Moving beyond the structural antagonism of criminal law, this chapter explores the subject positions of actors in scenarios of sexual harm. If the sex offender emerges as a felon bearing the head of a wolf, the victimized white child emerges as the exemplary figure of vulnerability. While tropes of vulnerability are mobilized to justify paternalistic state coercion, they are also a powerful reminder of humans’ interdependence and mutuality. Thinking with vulnerability as an analytical category focuses attention on the lingering traumatic effects of sexual assault, as well as the severe punitiveness toward sex offenders. Addressing sexual violence does not require draconian penalties; conversely, addressing carceral expansion does not necessitate minimizing sexual violence. Centering vulnerability may allow us to rethink the foundations of our social contract in ways that acknowledge both our precariousness and the sovereign violence that holds us in its thrall.

The notion that people with psychopathy traits do not respond positively to treatment efforts may sound intuitive. If people are inflexible, uncaring towards others, manipulative, and just generally difficult to get along with, it follows that treatment might be ineffective. However, what is intuitive and what is accurate do not always overlap perfectly. The analyses in this chapter contribute to a growing body of literature indicating that individuals with psychopathy traits can change and respond in expected ways to intervention strategies (Bernstein et al., 2021; Wong et al., 2015). The analyses in this chapter identified that people with psychopathy traits who spent more time incarcerated, thereby increasing access to rehabilitative services, experienced a subsequent decline in offending. It is possible that these findings reflect the efficacy of the risk-need-responsivity model, wherein intensive intervention strategies reduce criminal behaviour for high-risk persons. Treatment modalities for people with psychopathy traits are discussed.

The focus of this chapter is on the relationship between psychopathy traits in adolescence and persistent involvement in offending through adulthood. Too often, research on psychopathy has restricted itself to very simplistic measures of offending outcomes. For example, recidivism reflects whether or not someone reoffends. However, some people reoffend dozens of times, and others only once. I used generalized estimating equations to measure repeated offending at each year of age beginning at age eighteen and continuing for over twenty years. Regardless of whether psychopathy was represented by PCL:YV total scores, four-factor model scores, or three-factor model scores, higher scores significantly increased the likelihood of persistent offending. However, this relationship was far from perfect; some people who scored high on the PCL:YV did not continue to offend at a high rate in adulthood. I use case study data to qualitatively explore why this may have been the case.

Chapter 5 explores the importance of the communication of news and information through correspondence, but also the problems of its interception and betrayal. Couriers faced the risk of violence and incarceration, particularly at times of diplomatic tension, and strategies of concealment could be quite sophisticated to counter this, such as the use of ciphers, pseudonyms and other methods. Nevertheless, the dangers to which Tivinat and other couriers were exposed was considerable, their detention was a frequent occurrence, as was that of Huguenots carrying books and papers, as shown in cases drawn from the Conciergerie in Paris. Consideration is given to the importance of correspondence as a source for both contemporaries and historians. The news content of the letters carried by Tivinat is discussed in detail, revealing concerns with events both international and domestic. Connections between the letters and those found in other circumstances, such as on the body of the prince of Condé and in the English State Papers, are made, identifying Regnard/Changy as their author and the complexity of the network in which he operated.

This chapter introduces the interrogation document and associated letters around which the book is based and summarises the structure of the book and the content of its chapters. Emphasises the European-wide context of the Huguenot network that is revealed as well as the circumstances of the French religious wars c. 1567–1571. Engages with the relevant historiographical themes, including studies of correspondence and communication, diplomacy, intelligence-gathering and espionage, and confessional and transnational connections. Addresses the sub-themes of truth and secrecy and how these provide the backdrop for the clandestine confessional activities to be explored, particularly through the participation of Huguenot ministers. Investigates what we are able to reconstruct about the man, Jean Tivinat, who was arrested for and interrogated about his role in carrying the correspondence and the circumstances of his incarceration at the château of Dieppe.

Judging by rates of criminal recidivism, the very trauma that leads to American incarceration only amplifies inside facilities whose purported mission is to rehabilitate. Using psychiatric, literary, and sociological studies alongside three twentieth-century prison memoirs written by American men of color – Jarvis Jay Masters’s That Bird Has My Wings (2009), Shaka Senghor’s Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (2013), and Ravi Shankar’s Correctional (2022) – this essay examines the use of bibliotherapy as a means of processing traumatic memory, reconnecting with community, redressing harm, and reclaiming control over one’s story to help stimulate and accelerate the process of healing and recovery. Life writing, and memoir specifically, allows for the transfiguration of generational, localized, and institutional trauma while bearing witness to the inner workings of carceral spaces, which are disproportionately populated by men of color and intentionally kept concealed from public view.

The conclusion reflects on compatibilities and tensions within stratification economics, disability justice, and intersectionality. It points to additional areas of inquiry beyond the scope of this study, including state violence, sex and sexuality, climate change, built environment, voting, and reparations. In so doing it offers an outline of future work that might advance an agenda of disability justice within the work of stratification economics in the years ahead.

This chapter of Complex Ethics Consultations: Cases that Haunt Us begins when the ethics consultant is asked if the mother (and suspect) in a case of shaken baby syndrome should be allowed to visit her child in the hospital. After two weeks, the baby remained ventilator dependent and the baby was likely to end up in a persistent vegetative state. Questions about whether the baby was suffering plagued everyone. Assuming parental roles and affections, nursing staff wanted to protect the baby and shift to comfort care. If this were authorized by the baby’s mother, she would face homicide charges. The baby’s mother visited as a prisoner, in chains. A prison guard compassionately unlocked the chains so she could touch her baby. The consultant is haunted by the sheer misery experienced by everyone, the persistent outrage from staff that her mom might serve as surrogate decision-maker, and the enduring sound of chains.

This chapter continues the discussion of the relation between liberty and democracy. It then shifts to a discussion of "sites of unfreedom" as in the case of prisoners, immigrants and refugees, and trafficked persons in order to illustrate the value of the concept of liberty defended in the book.

This chapter is about how police officers in China enforce anti-prostitution laws. These regulations outlaw the exchange of sex for money or other material goods in all of its forms, and for all individuals who engage in it. Yet in practice, police enforcement primarily targets low-tier sex workers. Of the array of possible sanctions, these women are more likely incarcerated than fined, and they are placed in institutions with a rehabilitative mission that, in practice, is not met. In addition, law enforcement officials often engage in illegal and abusive practices when arresting sex workers. Clients are not completely immune from punishment, but they are less likely to be arrested than are the women they solicit. The major exception to that pattern involves high-profile men whose actions have crossed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their cases are taken out of the hands of street-level police officers and into the world of elite politics, with prostitution charges used to help secure their downfall.

This chapter shows how human sciences researchers in Puerto Rico faced pressure to abandon earlier traditions and embrace the methods and biomedical enterprise of the United States empire’s scientific modernity. Drawing on the history of mental testing and inmate assessment as well as designs for a new penitentiary, the chapter contends that while mid twentieth-century US-American social science engaged in intense processes of othering that aligned with imperial expansion, Puerto Rican social scientists combined US-American psychometrics with older Spanish ethnographic traditions that powerfully resurfaced in the 1940s. These diagnostic and descriptive tools revealed that incarcerated people required discipline, tutelage, and treatment, but that they also had redemptive potential regardless of social difference. Social scientists put mental test results into dialogue with ethnographic narratives of convicts to forge what to them were forward-looking treatment programs, illustrating how racialized racelessness and intersubjective exchanges transformed Puerto Rican corrections for a time. The result was a blended, “creole” nationalist science with decolonial aspirations, although one that was colonial-populist in practice.