Breaking bad news: Penal populism, tabloid adversarialism and Brexit

This article analyses the role that British conservative tabloid newspapers play in promoting penal populism and delegitimising liberal prison reform initiatives. Principally, we consider how different sections of the British press reacted to the then Prime Minister David Cameron's prison reform speech of 8 February 2016. The analysis illustrates how different newspapers cohered around two diametrically opposing interpretations of the scandalous state of the prison system, reflecting distinctive penal philosophies and moral positions. In the context of penal populism and the populist furies unleashed by the Brexit campaign, the central research finding is that the comparatively passive and equivocal support offered by the broadsheets was no match for the vitriolic attack mounted by the conservative tabloids on the ‘soft justice’ parts of Cameron's prison reform agenda. We conclude by arguing that the stark lesson to be learned is that the scandal‐ridden prison is a particularly toxic issue marked by serial policy failure. Consequently, in a febrile, intermediatised penal populist context, why would any political leader take on the manifest risks associated with embarking on liberal prison reform

Righting Wrongs: Citizen Journalism and Miscarriages of Justice

This chapter demonstrates the agenda-setting power of citizen journalism in a context of miscarriages of justice. Our empirical analysis focuses on the interaction of media, political and judicial forces following the death of newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, shortly after being struck by a police officer at the G20 Protests in London 2009. We examine the rise of citizen journalism as a key challenge to those institutions that traditionally have been able to control the information environment. We then illustrate how the intervention of citizen journalism, above all else, established the news agenda around the Tomlinson case, disrupted the traditional flows of communication power, and was transformative in the Tomlinson family's search for justice

Enhancing the work of the Islington Integrated Gangs Team: A pilot study on the response to serious youth violence in Islington

This report is the result of research conducted by the Centre for City Criminology at City, University of London, in partnership with Islington’s Integrated Gangs Team (IGT) and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). The research was co-funded by MPS and the School of Arts and Social Sciences, City, University of London. Following a collaborative research event in October 2017, City Criminologists were commissioned to carry out a small-scale research project to capture the work of the IGT and to make recommendations regarding its operations, coherence, effectiveness and sustainability. The research team conducted semi-structured interviews over several months with 23 practitioners across the services that constitute the IGT. This report presents the findings and recommendations

Dynamical Monte Carlo Study of Equilibrium Polymers : Static Properties

We report results of extensive Dynamical Monte Carlo investigations on self-assembled Equilibrium Polymers (EP) without loops in good solvent. (This is thought to provide a good model of giant surfactant micelles.) Using a novel algorithm we are able to describe efficiently both static and dynamic properties of systems in which the mean chain length \Lav is effectively comparable to that of laboratory experiments (up to 5000 monomers, even at high polymer densities). We sample up to scission energies of $E/k_BT=15$ over nearly three orders of magnitude in monomer density $\phi$, and present a detailed crossover study ranging from swollen EP chains in the dilute regime up to dense molten systems. Confirming recent theoretical predictions, the mean-chain length is found to scale as \Lav \propto \phi^\alpha \exp(\delta E) where the exponents approach $\alpha_d=\delta_d=1/(1+\gamma) \approx 0.46$ and $\alpha_s = 1/2 [1+(\gamma-1)/(\nu d -1)] \approx 0.6, \delta_s=1/2$ in the dilute and semidilute limits respectively. The chain length distribution is qualitatively well described in the dilute limit by the Schulz-Zimm distribution \cN(s)\approx s^{\gamma-1} \exp(-s) where the scaling variable is s=\gamma L/\Lav. The very large size of these simulations allows also an accurate determination of the self-avoiding walk susceptibility exponent $\gamma \approx 1.165 \pm 0.01$. ....... Finite-size effects are discussed in detail.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, LATE

Solution to the problem of the poor cyclic fatigue resistance of bulk metallic glasses

The recent development of metallic glass-matrix composites represents a particular milestone in engineering materials for structural applications owing to their remarkable combination of strength and toughness. However, metallic glasses are highly susceptible to cyclic fatigue damage, and previous attempts to solve this problem have been largely disappointing. Here, we propose and demonstrate a microstructural design strategy to overcome this limitation by matching the microstructural length scales (of the second phase) to mechanical crack-length scales. Specifically, semisolid processing is used to optimize the volume fraction, morphology, and size of second-phase dendrites to confine any initial deformation (shear banding) to the glassy regions separating dendrite arms having length scales of ≈2 μm, i.e., to less than the critical crack size for failure. Confinement of the damage to such interdendritic regions results in enhancement of fatigue lifetimes and increases the fatigue limit by an order of magnitude, making these “designed” composites as resistant to fatigue damage as high-strength steels and aluminum alloys. These design strategies can be universally applied to any other metallic glass systems