Suchergebnisse

Abstract: The criminal justice arena within which penal reform groups now operate requires them to develop new strategies. With this context in mind, the significance of a recent action for judicial review is discussed. In this landmark case, the Howard League for Penal Reform successfully challenged the legality of the Home Secretary's policy on children held in young offender institutions. The article describes the changing strategies employed by the League, and particularly contrasts 'persuasion and influence' with the turn to litigation. The ability of judicial review, as a specific kind of litigation, to further the goals of penal reform, is considered. Two principal arguments are advanced, namely: (i) that legal strategies are an important means through which penal policy is contested, and (ii) that legal actions contribute to the pursuit of informed modes of public engagement with questions about criminal justice.

This article explores the character of our subjective investments in the practice of legal punishment, and asks whether in attending to these the possibility of an ethical relation to the other might be opened up. The medium for this reflection is an introspective reading of several visual and literary representations of imprisonment. As concerns the emotional significance of the act of punishing, the reading advanced challenges Durkheimian and Foucauldian understandings of the meaning of punishment. This renders the question as to whether contemporary penality can be described as `post-disciplinary' somewhat premature. Proceeding from this primary thesis, I go on to argue for the work of psychoanalytic reading as a valuable critical and reflexive exercise in the study of penality. Scholarship that fails to elaborate in any detail the complexities of the intrasubjective does not facilitate a reflexive approach to penality. Melanie Klein's work, however, is particularly apposite, with its unflinching pursuit of vacillations between relations to others and what Klein called `the relationship to ourselves'.

When the call for justice comes through the grief-stricken plea of the mother of a murdered child, it carries a potent affective charge, levying an unassailable demand for our concern and commanding urgent action. Today we are regularly confronted with images of suffering and vengeful crime victims. What kind of response can be envisioned as just? This article stages some encounters arising from press photographs of mothers bereaved by violent acts of criminality. The reflections presented here pose a grave test to the theory of the face. How to respond to the face of the hater, and specifically to the black wrath of the mother of the murdered child? How is the passage from ethics to justice to be negotiated?