The aim of this paper is to critically engage with the idea that Therapeutic Communities (TCs) can be promoted in England and Wales as a radical alternative to prison for substance users who have broken the law. After grounding the discussion within the normative framework of an ‘abolitionist real utopia’ (Scott 2013), the article explores...

This article examines an ostensibly new feature of the securitised urban landscape: ‘hostile architecture’. Following controversy in 2014 London over ‘anti‐homeless spikes’– metal studs implanted at ground level designed to discourage the homeless from sleeping in otherwise unrestricted spaces – certain visible methods of environmental social control were temporarily subject to intense public scrutiny and...

Drawing on findings from a two‐year empirical study examining the culture of closed‐circuit television (CCTV) operation in the UK, this paper analyses how CCTV camera operators subjectively experience the visual media that they work to produce.

An analysis of the Kony 2012 phenomenon to illustrate how a digital campaign can validate and reproduce subjectivities and structures of domination rather than stimulate sustainable reform‐based change.

Addressing the dynamics of interpersonal violence, institutionalised abuses and prisoner isolation, this article consolidates critical analyses as challenges to the essentially liberal constructions and interpretations of prisoner agency and penal reformism. Grounded in long term research with women in prison in the North of Ireland, it connects embedded, punitive responses that undermine women prisoners’ self‐esteem...