All Outputs (20)
Is the Party Really Over? Parties, Partisanship and the Politics of Crime (2023)
Journal Article
Political parties occupy a contradictory position in the criminological literature: at once active participants in the political contestation of crime but virtually absent from contemporary debates concerning the relationship between crime and democr... Read More about Is the Party Really Over? Parties, Partisanship and the Politics of Crime.
Explaining penal momentum: Path dependence, prison population forecasting and the persistence of high incarceration rates in England and Wales (2023)
Journal Article
This article seeks to explain the persistence of high incarceration rates in England and Wales. Building upon recent theoretical work on path dependence, we identify prison population forecasting as a poorly understood positive feedback mechanism tha... Read More about Explaining penal momentum: Path dependence, prison population forecasting and the persistence of high incarceration rates in England and Wales.
Path dependence and criminal justice reform: Introducing the special issue (2023)
Journal Article
Franklin E Zimring, The Insidious Momentum of American Mass Incarceration (2023)
Journal Article
Book Review: The Insidious Momentum of American Mass Incarceration by Franklin E Zimring (2023)
Journal Article
Ideologies, Power and the Politics of Punishment: The Case of the British Conservative Party (2022)
Journal Article
Recent scholarship has underscored the limitations of a theoretical repertoire that reduces the politics of punishment to debates over punitiveness, neoliberalism or penal exceptionalism. In this paper I argue that greater understanding of the dynami... Read More about Ideologies, Power and the Politics of Punishment: The Case of the British Conservative Party.
Ideologies, Power and the Politics of Punishment: The Case of the British Conservative Party (2022)
Journal Article
Recent scholarship has underscored the limitations of a theoretical repertoire that reduces the politics of punishment to debates over punitiveness, neoliberalism or penal exceptionalism. In this paper I argue that greater understanding of the dynami... Read More about Ideologies, Power and the Politics of Punishment: The Case of the British Conservative Party.
Populism, Conservatism and the Politics of Parole in England and Wales (2022)
Journal Article
Reform of the parole system has emerged as the cause célèbre of a resurgent law and order politics. Successive governments have seized upon the symbolic power of parole to demonstrate ‘toughness’ with respect to violent and sexual offending, to expre... Read More about Populism, Conservatism and the Politics of Parole in England and Wales.
Parole, parole boards and the institutional dilemmas of contemporary prison release (2022)
Journal Article
The decision to release is a defining feature of the carceral experience: at once a necessary function of a dynamic penal system, and a highly contested form of symbolic communication where the anxieties and contradictions of contemporary penality be... Read More about Parole, parole boards and the institutional dilemmas of contemporary prison release.
Governing against the tide: Populism, power and the party conference (2022)
Journal Article
In this article we argue that a tendency to treat populism as a ubiquitous, mechanistic characteristic of contemporary penality has impeded systematic theoretical discussion of how populist ideologies find contingent expression within national penal... Read More about Governing against the tide: Populism, power and the party conference.
Diarmuid Griffin, Killing Time: Life Imprisonment and Parole in Ireland (2020)
Journal Article
Marginal gains or diminishing returns? Penal bifurcation, policy change and the administration of prisoner release in England and Wales (2019)
Journal Article
Prisoner release has emerged as a key site of penal policy contestation in England and Wales. A series of crises have undermined public confidence in the parole system and reopened longstanding debates over the confused normative basis of prisoner re... Read More about Marginal gains or diminishing returns? Penal bifurcation, policy change and the administration of prisoner release in England and Wales.
Solid Foundations? Towards a Historical Sociology of Prison Building Programmes in England and Wales, 1959–2015 (2019)
Journal Article
Between 1959 and 2015 the UK government embarked upon five major phases of prison building in England and Wales. Drawing upon detailed archival research, this article offers a historical sociology of prison building programmes. It traces the evolutio... Read More about Solid Foundations? Towards a Historical Sociology of Prison Building Programmes in England and Wales, 1959–2015.
Excavating the archive: Reflections on a historical criminology of government, penal policy and criminal justice change (2018)
Journal Article
This article makes the case for greater use of systematic archival research as a methodological tool of criminology. Drawing upon insights from the author’s 2018 historical study of ‘early release’ in England and Wales, it reviews the legal framework... Read More about Excavating the archive: Reflections on a historical criminology of government, penal policy and criminal justice change.
An Idea Whose Time Had Come? The Creation of a Modern System of Parole in England and Wales (2018)
Journal Article