REgulating Criminal justicE DEtention: glocal prospects for improving health and safety in detention and society

Overuse of detention and poor detention conditions create and compound serious problems for societies, presenting significant health and safety risks. Crime rates are not rising, but criminal justice detention is expanding.

Substantial literature examines the disproportionate regulation of marginalised groups through criminal justice, but we know remarkably little about the regulation of criminal justice itself. Mechanisms for regulating detention have recently proliferated, but their effects on practice are largely unknown.

This is a major evidence gap, which there is a compelling need to address.

My project will develop the first comprehensive, empirically generated model of criminal justice detention regulation: RECEDE, which will facilitate new understandings of how detention regulation could improve health and safety in detention and society.

RECEDE will be developed through a multidisciplinary research programme, linking criminology, law, geography and citizen participation studies.

My research will create new knowledge about the four fundamental components of the model: i) regulation of the system of interdependent detention institutions, within and across glocal geographical scales, by (quasi-)statutory bodies and by ii) (participatory) voluntary sector organisations; iii) relationships between detention regulation, law and policy on the books and bottom up norm making in the cells; and iv) the brokerage of innovation in detention regulation and practice.

Each component addresses a significant gap in scholarship, which has thus far been constrained by intra- and interdisciplinary silos. RECEDE is informed by actor-network theory (ANT), a sociological method for examining organisation and agency. ANT sensitises researchers to complex realities that might otherwise have remained obscure.

ANT has been little used within penology and holds unrealised potential to investigate and reconfigure detention regulation and practice, across local to global scales.