Factores explicativos de las actitudes hacia el castigo juvenil. Evidencias de un diseño factorial

El rol desempeñado por la opinión pública en el desarrollo de la política criminal actual justifica el incremento de investigaciones destinadas a evaluar las actitudes de los ciudadanos hacia el castigo. No obstante, los avances en este ámbito han sido limitados debido a la utilización de rudimentarios instrumentos de medida. Por ello, el presente trabajo tiene como propósito explorar el efecto que generan en la opinión ciudadana ciertas variables referidas al hecho delictivo y al infractor, precisando su contribución relativa y la interacción existente entre ellas. Para satisfacer este objetivo se recurrió a un diseño factorial de la encuesta, creando una población de 256 casos-escenario fruto de la combinación de cuatro factores: la edad del joven, su historial delictivo, el grado de implicación en el hecho y el tipo de delito cometido. Los mismos fueron distribuidos en grupos de ocho casos ordenados aleatoriamente y fueron suministrados a 32 sujetos. Posteriormente se aplicaron análisis de regresión logística binaria. Los resultados obtenidos revelan que la naturaleza violenta de los hechos, la implicación activa de los jóvenes y el historial delictivo son predictores importantes de las condenas punitivas. Sin embargo la edad, una variable fundamental en la configuración de la justicia juvenil, no resulta significativa. De este modo, el trabajo muestra el potencial explicativo de este conjunto de factores y debate sus implicaciones teóricas y metodológicas para la investigación futura en este terreno.

Reconfiguring Older Bodies in the Prison Time Machine

It is by mapping an area that the geographer comes to understand the contours and formations of a place. The “place” in this case is the prison world. This article serves to map moments in prison demonstrating how “old” female bodies are performed under the prison gaze. In this article I will illustrate how older women subvert, negotiate, or invoke discourse as a means of reinscribing the normalizing discourses that serve to confine and define older women's experiences in prison. Female elders in prison become defined and confined by regimes of femininity and ageism. They have to endure symbolic and actual intrusions of physical privacy, which serve to remind them of what they were, where they are, and what they have become. This article will critically explore the complexity and contradictions of time use in prison and how they impact on embodied identities. By incorporating the voices of elders, I hope to draw out the contradictions and dilemmas which they experience, thereby illustrating the relationship between time, their involvement in doing time, and the performance of time in a total institution (see Goffman, 1961), and the relationship between temporality and existence. The stories of the women show how their identities are caught within the movement and motion of time and space, both in terms of the time of “the real” on the outside and within prison time. This is the in-between space of carceral time within which women live and which they negotiate. It is by being caught in this network of carceral time that they are constantly being “remade” as their body/performance of identities alters within it. While only a small percentage of the female prison population in the United Kingdom are in later life, one has to question why criminological and gerontological literature fail to address the needs of a growing significant minority.

Reconsidering Respect: Its Role in the British Prison Service

This article examines the meaning of respect in the interpersonal relationships within Her Majesty’s Prison Service. It is argued that respect-as-esteem and respect-asconsideration are often confused and unequally emphasised in modern society. This confusion is especially evident within the prison context where, due to the prison service’s ‘decency agenda’, the respectful treatment of inmates has become a topical issue. What does respect mean in prison? Why is it important? How can respectful relationships be established between staff and inmates? This article discusses these questions and proposes that there are different forms of respect possible between people. It is argued that there needs to be a recognition of the nuances of meaning when we use the word respect and that ‘respect-as-consideration’ may be the form of respect most consistently achievable, at the present time, within interpersonal relationships in English and Welsh prisons.