bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The virtual sphere
Authors: Papacharissi Zizi
Published: July 2003

The internet and its surrounding technologies hold the promise of reviving the public sphere; however, several aspects of these new technologies simultaneously curtail and augment that potential. First, the data storage and retrieval capabilities of internet-based technologies infuse political discussion with information otherwise unavailable. At the same time, information access inequalities and new media literacy compromise the representativeness of the virtual sphere. Second, internet-based technologies enable discussion between people on far sides of the globe, but also frequently fragmentize political discourse. Third, given the patterns of global capitalism, it is possible that internet-based technologies will adapt themselves to the current political culture, rather than create a new one. The internet and related technologies have created a new public space for politically oriented conversation; whether this public space transcends to a public sphere is not up to the technology itself.
The art of invective
Authors: Vrooman Steven S.
Published: July 2003

This article examines the common computer-mediated communication (CMC) phenomenon of ‘flaming’ from a rhetorical perspective, situating the phenomenon diachronically in the histories of invective in art and society. An examination of the notorious alt.flame newsgroup draws connections between the political and sexual content of the flames and the rants and dozens genres of invective. The article concludes with an argument against the still prevalent media-determinant view that holds that flaming is somehow caused by the medium of CMC itself. Given the strategic nature of the different kinds of flames, it makes more sense to view them as performative enactments of identity which stress either group or individual identity depending on the genre of invective utilized by the flamer. This article demonstrates that the more historical approach offered by rhetorical criticism gives a vital perspective to an area of study from which rhetorical critics have for too long been absent.
Illusions of perfect information and fantasies of control in the information society
Authors: Winseck Dwayne
Published: July 2003

This article introduces the idea of ‘risk societies’ to highlight how conventional views of the information economy are confounded by the productivity paradox, uncertain demand for new information and communication technologies (ICTs), and the heterogenous qualities of information. Confronting these realities, the communication industries are using monopolization strategies, surveillance, and technological design in their, often elusive, attempts to manage risk and turn the scarce resources of the media economy - time, money and attention - into economic value. These strategies erode the ‘soft factors’ of trust, confidence, social networks and privacy that are vital to people’s willingness to embrace new ICTs and the legitimacy of the information society. Although these trends have created space for new privacy enhancing technologies and trust-brokers, the translation of sociocultural norms into technology and market-based solutions renders communicative spaces more opaque than ever.
China and the globalization of ICTs: Implications for international relations
Authors: Hughes Christopher R.
Published: July 2003

As the People’s Republic of China (PRC) accedes to the World TradeOrganization (WTO), much speculation has been generated about the political impact of the opening of its telecommunications market to foreign firms and investors. This article evaluates the assumptions behind competing views from the West and China, drawing out the implications for international politics. It argues that international economic, technological and security regimes fail to address human rights concerns that arise from the globalization of information and communication technologies (ICTs), despite the fact that serious problems are generated by the need for cooperation between liberal- democratic and authoritarian regimes to preserve state security. To redress the balance, it is necessary to move away from assumptions of technological determinism held by policy-makers, in favour of developing a communication analysis of security that can embrace broader political issues.
The kinder, gentler gaze of Big Brother
Authors: Andrejevic Mark
Published: July 2003

Surveillance-based reality television has emerged as a resurgent programming genre in the US and Western Europe during a time when the online economy is becoming increasingly reliant upon surveillance as a form of economic exploitation. The portrayal of surveillance through ‘reality TV’ as a form of entertainment and self-expression can thus be understood as playing an important role in training viewers and consumers for their role in an ‘interactive’ economy. This article relies on interviews with cast members and producers of MTV’s popular reality show ‘Road Rules’, to explore the form of subjectivity that corresponds to its implicit definition of ‘reality’. This form of subjectivity reinforces the promise of the interactive economy to democratize production by relinquishing control to consumers and viewers. Surveillance is portrayed not as a form of social control, but as the democratization of celebrity - a fact that has disturbing implications for the democratic potential of the internet’s interactive capability.
Constructing the Meaning of Digital Television in Britain, the United States and Australia
Authors: WEBER IAN , EVANS VANESSA
Published: July 2003

Much has been written about digital television. Mainstream reports range from a vague televisual utopia where one need never unplug oneself from the TV ever again to the social realities and practicalities of a consumer driven market. This study examines how the media constructs the meaning of digital television in Britain, the United States and Australia. Rogers' (1983, 1995) diffusion of innovation theory to assess the rate of diffusion the role that media communication (language) plays in this process. It uses a content analysis methodology to examine 1836 digital television articles, drawn from mainstream newspaper publications from 1996 to January 2002. Results from the analysis show a correlation between the extent of media coverage; the media's strategic, flexible and timed use of technological determinism—social construction language structures; and the degree and success of the diffusion of digital television in these research settings.
Network Ethnography and the Hypermedia Organization: New Media, New Organizations, New Methods
Authors: HOWARD PHILIP N.
Published: July 2003

Social scientists are increasingly interested in innovative organizational forms made possible with new media, known as epistemic communities, knowledge networks, or communities of practice, depending on the discipline. Some organizational forms can be difficult to study qualitatively because human, social, cultural, or symbolic capital is transmitted over significant distances with technologies that do not carry the full range of human expression that an ethnographer or participant observer hopes to experience. Whereas qualitative methods render rich description of human interaction, they can be unwieldy for studying complex formal and informal organizations that operate over great distances and through new media. Whereas social network analysis renders an overarching sketch of interaction, it will fail to capture detail on incommensurate yet meaningful relationships. Using social network analysis to justify case selection for ethnography, I propose `network ethnography' as a synergistic research design for the study of the organizational forms built around new media.
The Domestication of Video-On-Demand
Authors: LING RICH , NILSEN SIRI , GRANHAUG STEPHAN
Published: July 2003

This article describes several of the elements that have relevance in the integration of video-on-demand into the home. The specific case examined here involves a trial carried out in Oslo, Norway. Using qualitative methods, the study describes how a selection of users integrated the technology into the mental and physical contexts of their everyday lives. Video-on-demand is a technology that is outside our taken-for-granted experience and thus its integration presents a chance to observe the domestication of technology in everyday life.
Understanding the Development of Online Newspapers
Authors: BOCZKOWSKI PABLO
Published: July 2003

The central argument of this article is that the social study of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has generated knowledge about at least four issues that have figured prominently in the development of online newspapers. Thus, CMC scholarship becomes relevant to analyzing the electronic version of a medium that has traditionally been the almost exclusive province of mass communication theorizing. Four issues are identified: (1) the social consequences of the increased anonymity of interlocutors; (2) the reconfiguration of territorially- and interest-based associations; (3) the processes that mediate between the introduction of new artifacts and their social outcomes; and (4) the mutual shaping of consumers and technologies. The role each has had in the construction of online newspapers is explicated and potential avenues for further research are suggested. Finally, Boczkowski maintains that the work outlined in this article fosters two dialogues crucial to the future of communication in increasingly networked societies: those between CMC and mass communication scholarship, and between media theory and practice.
New Media Competition and Access
Authors: MANSELL ROBIN
Published: July 2003

It is often argued that constraints on access to new information and communication environments will disappear as services decline in price and as customers and producers engage in new market relationships. Following this line of argument, the relative scarcity of communication and information access opportunities of the past should be dispelled. The aim of this article is to illustrate the faults in this vision as applied to Internet and new media services development. It is argued that the new electronic environment will not be immune to forces of monopolization nor will it give rise to an era of market competition that fully protects the interests of all consumers and citizens. In fact, empirical evidence suggests that electronic intermediary service providers are populating the new markets and deploying strategies that are no less informed by monopolization strategies than in the past, though they do take different forms. The evidence is consistent with the inescapable dynamics of tension between abundance and scarcity in the market place.
On Competition, Access and Diversity in Media, Old and New
Authors: VAN CUILENBURG JAN
Published: July 2003

This article deals with access and diversity as central concepts of modern communications policy. Access may be sought at different layers of the communications system (Section 2), each presupposing a specific elaboration of communications policy questions (Table 1). Diversity, that is media diversity, refers to media content (Section 3). Media diversity has two faces: reflection of population preferences and openness, equal, uniform media access for divergent population preferences. These two faces have a dialectic relationship: usually for media systems it is not possible to produce full reflection and full openness at the same time. In Section 4 it is argued that, due to Hotelling's Law, media markets are often better at reflection than at openness. In Section 5 the relationships between media competition and media diversity are further explored within the framework of media and democracy. Three hypotheses on these relationships are being developed. In Section 6 a plea is made for the main objective of modern communications policy to be free and equal access to a social communications system that diversely provides for the information and communication needs in society.
New Media and Democracy
Authors: TAMBINI DAMIAN
Published: July 2003

This article describes and evaluates civic networks in Europe and the USA. These are seen as attempts to use new media technology, particularly the internet, to improve participation in local democratic processes. Various aspects of democratic communication are examined, including information access, preference measurement, deliberation and group mobilization. A wide variety of city-based experiments are described, which have all faced problems of low take-up and problems of inequality of access. It is argued that new media will have a significant and positive impact upon the processes of democratic communication within the appropriate regulatory and economic context, particularly regarding access to communications technologies.
The Broadcasting Media in the Age of Risk
Authors: CHALABY JEAN K. , SEGELL GLEN
Published: July 2003

This essay argues that the process of digitization has farreaching implications for the broadcasting field and claims that the most suitable theoretical framework to comprehend the full scope of these changes is provided by Ulrich Beck's theories on risk society. Despite predictable developments, digitization increases the sources of uncertainties and the level of risks for the expanding number of players involved in broadcasting. Several sources of uncertainties are identified: market demand for digital services, intensified competition, regulations, the pace of technological progress and the phenomenon of convergence.

The second section argues that the process of digitization is challenging public service broadcasters and may contribute to weaken their presence in the public sphere. Technological mastery increasingly tends to rest in the hands of commercial firms and digital broadcasting furthers the commercialism of television. In addition, fuelling the growth of conditional access, digitization threatens universal access, one of the key principles of public broadcasting.

The last section argues that when digital broadcasting will be fully operational, watching television will cease to be a common experience, to become a shared activity that individuals experience separately.
Digital Rule
Authors: JONES RICHARD
Published: July 2003

This article develops a theoretical model of `digital rule'. This is a form of at-a-distance monitoring which becomes possible with the advent of certain electronic technologies. It is argued that this form of monitoring gives rise to a related form of decision-making, and to particular forms of punishment, both directly and indirectly. The article begins with a review of Foucault's work on `discipline'. It is argued that while his general approach remains useful, his `technology of power' model requires updating, because of certain moves within many criminal justice systems away from reliance on the disciplinary techniques Foucault associates with modernity. I argue that comments by Deleuze suggest a way of developing a theoretical adjunct to Foucault's model, and this new control form I characterize as one of `digital rule'. Various emerging electronic technologies are examined, and it is shown how they operate specifically through restrictions specified in terms of time and space. The relationship between formal control, exclusion and punishment measures is considered, and it is concluded that in this emerging form of rule, these aspects continue to have a very close relationship, manifest here in a particular new way.
Punishment and Conditional Citizenship
Authors: VAUGHAN BARRY
Published: July 2003

This article enquires whether modern practices of punishment are undergoing a transformation by investigating the effect that the development of citizenship has had upon modern punishment. Citizenship requires that people expand their horizons of recognition and treat people, who had previously been disregarded, as equals. This is one of the primary cultural influences upon punishment and explains why modern punishment has always partly been an inclusionary project. The effect of citizenship is ambivalent as punishment is designed not only to incorporate offenders but also to underline their `conditional' status as citizens, hence the persistence of brutal treatment. This article traces the influence of citizenship, through the emergence of civil, political and social rights, upon punishment from the late 18th century to the present day. It argues that the `inclusionary' aspect of punishment is waning as the conditions of citizenship are becoming ever more stringent.
Expanding Realms of the New Penology
Authors: KEMPF-LEONARD KIMBERLY , PETERSON ELICKA S.L.
Published: July 2003

This article argues that juvenile justice practices now reflect what Feeley and Simon have identified as `actuarial justice.' This means that the traditional parens patriae orientation of juvenile justice, as well as punishment, have been supplanted by the goal of efficient processing. Mathematical models, akin to those in the insurance industry, establish profiles that are used to streamline the processing of juvenile cases and offenders. Attributes of actuarial justice markedly change the justice process for youths, as traditional informality, individualized casework, and treatment are set aside, and the emphasis becomes one of cost-efficient warehousing. We urge scholarly attention and public debate of the theory of actuarial justice before a separate system for juveniles is no longer considered viable.
Two Cheers for Vindictiveness
Authors: MURPHY JEFFRIE G.
Published: July 2003

Vindictiveness (the desire for revenge) is commonly condemned as irrational, immoral, and deserving of no place in civilized legal systems. It is here argued that this condemnation may be hasty - may often reflect more what we think we ought to say than what we actually feel and believe. After an attempt to rehabilitate, at least partially, the reputation of the vindictive passions, the article closes with some serious cautions with respect to the ultimate legitimacy of acting upon these passions.
Rethinking the Punitive Turn
Authors: HALLSWORTH SIMON
Published: July 2003

This article examines the thesis that the recent punitive shift taken by western states can be explained in terms of what Christie calls the `subordination of law and order systems to the purposive logic of the rational bureaucratic state' (Christie, 1996). While accepting that this `subordination to modernity' thesis has considerable explanatory power, this article argues that it is nevertheless limited in terms of providing an adequate explanation of the punitive shift. While it is true that it can help explain how punitive solutions may evolve out of rationalizing tendencies integral to the modern state, this thesis cannot account for what Garland (1996) terms the `criminology of the other' and the contribution of this to the current punitive turn. Not only is this `criminology' irreducible to the rationalizing forces specific to modernity, it is also a form of `criminology' the appearance of which marks a decisive attack upon other attributes of modernity around which modern penal systems were also constructed; in particular, as this article will examine, the `restricted economy of limits' that historically established the normative parameters within which modern penal systems emerged. To interpret the punitive turn, this article argues that it is necessary to trace its genesis not only to a purification of modernity, but also and in a different respect to its dissolution and replacement by what, after Bataille, will be termed an `economy of excess'.
The Utilitarian Justification of Torture
Authors: MORGAN ROD
Published: July 2003

Torture is prohibited by customary international law. Yet the practice widely persists. Beneath the rhetoric of human rights talk the utilitarian justification of torture commands a good deal of support among police and security agencies and is detectable between the lines of the discourse of denial. Can torture be justified on utilitarian grounds? Close examination of Bentham's defence of torture, and the reasoning of the Landau Report in support of `moderate physical pressure' in Israel, suggests that it cannot. The practice of torture will arguably best be countered by confronting the subterranean utilitarian justifications of torture on their own terms: in the long term it does not work but, rather, undermines the legitimacy of the state itself.
Life, Death and the Crime of Crimes
Authors: SCHABAS WILLIAM A.
Published: July 2003

The attitude of international law and practice to supreme penalties has evolved enormously over the past half-century. At Nuremberg, in 1946, capital punishment was imposed upon Nazi war criminals. But at the Rome Conference in 1998, when the international community provided for the establishment of the International Criminal Court, not only was capital punishment excluded, the text also limited the scope of life imprisonment. These changes were driven principally by evolving norms of international human rights law. The first changes became apparent in the early work of the International Law Commission on the Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind, during the 1950s. When criminal prosecution returned to the international agenda, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was widespread agreement to exclude capital punishment. But at the Rome Conference, a relatively small and geographically isolated group of States made an aggressive attempt to defend capital punishment. Ultimately unsuccessful, their efforts only drew attention to a growing rejection of both capital punishment and life imprisonment in international and national legal systems.
Sclerosis
Authors: DRUMBL MARK A.
Published: July 2003

In the 1994 Rwandan genocide 800,000 people were massacred. The victims were overwhelmingly of the minority Tutsi ethnic group and the aggressors of the majority Hutu group. At present, 125,000 Hutu prisoners remain incarcerated while awaiting trial on genocide-related charges. This article argues that these trials, and the extensive incapacitation that necessarily precedes them, may do little to promote justice, regime legitimacy, or national reconciliation in Rwanda. This, in turn, raises broader questions about the role of criminal punishment and sentencing in situations of mass violence. Criminality usually attaches to deviant conduct. Mass political violence - from Nazi Germany to Serbia to Rwanda - generally involves significant levels of public participation and complicity. How, then, should we punish conduct that, at the time it was committed, was not deviant? The thesis is advanced that restorative and transformative justice initiatives are effective at deconstructing complicity and can play a valuable part in the legal response to genocide. These initiatives may take the form of public inquiries, extra-judicial mediation, reparations, commemorations, and truth commissions. This thesis runs counter to the international legal community's embrace of the punitive criminal justice model as the preferred and often exclusive way to `deal with' perpetrators of genocidal violence and crimes against humanity.
Prisoners' Rights in the Context of the European Convention on Human Rights
Authors: LIVINGSTONE STEPHEN
Published: July 2003

Prisoners in Europe have frequently resorted to the European Commission and Court of Human Rights over the past 30 years. While many applications have been unsuccessful the Court has given a number of important decisions which have had a significant impact on prison law and policy, especially in the United Kingdom. After consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of applying a general human rights treaty to the prison environment the article moves on to examine the decisions of the Commission and Court in relation to a number of specific issues. These are prison conditions, communications with the outside world, prison discipline and release from prison. The article argues that this judicial involvement has been uneven, with the Strasbourg institutions showing a reluctance to intervene in relation to prison conditions or matters of internal administration. Overall while the decisions of the Commission and Court show an aversion to authoritarian approaches to prison management and a strong support for judicial supervision of what happens in prisons, the application of a human rights approach still seems to leave substantial discretion to the prison authorities regarding the underlying philosophy of punishment.
Educating Sensibilities
Authors: SMITH MARION , SPARKS RICHARD , GIRLING EVI
Published: July 2003

Theoretical work in the sociology of punishment (especially since Garland's influential introduction of the notion of penal `sensibilities') increasingly recognizes the importance of the cultural aspects of the topic. Yet surprisingly little examination exists of how penal questions actually figure in people's everyday consciousness or conversations. We address penal culture from the perspective of conversation. Specifically, we discuss a number of conversations that we have had with 9-year old children. By considering the dynamic aspects of these conversations we seek (a) to demonstrate one method for investigating sensibilities-in-action and (b) to indicate some ways in which the terms of penal culture are mobilized, assimilated or subverted among children. Such analysis discloses a quite high degree of ambiguity and semantic density in ordinary language discussions of punishing. We exemplify this inter alia by indicating the varying uses of the expression `teach someone a lesson'. The children's dominant idea of the `lesson' suggests that punishment is an intractable problem, and that people are not particularly tractable to its corrective or suasive force. On the other hand the `lesson' can also suggest communication of a different kind with more radical and hopeful implications.
Emotive and Ostentatious Punishment
Authors: PRATT JOHN
Published: July 2003

Over the course of the last decade or so, it has become increasingly apparent that modern penality is undergoing significant change. One aspect of this refiguring of the penal spectrum involves a growing recourse to what I refer to as emotive and ostentatious punishments of varying kinds - although this must be set against the enhanced continuity at the same time of a long-established trend towards bureaucratic rationalism in this area. The article draws on the theoretical constructs of Norbert Elias to explain this refiguring, arguing that what we can now see taking place in the penal arena is a decivilizing interruption in various localized sites to the broader continuity of the civilizing process.
Caring to Death
Authors: FEDERMAN CARY , HOLMES DAVE
Published: July 2003

The aim of this article is to describe the role of health care professionals in the capital punishment process. The relationship between the protocol of capital punishment in the United States and the use of health care professionals to carry out that task has been overlooked in the literature on punishment. Yet for some time, the operation of the medical sciences in prison have been `part of a disciplinary strategy' `intrinsic to the development of power relationships'. Many capital punishment statutes require medical personnel to be present at, if not actively involved in, executions. Through analyses of these statutes, show the degree to which these professionals have become part of the state's executive apparatus.
Bringing the Individual Back In
Authors: MILLER JEROME
Published: July 2003

The articles by Wacquant and Anderson in the present issue (1) plumb current statistical data on incarceration along with case examples and thereby draw important social policy implications; and (2) explore a detailed individual case study with the implications it suggests for devising social policies to address inner-city crime and the `code of the streets'. The highly different approaches of these two researchers - both valid - highlight the timeliness of contemporary criminological researchers reconsidering the early roots of their profession - particularly insofar as the dicey task of constructing grand theory must ultimately be grounded in the individual case. In their attempt to free themselves from the biases of ideology, contemporary positivist criminologists have policitized the field and in that process have wrought ideologically charged social harm. I propose that we rethink these approaches and once again ground research in matters that allow us to plumb such realities as the `meaning' of those actions we label delinquent and the transcendent aspects of human activity. These are not factors that easily surrender themselves to the measures of social positivism. I call for a rereading and reintegration of the thoughts of sociologists, political scientists and social theorists like George H. Mead, Clifford Shaw, W.I. Thomas, Jerome Bruner, Jürgen Habermas, and Eric Voegelin.
Unthought Thoughts
Authors: TONRY MICHAEL
Published: July 2003

Fashions in punishment policies and forms vary with changes in sensibilities (as do fashions in the arts, attitudes towards homosexuality, drug use and religious tolerance). Propositions and policies that appear unthinkable in some times become commonplace in others; beliefs and positions that are hotly contested or widely endorsed in some times are forgotten in others. With a bit more modesty, and longer memories, contemporary advocates and policy makers could avoid the worst excesses of their predecessors.
Facts, Values and Prison Policies
Authors: JACOBS JAMES B.
Published: July 2003

This article calls attention to the tendency of liberal criminologists to mix facts and values when assessing sentencing policies. It argues that an objective methodology for ranking countries with respect to sentencing severity has yet to be developed and urges caution and clarification in making moral criticisms of US sentencing policy and imprisonment rates.
The Causes and Consequences of Prison Growth in the United States
Authors: MAUER MARC
Published: July 2003

The unprecedented growth in the prison and jail population in the United States can be traced to a complex set of political developments and changes in sentencing practice. The rise in crime in the 1960s came at a time of increasing social divisions and the politicization of crime at the national level. This influenced and coincided with a debate on sentencing practice, which led to a dramatic shift away from the indeterminate sentencing model that had prevailed for much of the 20th century. As a result sentencing practice today is characterized by severe constraints on judges and parole officials in many jurisdictions and decreased emphasis on examining the unique circumstances of offender and offense. These changes in sentencing and the impact of the `war on drugs' have been the most substantial features contributing to the rise in the use of incarceration since 1980. Any movement for reduced incarceration will need to develop a clear analysis of the role of politics, race, media and coalition building in order to succeed.
Television, Public Space and Prison Population
Authors: MATHIESEN THOMAS
Published: July 2003

The article discusses the influence of television in and on public space. It maintains that with television, the world entered a qualitative new stage in the development of the mass media. Television has transformed public space into an enormous market place for entertainment, and functions as the spearhead of the modern entertainment industry. It is well known that crime is a perfect focus of attention for such an industry. The article does not suggest that the development of television is the only factor behind prison growth. But television facilitates prison growth in the sense of opening up for it, dismantling defenses that might otherwise be mustered against escalation. It corrodes values like civil rights, the rule of law and humanity. First, penal policy has become much more of a commodity than was the case a few decades ago. Second, a change has taken place from political legitimation in terms of principles to legitimation in terms of popularity. Third, a change has occurred in public debate from an emphasis on communicative rationality based on truthfulness, relevance and sincerity in augmentation, to an emphasis on opportunism and sensationalism. The article calls for a development of an `alternative public space'.
Governing Social Marginality
Authors: BECKETT KATHERINE , WESTERN BRUCE
Published: July 2003

Rapid growth of the US penal population over the last two decades has coincided with a decline in the number of welfare recipients. While shifts in crime rates, economic and political considerations most commonly account for variations in incarceration, we place the rise in incarceration levels in the institutional context of welfare state retrenchment. An analysis of state-level incarceration rates between 1975 and 1995 indicates that large penal systems are found in states with weak welfare systems. The negative relationship between welfare and incarceration grows over time, suggesting the emergence of a novel kind of penal-welfare regime in the late 1980s and 1990s. Although welfare state retrenchment is often interpreted as a kind of market deregulation, our analysis suggests that declining support for social welfare is part of a punitive policy development in which the state has a substantial and active role.
The Macho Penal Economy
Authors: DOWNES DAVID
Published: July 2003

The rise of mass incarceration in the USA is related to the historic character of American exceptionalism and the abandonment, over the past few decades, of policies of rehabilitation and radical social reform. The components for a compararable penal expansion are, with the exception of high rates of lethal violence, in process of assembly in some European societies: rates of serious property crime surpassing those in the USA; a shift in the politics of law and order towards `governing through crime' and populist punitiveness; and rising anxieties about risk and insecurity, in particular relating to ethnic minorities and crime. The distinctive character of social democratic societies, which has so far shielded them against mass incarceration and which already face challenge due to globalization, face further adverse comparison with the more deregulated US economy in terms of unemployment rates which are significantly distorted by the size of the American prison population. Economic debate should be better informed of the unprecedented extent to which the penal factor has come to exert a hidden influence on cross-national images of socioeconomic success and failure, and of the costs and benefits of social-democratic relative to more deregulated market economies.
Novus Ordo Saeclorum?
Authors: GREENBERG DAVID F.
Published: July 2003

The article discusses methodological and interpretive issues raised by Beckett and Western's (2001) statistical analysis of US state imprisonment rates. It considers Downes' (2001) argument that market economies generate high crime rates and high levels of punitiveness and questions whether Europe's penal history will follow that of the United States.
Deadly Symbiosis
Authors: WACQUANT LOÏC
Published: July 2003

To explain the astounding over-representation of blacks behind bars that has driven mass imprisonment in the United States, one must break out of the `crime-and-punishment' paradigm to reckon the extra-penological function of the criminal justice system as instrument for the management of dispossessed and dishonored groups. This article places the prison in the historical sequence of `peculiar institutions' that have shouldered the task of defining and confining African Americans, alongside slavery, the Jim Crow regime, and the ghetto. The recent upsurge in black incarceration results from the crisis of the ghetto as device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for the containment of lower-class African Americans. In the post-Civil Rights era, the vestiges of the dark ghetto and the expanding prison system have become linked by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion, spawning a carceral continuum that entraps a population of younger black men rejected by the deregulated wage-labor market. This carceral mesh has been solidified by changes that have reshaped the urban `Black Belt' of mid-century so as to make the ghetto more like a prison and undermined the `inmate society' residing in U.S. penitentiaries in ways that make the prison more like a ghetto. The resulting symbiosis between ghetto and prison not only perpetuates the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic taint of the black subproletariat, feeding the runaway growth of the carceral system. It also plays a pivotal role in the remaking of `race', the redefinition of the citizenry via the production of a racialized public culture of vilification of criminals, and the construction of a post-Keynesian state that replaces the social-welfare treatment of poverty by its penal management.
Going Straight
Authors: ANDERSON ELIJAH
Published: July 2003

Living in the poor inner-city black community places young people at special risk of falling victim to aggressive behavior. Although forces exist in the community that can counteract the influences that spawn violence and aggression - by far the most powerful is a strong, loving, `decent' (as inner-city residents put it) family committed to conventional social values - the despair is so pervasive that it has created an oppositional culture. The norms of this `street' culture are often consciously opposed to those of mainstream society. This article examines these two orientations, decent and street, and the way that they socially organize the community, by telling the story of a young innercity ex-convict's successful effort to `go straight' after release from prison.
Public Protection, Partnership and Risk Penality
Authors: KEMSHALL HAZEL , MAGUIRE MIKE
Published: July 2003

This article uses empirical research on the implementation of risk assessment and risk management procedures by public protection panels in England and Wales, to assess how far the evidence supports claims of a broad shift in modes of crime control from penal modernism towards a new `risk penality' characteristic of the late (or post-) modern period. The result is a mixed and contradictory picture, in which the dominant discourse around measures to deal with sexual and `dangerous' offenders is in tune with this claim, but there are numerous aspects of agency culture and practice - for example, interest in the individual case, and the valuing of professional judgement above actuarial tools - which reflect the continuing strength of the `modernist' project. There are, however, signs of a growing populist challenge to the modernist assumption that risk knowledge and management should be left to small groups of `experts' working in secret. Overall, perhaps the strongest evidence of a shift towards new penal forms lies in (a) the emergence of new forms of partnership, driven by the `logic of risk', and (b) the significant dispersal of accountability which has accompanied their development.
Affective Versus Effective Justice
Authors: FREIBERG ARIE
Published: July 2003

This article argues that if crime prevention policies are to succeed in the political or public spheres they must address some of the deeper emotional or affective dimensions of crime and its place in society. While crime prevention remains a predominantly `rationalist' approach to criminal policy it will fail to compete successfully with the more emotive law and order policies which tend to resonate with the public and which appear to meet deep-seated psychological and affective needs. It suggests that crime prevention can address the three core elements that must make up a response to crime: the instrumental, the emotional and the production of social cohesion. It outlines a range of values and symbols which crime prevention may tap into in order to meet some of the affective dimensions of criminal justice policy.
The Uses of Punishment and Exile
Authors: FINNANE MARK , MCGUIRE JOHN
Published: July 2003

The European settlement of Australia from 1788 was accompanied by a prolonged dis-possession of the indigenous people, who became British subjects at law. Regimes of punishment played an important role in this dispossession. Focusing on the colonies of latest settlement, Western Australia and Queensland, the evidence here suggests also that conventional modes of punishment were modified to accommodate indigenous offending. Public execution and corporal punishment of Aborigines was practised after their exclusion as options for the settler population - but imprisonment too was shaped to the end of managing a seemingly intractable indigenous population. In completing the process of dispossession, the colonial state developed less violent punitive resources to manage the indigenous population. Incarceration within unique institutions, segregation from the settler population and surveillance and regulation through an expanding bureaucracy were strategies of social control increasingly deployed in an attempt to address the distinctive challenges posed by a dispossessed indigenous population.
Death and the Triumph of Governance?
Authors: CARLEN PAT
Published: July 2003

Analyses of the consciously moral attempts to combat suicide at a women's prison via organizational innovation provide important lessons not only in the governance of women's prisons, but also in the conditionality and politics of contemporary penal probity. At the policy level they call into question the adequacy of quantitative methods for assessing staff efficiency in delivering an appropriate anti-suicide policy. In the realms of theory and penal politics they provoke an unease with studies in governmentality which give primacy to the teleological meanings of explicitly reform-oriented penal strategies. Insofar as such analyses omit to specify the points at which prevailing power relations and their conventional practices were under threat or open to challenge, they also omit to identify new configurations of resistance to penal oppression. Thus, while, on the one hand, successive studies of governmentality suggest that prevailing power relations ensure that all practices of imprisonment are inevitably illegitimate, and, on the other, successive governments continue to evaluate women's prisons according to totally inappropriate criteria, present opportunities to recognize, record and extend the genuinely therapeutic practices which reduce the damaging pain of women in penal custody will be lost. Either they will not appear in teleological depictions of an evertriumphant governmentality; or they will be suppressed by official audits looking for quantitative evidence that the prisons are `good value for money'. Possibilities for a `remoralization' of prison regimes will thereby be occluded by the mystifications of a positivist empiricism and a theoreticist social theory.
Reassessing Resistance
Authors: BOSWORTH MARY , CARRABINE EAMONN
Published: July 2003

The relationship between power and resistance behind prison walls has long animated sociological discussions of imprisonment. In this article we advance a fresh understanding of resistance that recognizes the multi-faceted dimensions of prisoner agency while acknowledging the dangers in simply valorizing the strategies of the confined to subvert penal power. For us the importance of resistance is that it makes explicit the connections between everyday actions and broader inequalities. Nevertheless we identify three limitations in conventional characterizations of resistance. First it is understood as a privileged quality in the human spirit. Second, is the assumption that those who do not challenge authority accept the legitimacy of the institution. Third is the equation of resistance with rudimentary political action. Though drawing on our empirical research conducted in male and female prisons in the UK we refine the concept to overcome these limitations. In particular we indicate how social identities mediate prisoner agency and are crucially implicated in acts of contestation. Our more general ambition is to place at the centre of prison sociology the still marginalized issues of gender, race and sexuality.
Symbol, Substance, and Severity in Western Penal Policies
Authors: TONRY MICHAEL
Published: July 2003

Similar economic transformations, public opinion patterns, social developments and crime trends have affected most western countries over the past few decades. Punishment trends, however, whether measured in terms of imprisonment rates, average sentence lengths, preferences for or against short or long prison sentences and adoption of various forms of new community penalties vary widely. Why similar economic, social, crime and public opinion trends have such different effects on penal policy is not known. Many explanations for penal policy trends have some explanatory weight for particular countries but few are broadly generalizable.
Quality of prison operations in the US federal sector
Authors: Camp Scott D. , Gaes Gerald G. , Saylor William G.
Published: July 2003

An examination of the quality of operations at private and public prisons is essential to making informed decisions about the desirability of using private and public prisons. Previous studies have used survey data collected from staff and inmates to compare prisons based on the proportions or percentages of staff making favorable evaluations of different items. As argued here and elsewhere, the previous studies have been flawed by methodological shortcomings. An approach is demonstrated here that allows for an examination of the aggregate measurement properties of survey items as well as for making comparisons of different prisons. The data are from surveys administered to staff at 96 federal prisons and two private prisons. The results demonstrate that not all survey items can be used indiscriminately to compare prisons, and when comparisons are made, it is essential to control for individual-level and institutional-level factors that are not related to institution performance but still influence survey results.
Restorative justice
Authors: Daly Kathleen
Published: July 2003

Advocates’ claims about restorative justice contain four myths: (1) restorative justice is the opposite of retributive justice; (2) restorative justice uses indigenous justice practices and was the dominant form of pre-modern justice; (3) restorative justice is a ‘care’ (or feminine) response to crime in comparison to a ‘justice’ (or masculine) response; and (4) restorative justice can be expected to produce major changes in people. Drawing from research on conferencing in Australia and New Zealand, I show that the real story of restorative justice differs greatly from advocates’ mythical true story. Despite what advocates say, there are connections between retribution and restoration (or reparation), restorative justice should not be considered a pre-modern and feminine justice, strong stories of repair and goodwill are uncommon, and the raw material for restorativeness between victims and offenders may be in short supply. Following Engel, myth refers to a true story; its truth deals with ‘origins, with birth, with beginnings... with how something began to be’ (1993: 791-2, emphasis in original). Origin stories, in turn, ‘encode a set of oppositions’ (1993: 822) such that when telling a true story, speakers transcend adversity. By comparing advocates’ true story of restorative justice with the real story, I offer a critical and sympathetic reading of advocates’ efforts to move the idea forward. I end by reflecting on whether the political future of restorative justice is better secured by telling the mythical true story or the real story.
The British General Election 2001
Authors: Downes David , Morgan Rod
Published: July 2003

The politics of law and order played only a modest role in the British General Election of 2001. But that role was shaped by a near consensus between New Labour and Conservative agendas for more punitive policies towards persistent offenders and the rediscovery of the criminal rather than the crime as the rationale for sentencing policy. The article explores the background and character of this climax to a decade of realignment.