Workshop // 3A 

// Session 3A //
The wider punitive effect:
mapping the contours of race, rehabilitation and harm in early modern British penal reform

This workshop develops from the analytical logic of ‘the wider punitive effect’. This term references how the wider public who, having witnessed the customary normalization of punishment meted out to racialized peoples, take up the mantle to exact similar blame and recompense; but crucially, this is informal.

The workshop explores this effect, in the context of racialized youth’s contemporary experiences, as a phenomenon with historical antecedents. It pays particular attention to the wider implications of blame and recompense exacted informally, focusing on the interwar period informing of early youth penal reform, as an important yet unexplored era. To achieve this, the workshop draws on documentary research from the Liverpool University Archives, including the Fletcher Report (1930) and the digitized catalogue of the Eugenics Review, a populist journal spanning 1909 to 1968.

As racialized youth’s contemporary experiences remain locked in stigma, customary contemporary narratives focus on the penal estate as a starting point for understanding the relationship between race, crime and punishment. The lens of informal recompense allows for a more expanded analytical scope to explore what really is at stake for racialized youth.

About the Convenor

Dr Esmorie Miller’s research explores the role of race, racism, and racialization in contemporary youth justice (YJ). Where race in contemporary youth justice is concerned, specifically with the amplification of punishment, her research explores realities beyond crime and punishment; it explores punitive outcomes in contemporary YJ, for racialized youth, as continuities of the historic exclusion of racialized peoples from the benefits of modern, universal rights. Retributive justice has, thus far, decoupled racialized youth’s contemporary concerns from this relevant history. A contemporary example of this are the institutional policies and practices around urban youth gangs, in England and Canada. Her research observes that, in both these contexts, race remains invisible in historic narratives on early modern youth penal reform, and thereby in the statutory approaches to gangs. Esmorie is a lecturer in Criminology at London South Bank University, and Chair of #HCNet @BritSocCrim, Historical Criminology. Her forthcoming book is titled Race, Recognition and Retribution in Contemporary Youth Justice: The Intractability Malleability Thesis and will be published with Routledge in 2022.