This symposium firmly covers the impacts of human rights law on penal, prison, (police) custodial, immigration, and psychiatric policies in diverse jurisdictions, including Russia, Australia, Japan, Israel, the United States, and Europe, that have been understudied and neglected in comparison with the United States and Europe. It also raises socio-legal debates about accountability, operational complexities, transparency, the ability to either limit or increase the state’s right to punish, the efficacy of oversight bodies, the limits of human rights “law” in this context, access to justice and legal aid for detainees and prisoners, and the persistence of violations in the face of reform. In particular, this symposium offers an opportunity to analyze the way in which the United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights, national courts, the monitoring bodies, and detainees are able to challenge penal and detention policies as well as to soften them through the lens of human rights. This symposium intends therefore to demonstrate an engagement with existing scholarship in human rights, penal, detention, immigration and prison policies, and punishment. It relies on theoretical and empirical socio-legal work that addresses these issues from a local, national, and global perspective. It also challenges traditional socio-legal boundaries by taking into account and integrating the intersection of policy and subdiscipline spheres that cover criminal and penal justice, immigration, psychiatric institutions, and human rights. In this way, this symposium combines the study of these socio-legal fields and all places of detention in very contrasting jurisdictions with a view to analyzing the nature of relations between human rights and detention.

A decade ago, it seemed that America’s punitive system of mass incarceration was on the precipice of a transformation, stimulated by a legitimacy crisis as great as any in a century. A decade later, far more modest steps toward reform have been accomplished, and mass incarceration in the United States has proven stubbornly resilient. While overall imprisonment rates are modestly lower, there is little evidence of improving prison conditions or a fundamental reorientation of the use of prolonged incarceration. This prompts a deeply historical question, to which answers, of necessity, must be speculative. What makes the carceral state so resilient, not just in recent decades but also across centuries? Following recent law and society scholars, who have brought together the literature on the historical political-economy of punishment with new institutionalist accounts of the role of myth and ceremony in formal organizations and the bureaucratization of modern societies, this article identifies five “legal-rational myths” about crime and punishment that have perennially delayed a reckoning with its lack of alignment with central public values like respect for human dignity and racial justice. The article turns to California as the epicenter of this most recent legitimacy crisis to chart how myths work to bolster the carceral state against efforts to shrink or abolish it.

In recent years US prisons have failed to meet legally required minimum standards of care and protection of incarcerated people. Explanations for the failure to protect prisoners in the United States focus on the effects of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and lack of adequate external oversight. However, very little scholarship empirically examines how different systems of accountability for prisoners’ rights work (or do not work) together. In this article, we introduce an accountability framework that helps us examine the prisoners’ rights “accountability environment” in the United States. We then compare two post-PLRA case studies of failure to protect incarcerated women from sexual assault in two different states. We find that the prisoners’ rights accountability environment is a patchwork of legal, bureaucratic, professional, and political systems. The patchwork accountability environment consists of a web of hierarchical and interdependent relationships that constrain or enable accountability. We argue that ultimately the effectiveness of prisoners’ rights accountability environments depends on whether protecting prisoners’ rights aligns with the priorities of dominant political officials. Our argument has implications for efforts to improve prison conditions and incarcerated people’s well-being.

The need to protect the rights of children and young people in detention is the subject of a recent United Nations study (Nowak 2019) and is highlighted by national and international controversies. This article examines the role of external monitoring in preventing the ill-treatment of children and young people in detention. Australia has until recently shown limited interest in protecting the rights of people in detention, but, in 2017, it finally ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment (OPCAT). This article examines Australia’s steps to ensuring the effective monitoring of the rights of people in detention, specifically the rights of children and young people in criminal justice detention. As a federal state, Australia must establish a comprehensive network of monitoring bodies constituting OPCAT’s National Preventive Mechanism across nine jurisdictions and with a range of existing monitoring bodies. This article highlights the importance of the “monitoring of monitoring” to ensure the fair treatment of children and young people in correctional detention. It identifies factors relevant to the effectiveness and credibility of child-centered monitoring processes and analyzes the opportunities for maximizing both in the Australian context and globally.

Russia’s penal system was arguably the largest penal system of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, law and society and criminological research continues to neglect the subject. This article presents a new theoretical and analytical framework that seeks to understand penal development in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 until the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The new theoretical framework—penal transformation—aims to locate significant periods of penal change in diverse and disputative external, compliance-building, and bureaucratic regimes. It argues that the Council of Europe’s compliance rules, and the escalating authoritarianism of the Putin regime, have together hindered a more refined approach to the study of the prison in state-society relations. When considered alongside legacies of the Soviet Gulag penal system, this scenario has created an enduring penal structure and culture where prisoners remain acutely vulnerable to rights violations.

This article provides an overview of the key issues in international and Israeli human rights standards related to incarceration from a legal and sociological perspective. We argue that the Israeli imprisonment system is currently undergoing uncertain changes, showing high volatility due to its historical development and normative nature. Our account of the tensions between punishment and human rights in Israel over recent decades suggests that this field is highly volatile, making it difficult to predict future developments. Although Israel’s constitutional and human rights-oriented reforms seemed to indicate progress, Israel also experienced a series of harsh and regressive statutory and penological reforms.

This article discusses the legitimacy of solitary confinement in prisons in Japan, which is still used despite the spread of modern international human rights norms in the twentieth century. The article examines the disciplinary measures provided for in the Act on Penal Detention Facilities and the Treatment of Inmates and Detainees (2006), which is a revision of the Prison Law (1908), and argues that although the legal revisions appear to have been made, the discretionary power of prison wardens remains unrestrained, wardens retain decision-making power for disciplinary measures. The article then critiques this approach on two grounds: first, there is an overuse of solitary confinement (over 85%) among other means of disciplinary measures; and, second, this violates both the spirit and the provisions of the Mandela Rules. International standards are based on the idea of human dignity with the established principle that solitary confinement should be imposed only as a last resort. The article ends with practical suggestions to make a more serious move forward to comply with international standards.

While scholars have pointed out the factors determining the impediments to and efficacy of international human rights rules, poor attention has been paid to human rights violations relating to transfers between prison and psychiatric detention. There is a lack of intersection of policy spheres in this regard that should be remedied. Our contribution aims to challenge traditional sociolegal boundaries by integrating the intersection of policy and subdisciplines that cover penal justice (prison and police stations), psychiatric institutions, and human rights.

Raising the question of human rights’ ability to limit the state’s power to punish in Europe compels us to explore different forms of “transinstitutionalization,” especially between prisons and psychiatric institutions and between prisons and immigration detention centers that present as “total institutions” (hosting populations perceived to be “deviant”), and share many similarities, including the risk of human rights violations. We forge the concept of “transpolicies” to take into account the mutual influence and the domino effects of such detention policies that are acknowledged, and both promoted and fought, by the European human rights institutions. In the empirical part, we focus on the increasing interactions between prison and mental health policies, taking Belgium as an example as it is known to raise specific human rights challenges.

Prison has long been recognized as a racialized institution in America, where race determines myriad aspects of life—from where individuals sleep to those with whom they live, eat, and socialize during incarceration. However, there is little evidence on how to effectively remediate prisons’ deep racial divisions—a question that is imperative given that interracial animus in prisons can be both a result and a determinant of racial conflict and violence. In this study, we argue that higher education in prison has significant potential to improve racial attitudes and foster racial integration by providing a “contrasting context” for interracial interaction in the classroom within an otherwise racially segregated institution. Using administrative data on college-level course completion, an original longitudinal survey of prison college students, and in-depth qualitative interviews with prison college alumni, we show evidence of shifts in racial attitudes and self-reported behavior as students move through their college career. Our results demonstrate the potential for prison higher education to shift race-based norms and offer a framework through which to analyze prison education that prioritizes outcomes of interest beyond recidivism.

Traditional legal scholarship has long focused on the exercise of discretion in all its forms; however, by borrowing from the analytical toolkit of science and technology studies (STS), we begin to take an ‘ontological turn’ into the courtroom by documenting a new tool of judicial discretion invoked by criminal justice adjudicators: what we call ontological discretion. By examining three objects from our own research – sleep, death, and intoxication—we show how their lack of a universal, singular ontology may necessitate that adjudicators use their discretion to either choose a coherent ontology in a given case, or else avoid opining on ‘what things are’ altogether. We therefore start to move beyond those important but now rather mainstream sociolegal inquiries into legal knowledges, instead shifting our focus toward what legal actors say the objects of their various knowledges actually are, as well as the widespread legal effects of the court’s ontological games.

Since the Internet’s mainstream inception in the mid-1990s, the global telecommunications network has transformed from one that offered egalitarian promise to a network that often compromises democratic norms. And, as its conceptual linchpin, Internet “openness” provided the potential for technological innovation that could revolutionize both communication and commerce. The regulatory schemes introduced in the early Internet era thus sought to advance openness and innovation in the fledging online world. But, while the times and technologies have since changed, the regulatory frameworks have largely remained the same. Accordingly, this review essay examines the Internet’s regulatory and cultural history to explore how the open values of the information age gave way to our current era of online disinformation. To do so, I reflect upon two early studies of the digital realm that have advanced discourse and scholarship on Internet openness: Lawrence Lessig’s Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0, and Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Informed by these works, along with related digital scholarship, this essay argues that remembering the history of Internet openness reveals how the free access ideals of the Internet’s foundational age have been transformed by the renewed proprietary conventions of our current disinformation era.