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12 Punishment & Soc'y 5 (2010)

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                                              Copyright @The Author(s), 2010.
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                                                     1462-4745; Vol 12(1): 5-6
                                                DOI: 10.1177/1462474509349087

                                                                       PUNISHMENT
                                                                       & SOCIETY




Editorial

ALISON LIEBLING AND DIRK VAN ZYL SMIT
Cambridge  University and the University of Nottingham, UK


When   David  Garland wrote his first Editorial for Punishment and Society in 1999 his
vision was that it would become  'an intellectual project, not just another journal'. It
should provide 'an intellectual and institutional space to think about questions of penal
change, penal practice and punishment', provide 'a new focus for penological scholar-
ship, and  foster the field's development by encouraging interdisciplinary and inter-
national exchange, highlighting new and  innovative work, and providing a dedicated
forum  for all those whose interests centre upon penal matters' (1999: 10). Richard Sparks,
and  then Malcolm  Feeley and Jonathan Simon,  ably stewarded the journal along these
lines, and we  thank  them  for their hard work  and intellectual leadership. We are
honoured  to be taking our turn as Editors in Chief and aim to pursue this original vision.
   Punishment and  Society is a scholarly periodical, but we hope that the scholarship it
represents can be regarded as having implications for practice and that it will also be
read by those who  make  and  manage  policy. The journal should encourage dialogue
and reflection: as Richard Sparks (2004: 355) suggested in his outgoing note of thanks:

   we seek to provide a venue in which scholars from a wide range of national, cultural and disci-
   plinary starting points might find a ready, open-minded and engaged audience; and at the
   same time to ensure that a certain set of often deeply troubling institutional and political
   phenomena, whose implications in diverse ways haunt the public life of every contemporary
   society, be laid open to a new intensity of concerted and systematic inquiry.

   Penal institutions continue to be deeply problematic aspects of our contemporary
social life, with politically led, tough-on-crime policies driving unprecedented expan-
sion, overcrowding and increasing resort to privatization. New financial constraints are
causing increasing problems for crumbling penal systems. Tensions and  shortcomings
are widely documented.
   At the same time new punishment  practices are evolving, whose shape, meaning and
effects provide fresh analytical challenges. Like the prison, new community sanctions
and  penalties embody conflicting urges to condemn,  reform, censure, exclude, trans-
form,  repair and harm.  The  boundaries  of punishment   institutions have become
blurred: on the edges of the more  formal penal apparatus, excluded and  stigmatized
'outcast' populations are  increasingly vulnerable to other  types of  custody  and
control, of a permanent and debilitating kind. Public safety is undermined rather than
guaranteed by increasing resort to the use of punishment sanctions.

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