'Tactics', Agency and Power in Women's Prisons

Following some months off to attend to pressing PhD business, The DA is making a comeback with a meet-up in May to discuss Abigail Rowe's recent article in the British Journal of Criminology, 'Tactics', Agency and Power in Women's Prisons.

Everyone welcome!

Date: Tuesday 10th May
Time: 6pm
Venue: Mulligan's Pub (we're usually in the back room) (Dublin 2, Poolbeg Street)

Please feel free to get in contact to be included on future mailing lists! Alternatively tweet to @blalygamal for more information.

Orange is the New Black - S3!

The Differential Association is plunging into the world of Orange is the New Black yet again this summer to discuss season 3 of the phenomenally successful Netflix show. In the summer of 2014, we discussed the first two seasons, and this August we're returning to discuss the story so far.

In the interim, Orange is the New Black has spawned its own mini-industry, with seminars devoted to it, and with an exciting array of research which takes the show as its starting point; this research is coming from the fields of media studies, gender/queer studies, critical race studies and criminology and criminal justice issues.

This makes the release of the third season a really pertinent time to get together and discuss how the show is progressing, how characters are developing AND to discuss the reaction to the show as well.

Everyone is welcome! If you missed the first DA on the show, come along and partake in the second.

Date: Wednesday 26th August

Time: 6pm

Venue: Mulligan's on Poolbeg Street - distressingly, the door to the back room has been REMOVED. We shall struggle on, make and mend.

Death and Furniture - the DA talks epistemology

On Wednesday 29 April, The Differential Association will be discussing Edwards, Ashmore and Potter's 'Death and Furniture'. The article is a reflection on realism versus relativism and the arguments for and against social constructionism.

As well as discussing the questions of epistemology that this article throws up, we will also be applying these questions to our own research and experience, so that we can consider the theoretical preoccupations in light of tangible questions emerging in relation to understandings of crime and punishment.

When: 6pm Wed 29 April
Where: Mulligan's Back Room

Edwards, D., Ashmore, M. and Potter, J. (1995) 'Death and Furniture: The Rhetoric, Politics and Theology of Bottom Line Arguments Against Relativism', History of the Human Sciences, 8(2), 25-49.

Filler Elevator Music...

The Differential Association has been AWOL for some months now. Its winning mix of light-hearted banter, deep criminological ponderings and devotion to holding monthly meet-ups in Dublin pubs has no doubt been much missed.

There has been a very good reason for its prolonged absence.

Members of the DA have been beavering away tirelessly behind the scenes to arrange a conference in which a lot of what happens at our monthly meetings will take place on a larger scale.

On Friday 27 March, the inaugural Irish Postgraduate Criminology Conference will be held. The conference is being co-hosted and funded by Dublin Institute of Technology, and the School of Law at Trinity College Dublin. It will bring together dozens of postgraduate researchers in the fields of criminology and criminal justice, criminal law, historical perspectives on crime and many others, to provide a space for research, both Irish and international.

The invited speakers at the conference are Professor Ian O'Donnell, of University College Dublin, Professor Eamonn Carrabine of the University of Essex and Dr Claire Hamilton of NUI Maynooth. We feel hugely honoured to host these speakers, especially as each has authored a text which at one time was the selected reading material of a monthly meet-up!

Normal service will resume for all those criminology discussions following the conference!

Democratising Punishment by Julian V Roberts and Jan de Keijser

Julian V Roberts and Jan W de Keijser (2014) ‘Democratising Punishment: Sentencing, Community Views and Values’, Punishment and Society, 16(4), 474-498

How far should public involvement in punishing criminal wrongdoing be facilitated? A recent movement towards greater participation from the ‘lay’ public has suggested that these voices are lacking in the criminal justice system as it is currently conceptualised. Those in favour of this movement towards ‘Democratising Punishment’ have argued that a crisis of legitimacy is impending as decision-making in criminal justice matters becomes ever more divorced from ‘common-sense’.

In light of this, one of the key rationales put forward by the democratising punishment scholars, the notion of ‘common-sense’, presents itself for examination. It is hard not to think of Gramsci’s view of common-sense as ‘a reservoir of historically discontinuous and disjointed ideas that functions as the philosophy of non-philosophers’ which suggested that it was hardly the wise arbiter it often purported to be (In Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci 1971).

In their forcibly articulated argument Roberts and de Keijser critique, and in turn, criticise the models of participation and rationales proposed by advocates of the democracy in punishment movement.

As Lon Fuller articulated, through the person of Justice Handy, in ‘The Case of the Speluncean Explorers’, the place of public opinion in justice has been a recurring question in legal circles:

‘I have never been able to make my brothers see that government is a human affair, and that men are ruled, not by words on paper or by abstract theories, but by other men. They are ruled well when their rulers understand the feelings and conceptions of the masses. They are ruled badly when that understanding is lacking.

‘Of all branches of the government, the judiciary is the most likely to lose contact with the common man.’

Fuller presented Justice Handy as entirely swayed by the ‘common-sensical’ views of the public, as revealed to him through opinion polls in newspapers; Handy used this evidence to solve the difficult case at hand, namely the saving of four men accused of murder (the case is worth a read, and it makes great dinner party/pub banter).

Interestingly, given the concerns of democratising punishment advocates about the apparent disconnect between the people and the courts, Ireland’s highly discretionary system would surely provide acute cause for concern. It ensures that there is even less input from democratically elected persons, while tools such as sentencing guidelines, for example, are not a feature of this jurisdiction.

Advocates of democratising punishment extol the virtues of community involvement. One issue not explored at length in Roberts and de Keijser’s article however is the assumed homogeneity of ‘community’ which must necessarily underpin these treatises. The concept of the ‘community’ in each of the models of participatory justice is presented without nuance or discussion of what this nebulous term actually consists. Using a vague term such as 'community' also serves to glorify and romanticise the idea of lay participation, in a manner which becomes difficult to sustain when subjected to scrutiny. The direct participation of ‘community’ in this abstract form would inevitably incorporate the discrimination and inequity of society; currently within a professionalised criminal justice system there is the veneer of equality and neutrality. This is allied to the dangers of a reduction in transparency and accountability, as laypersons would not be held accountable to the same extent as professionals acting within carefully determined parameters. The entire debate suggests that a key question must be answered - is dispassionate deliberation a desired trait in decision-making? If this is not agreed on, then proportionality and principled sentencing make way for emotive and expressive justice. The argument put forth by 'Democratising Punishment' advocates that sentencing is ‘dysfunctional’ is interesting in this vein. ‘Dysfunctional’ how? In reality, this appears to mean lenient. Therefore, public participation in sentencing poses a risk of increasing punitiveness in the form of longer sentences, with the resultant rise in prison populations and expense.

Following on from the uncertain concept of 'community', even juries in many jurisdictions, including Ireland (see the Law Reform Commission report on this), are rarely representative, inevitably showcasing a selection of society skewed towards certain sub-groups. The small proportion of criminal cases which end in a jury trial is also regularly glossed over in the fiction of the jury trial as the cornerstone of the legal system. The valorising of the jury trial also sits uneasily with calls for greater expert juries or calls for a complete absence of jurors, for example in sexual offence cases or in cases of financial complexity deemed particularly specialised.

The question of how public reactions are to be gauged is also problematic. The equation of a media with a public reaction raises issues of causation. To what extent can a media reaction be viewed as reflective of a public reaction? In Ireland, an intense media reaction to the Lavinia Kerwick case in the early 1990s led to the Criminal Justice Act 1993 in which victims were given an opportunity, through the use of victim impact statements, to express in court how the crime had impacted them. However, the untangling of genuine public disquiet from media noise is difficult to quantify and assuming that media reactions are a proxy for public opinion can have the paradoxical effect of shutting the public out of debate.

Ultimately, the democratising punishment argument appears to locate the citizen as consumer, and to prioritise concerns of getting value for ‘your’ money; a sleek criminal justice system, incorporating Points of View-style feedback, is envisaged. The question of how great the want is among the public to assume their starring role in the administration of justice is debatable, for example the record low turn-out at the elections for Police Commissioners in England and Wales, which suggested a tokenistic exercise in devolving power to a people who had little interest. Over the previous two centuries, civil society gradually gave up its role in the punishment of offenders, it is questionable to what extent it has the desire and capacity to participate in a meaningful way.

Ultimately, The Differential Association suggested that education and information campaigns targeted at the public may offer a more feasible means of incorporating public acceptance of criminal justice processes. Those present discussed the possibility of televising trials, for example The Murder Trial (aired by Channel 4) and the blanket coverage of the Oscar Pistorius homicide trial, both presented opportunities to assess how such a proposal could work in practice. However, inevitably, the entertainment imperatives and the danger of misleading editing presents issues of ethics, exploitation and sensationalism.

What is lost in the literature calling for greater democratisation is the idea that professionals in the criminal justice system are citizens; they are merely citizens that have been tasked with acting impartially and to the best of their ability according to pre-set parameters. Further, judges are already to an extent influenced by public opinion in sentencing. Arguably, the use of restorative justice practices are already an attempt to introduce the community into the criminal justice process, as is community policing.

Finally, justice cannot be devolved as a discrete area which operates without reference to other areas of policy-making. The criminal justice system comprises one part of a symbiotic relationship with other areas of policy and politics such as welfare and education. Should public participation extend to these diverse other areas? To consider criminal justice policy in isolation merely perpetuates the use of its institutions and agencies as a catch-all for failures elsewhere in society.

Roberts and de Keijser have presented a sharp critique of the main arguments for 'democratising punishment'; the article is written in an informal and colloquial style, and the arguments are concisely and convincingly stated.

'Policing Sexting' by Lara Karaian

The law is continually called upon to address emerging issues of concern arising from technological advances. The increasingly ubiquitous use and ownership of smartphones has presented its own novel catchment area of behaviours, including the neologism of ‘sexting’, the taking and sending of sexual images electronically. This year saw a high-profile news story in which the hacked, stolen and leaked images of celebrities, mostly women, were published online. This news story helped publicise some of the issues around ‘sexting’ and has brought the practice to general public consciousness. In England and Wales recently, so-called ‘revenge porn’, the distribution of explicit images without the consent of the subject, is to be enshrined as a criminal offence, carrying a maximum penalty of two years in prison. In the brave new world of smartphones therefore, law enforcement and legislators are grappling with issues of security and privacy. However, the rise of the smartphone has also ushered in child protection fears.

Lara Karaian, in a recent article for Theoretical Criminology, explores the discourses around ‘sexting’ and teen online safety. Using the real-world example of a Canadian public service campaign designed to educate teenagers on the harms of the internet and ‘sexting’ in particular, she sets out her task: ‘to expose how antisexting initiatives that reify and mobilize a culture of sexual shame in order to responsibilize certain girls for their own, and others’, safety constitute meaning-making projects that reproduce and reify gendered, racialized, classed and hetero-normative ideas of sexual value, propriety, privilege and blameworthiness.’ (284)

Since the advent of the internet as an everyday tool for many people, accessible to greater numbers of households worldwide, a rumbling about its pernicious effects on children has been palpable. Hanna Rosin, in a recent article in The Atlantic, highlights the difficulty in pitching a response to the teen behaviour of sexting, and documents attempts, of varying degrees of success, to develop responses. The concerns about children and the dangers of internet usage can be added to the legacy of ‘respectable fears’ outlined by Pearson (1983).

In her article, Karaian draws on Garland’s (1996) theory of responsibilization, put forward in ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State’, to suggest that teenage girls are being made responsible for their own sexual safety, and for the criminalisation of their peers who may redistribute images. Karaian locates the Canadian campaign within an identified tendency to blame women for their own victimisation; Karaian quotes one US police officer who rationalises the decision to focus on female behaviour with regard to ‘sexting’, to the effect that, ‘without her [the girl] there would be no crime’ and provides further contemporary relevance by citing the discourse evident during the ‘Steubenville Rape Trial’ which concentrated on the blighted futures of promising young men rather than the wrong they had perpetrated.

The Canadian ‘anti-sexting’ campaign was targeted particularly at teenage girls and appeared to tap into the informal social control mechanism of shame. The focus on teenage girls underlined a societal emphasis on the purity and virginity of this group; innocence was therefore understood as an identifiable form of social capital for a teenage girl. Karaian notes the tension inherent around this form of ‘privileged’ sexuality; teenage girls are unintelligible as sexual beings while also suffering fetishisation as sexual objects. The ‘framing’ of the Canadian campaign, explored by Karaian, once again prioritised this privileged yet unintelligible sexuality and further reified sexual double standards and the concept of the 'ideal' victim.

However, Karaian contends that teenage girls were not accorded universal concern in the campaign. Fears were concentrated in a specific sub-grouping of white, middle-class and feminine teenage girls; which effectively presented the ‘good girl’ in opposition to the ‘Other’, in this context the ‘Other’ as a racialized, queer or differently classed teenage girl.

Karaian presented statistics which suggested that teenage boys are more likely to redistribute images, and contrasts this with the message of the campaign which targets instead the consenting ‘image creator’, framed as a girl. This leads inevitably to questions of why the campaign did not direct more of its focus towards this cohort of teenage boys, who distribute images without consent. However, the fears underlying disquiet about ‘sexting’ centre specifically on the sexualisation of teenage girls. The opprobrium could be more accurately located on the act of taking pictures in the first place, and less on the issue of distribution (which, as per victim-blaming, is then often understood as a natural consequence of a girl’s initial ‘mistake’).

The Differential Association cited some recent campaigns, aimed at locating responsibility for sexual assaults with the perpetrator. Are small but significant shifts evident in public awareness? A recent White House campaign, ‘It’s On Us’, and the ‘Don’t Be That Guy’ campaign have been developed to raise awareness among males, in contrast to many public safety campaigns which exhort to potential victims. (Interestingly, the Irish Examiner article above refers to the campaign targeting 'potential sex offenders' – which tends to make it sound like 'potential sex offenders' are an identifiable category of persons, easily spotted by their shifty eyes).

The Differential Association segued into a discussion on the well-worn chestnut, the 'sexualisation of youth', understood inevitably as the sexualisation of teenage girls. Presumably, 'sexting' is viewed by many as another indicator of sexualised youth. Is 'sexting' merely an expression of sexual autonomy? Or is it an adverse impact of the 'pornification of society'? A post-feminist argument might counter that the radical feminist position further condemns girls for breaking the boundaries of convention by displaying themselves as sexual beings. However, is it purely coincidental that expressing sexuality often implicitly implies expressing 'raunch' sexuality (Levy 2005). The received societal wisdom on 'sexuality' often appears monolithic, and uniform, framed from a 'male gaze' perspective. This presents a very problematic balancing act for teenage girls, as their sexuality has tended to exist as a binary, the concealed sexuality of the 'respectable' and the overt sexuality of the 'Other'. Expressive/excessive sexuality can become a marker of shame. Teenage girls seemingly cannot legitimately include sex as part of their identity and not have it become a transformative, often degrading, aspect in this identity.

Karaian’s article presents a fascinating exploration of how visual cues can be read. It also provides an interesting example of the increasing prominence of images within criminology as a further means of explicating how understandings of crime and deviance are constructed. The theoretical underpinning is rigorous and is drawn together and used to explicate a tangible case study. The Differential Association did note, however, that the arguments made in the article could have been illustrated with the images described therein, to reinforce the interpretations and findings made throughout.

Xmas DA - Sentencing!

This December, The Differential Association will get together to have a festive chin-wag about sentencing (what makes it festive, you say, the port and the woolly jumpers!). The reading material is a recent article by Julian V Roberts and Jan W de Keijser which explores the question of who is qualified or entitled to pass sentence, and the role of the public in decision-making:

This essay explores and critiques a theory of criminal justice which privileges the role of public intuitions about punishment over more traditional influences on sentencing principles and practice. This movement may be termed ‘Democratising Punishment’ and it has important consequences for sentencing in all jurisdictions. Several recent books advocate reforms such as deriving sentencing principles from public opinion research or sentencing by juries rather than legal professionals. In the essay we critique this perspective and note the threats to principled sentencing arising from greater public involvement in the sentencing of offenders.

When: Wednesday 3rd December at 6pm

Where: Mulligan's Back Room, Poolbeg Street, Dublin 2