The book pulls together discussions and research conducted collaboratively between Henrique and Anastasia over the past 10 years and has just been published (October 6^th) by Routledge in their Criminology and Criminal Justice Series. Details are hereLink opens in a new window.

By drawing on a scholarship from law, sociology, criminology, and philosophy the book questions punishment as concept, social phenomenon and contemporary practice. It seeks to examine what are the assumptions underpinning its normalisation and legitimation in society and examines punishment’s targets, objectives and implications. The book also seeks to locate punishment and punitivity within their wider social-cultural contexts. It ultimately aims to unsettle the idea that there is something common-sensical, necessary and unavoidable about punitive justice.

As its title suggests, the book attempts to answer a series of questions, including what punishment is; who punishment’s targets and subjects are; how punishment is perpetuated and experienced; when and where punishment unfolds and finally, why we punish. It ends by considering the implications of this enquiry to understandings of punishment and broader pursuits of justice.

Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen have won the Howard Journal Best article Prize 2022 for their article titled: ‘Feeling the absence of justice: Notes on our pathological reliance on punitive justice’.

This article critically examines our relationship with justice in contemporary Western liberal settings, with a particular focus on why our pursuit of justice is intimately entangled with punitive logics. It starts by arguing that we have a predominantly pathological approach to justice, in the sense that it follows a logic that is akin to that displayed in contemporary sensibilities regarding bodily pain. We deploy Drew Leder’s concept of ‘dys-appearance’ to discuss how, in Western liberal societies, justice is primarily experienced negatively as a phenomenon; that is, we mainly become conscious of justice through the painful and episodic experience of injustice. We then explore this phenomenological quality of justice which, we argue, is linked to how the pursuit of justice in these settings predominantly takes a hostile, punitive aspect. The article concludes by exploring how this punitive impulse can be resisted, through what we term a ‘lived sense of justice’.

You can read the article hereLink opens in a new window.