence at which knife-carrying occurs among young British men, there have been few explanations for why it occurs, and for what the relationship might be between broader social issues of control and power and the behaviours of young men themselves. Drawing on interviews with 16 young white British men, the present paper explores the ways in which the sample accounted for knife-carrying. Two interpretative repertoires were identified: (1) attributions of blame to authorities for a lack of protection and a subsequent justification of knife-carrying, and (2) discussions of masculinity in relation to knife-carrying. The findings suggest that what is required are policy and practice responses that take into account the symbolic functions of knives for young white men, and which recognise the dilemmatic bind that such men are caught in when they attempt to negotiate competing demands of protection and control.