Geographies of landscape: Representation, power and meaning

Green criminology has sought to blur the nature-culture binary and this article seeks to extend recent work by geographers writing on landscape to further our understanding of the shifting contours of the divide. The article begins by setting out these different approaches, before addressing how dynamics of surveillance and conquest are embedded in landscape photography. It then describes how the ways we visualize the Earth were reconfigured with the emergence of photography in the 19th century and how the world itself has been transformed into a target in our global media culture

Challenging the Logics of Reformism and Humanism in Juvenile Justice Rhetoric

This article draws on contemporary policy discourse in order to advance claims about the intractable figure of the “bad” child in contemporary juvenile justice reforms in the United States (US). The article focuses in particular on the discourses of trauma and “brain science” to point to a form of neo-positivism that has arguably emerged and which challenges efforts to engage in systematic decarceration. The article also focuses on the idea of the “bad child” that persists in the commitment of some reformers to the necessity of confinement for some children. The article questions the extent to which new forms of positivism challenge our ability to leverage structural claims

Penal abolition and the state: colonial, racial and gender violences

The present issue of Contemporary Justice Review constitutes the first of three issues on the topic of penal abolition, assembled by us in an effort to bring the history and current character of penal abolition research to readers both familiar with and new to such work. The focus of this issue is ‘Penal Abolition and the State: Colonial, Racial and Gender Violences,’ and it is followed by another two issues, themed on ‘Penal Abolition Praxis’ (Critical Criminology 2018) and ‘Penal Abolition: Challenging Boundaries’ (Social Justice 2018

Relocating the “inmate”: Tracing the geographies of social reproduction in correctional supervision

Neoliberal governance spurs the contradictory drives of securitization and austerity in the US carceral system. Correctional and parole offices cut costs by relocating care, relying upon the work of Black women, their families, and communities to provide myriad services to their incarcerated and paroled loved ones. Yet while their labor is vital to the reproduction and growth of this system, these same neoliberal processes work systematically to erase it. In doing so, they allow new kinds of unwarranted state surveillance through the private space of the home. In this article, I critically analyze the austerity measures implemented by Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections, an institution that has undergone extensive reforms since 2012. To do so, I bridge feminist political and economic geographies, examining state processes via an analysis of unpaid reproductive labor, everyday practices, and emotion. Through a three-year ethnographic study with the loved ones of incarcerated people, I show how the state externalizes the cost of supervision onto prisoners’ support networks, relying in varied ways on families for the care and surveillance of prisoners. I show that this covert strategy enables the state to claim reductions in prison populations while, in fact, maintaining containment of formerly incarcerated people. These findings urge increased attention to the state’s dependence on incarcerated people’s support networks, demonstrating the vital insights a feminist geographic perspective offers in this age of austerity