"Feeling the absence of justice: Notes on our pathological reliance on punitive justice"
Anastasia Chamberlen and Henrique Carvalho, Warwick University

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’.

Read the full article here.

The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice is launching a new feature – the state-of-the-art review article. These articles would take a topic of interest in criminology and/or criminal justice. In respect of that topic, state-of-the-art reviews will:

• Set out the contemporary significance of the topic and what is at stake in studying it;
• Review what is known about the topic or field;
• Outline new areas for research and theorization.  

Review article will be between 10-15,000 words in length and will be subject to standard reviewing practices. It is anticipated that the journal will publish 3 to 4 such articles per year.

Authors with an interest in writing such a review article, are invited to discuss their idea with the Editor-in-Chief Ian Loader.

Ana Veiga, Dr Jose Pina-Sanchez and Dr Sam Lewis, University of Leeds

Watch the video abstract for the article: "Racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing: what do we know, and where should we go?"

Dr Jamie Buchan, Edinburgh Napier University, and Fergus McNeill, University of Glasgow

Watch the video abstract for the article: "Progressive penality as performance"