Howard Journal video abstracts

Video abstracts

A new feature introduced by the Howard Journal.

Find out more about articles published in the Howard Journal by watching our video abstracts. You can watch all of the video abstracts on our YouTube channel here on the playlist ‘Howard Journal of Crime and Justice video abstracts’.

Latest video abstract

Progressive penality as performance

Jamie Buchan (Edinburgh Napier University) and Fergus McNeill (University of Glasgow)

Scotland’s prison population remains stubbornly high despite reforms to sentencing and community penalties (most recently in 2016). Seeking to advance the debate on punishment in Scotland, we use empirical data to support a novel theoretical synthesis of the ‘agonistic framework’ and ‘performative regulation’. We argue that these reforms appear oriented towards decarceration, without substantively engaging with the drivers of imprisonment, and hence exemplify the ‘performative’ nature of much Scottish penal policy. The ‘performance’ is shaped by countervailing political constraints on the Scottish Nationalist government, amid continued debate over independence – but truly progressive penal policy requires radical and substantive responses to the problems that punishment seeks to address.

Read the article here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hojo.12516