Punishment Futures, Justice Reimagined

The focus of this webinar will include talks from Professor Máximo Sozzo and Professor Fergus McNeill, who consider innovations in prison settings as well as justice reimagined in different regional contexts.

Speaker: Professor Máximo Sozzo National University of Litoral and Leverlhume Visiting Professor, School of law, University of Edinburgh

Title: Struggle, innovation and harm reduction in contemporary prison. Experiences and visions from the Global South

Abstract: In recent decades, in the context of a trend towards an extraordinary growth of imprisonment that has occurred in many jurisdictions globally, there is a tendency to think of changes in contemporary prison as always and inevitably linked to the maximization of its inherent effects of degradation, suffering and exclusion. Here I would like to briefly present a number of examples of innovations that have recently taken shape in a context of the Global South that has been affected by this trend towards mass incarceration (360% increase in its incarceration rate in the last three decades), the Argentinean case. But these innovations are clearly oriented towards a dynamic of harm minimization of the contemporary prison.

There are the multiplication of educational programmes and initiatives inside prisons by public universities, the permanent authorisation of the possession and use of mobile phones by inmates, and the multiplication of state actors and practices of monitoring and supervision of detention conditions. Based on these three cases studies, the aim of this paper is to discuss the conditions that made their emergence possible and the lessons that can be drawn from them in order to promote the multiplication of this kind of initiatives in the future.

Bio: Máximo Sozzo is Professor of Sociology of Law and Criminology at the National University of Litoral (Argentina) and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the School of Law of the University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom) during 2024/2025. His research is focused on punishment and society in Latin America. His last books are: Aliverti, H. Carvalho, A. Chamberlain & M. Sozzo (eds): Decolonising the criminal question. Oxford University Press, 2023; M. Langer & M. Sozzo (eds.) Justicia penal y mecanismos de condena sin juicio. Estudios sobre América Latina. Marcial Pons, 2023 and M. Sozzo (ed.) Prisons, inmates and governance in Latin America. Palgrave, 2022.

Speaker: Professor Fergus McNeill, University of Glasgow

Title: Towards Generative Justice

Abstract: Crimes and harms often damage social relationships and weaken solidarity, undermining the reciprocal forms of recognition on which living in communities depend. But there is much evidence that, rather than remedying these problems, conventional criminal justice responses in so-called advanced liberal democracies only serve to further damage social relations. The binary logics of criminal justice – criminal/law-abiding, innocent/guilty, victim/offender, incorrigible/redeemable – often leave both victims and offenders feeling alienated, marginalised and excluded. For those who go on to suffer state punishment, re/integration becomes a major challenge.

In this paper, drawing on ongoing work within an international network of scholars that I co-convene with Mary Corcoran and Beth Weaver, I seek to distil lessons from projects and communities in which, despite the difficulties noted above, justice-affected people have found their way into new or renewed social relationships that are characterised not by exclusion but by solidarity. In so doing, I outline key features of what we have termed ‘generative justice’, and explore how this emerging concept (and its associated practices) might relate to the imperative to ‘decolonise the criminal question’ (Aliverti et al, 2021).

Bio: Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow where he works in the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. He is also the Chair of the Board of the Howard League for Penal Reform. Prior to becoming an academic in 1998, Fergus worked for a decade in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker. Since then, his teaching and his many research projects and publications have examined institutions, cultures and practices of punishment, rehabilitation and reintegration. In 2021, his book ‘Pervasive Punishment: Making sense of mass supervision’ was awarded the European Society of Criminology's Book Prize. Fergus’s engagement with creative methods of research over the last decade or so has also had the unanticipated effect of enabling him to become an award-winning singer-songwriter.

This webinar is the second of a series of bi-monthly webinars entitled Security and Justice Futures which aim to confront the dilemmas, re-imaginings and futures of security and justice from a cross-regional perspective. Drawing from a range of speakers from north and south contexts, the series seeks to engage with both academic and practitioner audiences to encourage a mutual dialogue on the futures of security and justice in diverse contexts.

Photo Credit: Community Justice Scotland. There are special areas for some people in Perth Prison, Scotland to relax and talk to staff members to help their wellbeing. This area was decorated by people completing sentences.
InSight Crime. Mendoza Prison, Argentina.