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This book discusses the role of the prison in Europe across a divide of over 200 years. Inspired by the travels of the prison reformer John Howard (1726-1790), who visited prisons across Europe in the eighteenth century, it fundamentally reflects on centuries of the practice of locking people up as punishment. Howard travelled across Europe to visit prisons, with a simple method: he travelled and knocked on prison doors on his journey and entered the premises. He then observed the situation in the prison, took notes and left to visit other locations. Howard's influential book The State of the Prisons resulted from his experiences, provoking debate among prison reformers and academics worldwide. Adopting the contemporary methods of prison tourism research, the author follows in Howard's footsteps. He draws on extensive research conducted in prisons across six countries: England, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Italy and Azerbaijan. Howard's reflections are used as a frame to assess contemporary prisons, particularly revolving around the questions of what prisons are for today, and what they should (or should not) be. It will be of great interest to criminologists researching prisons and penology, as well as historians interested in the histories of punishment

This article provides an interpretation of the evolution of criminal punishment and prisons in China from an historical perspective. The historical investigation reveals that the current ganhua and paternalistic or fatherly approaches to prison corrections are expressions of an underlying cultural tradition that is deep and abiding. However, the existence of the paradoxical goals of punishment and reformation at the level of the implementation of prison sentences, which can erode the protection of the rights of prisoners, is contingent upon political and legal decisions that can be changed by acts of law and legal reform.

This paper explores two configurations of thinking about crime amongst law enforcement agencies and private sector security managers: 'risk calculation' (concerned with everyday, calculable probabilities and impacts and their management) and 'precautionary uncertainty' (concerned with events that might be incapacitating, yet are not calculable by probability assessments). The paper explores their respective constituent concepts and fields of application in crime assessment, drawing upon qualitative research-in-progress in Belgium. Risk calculation, as applied to crime, starts with past data on routines that link perpetrators with targets that lack capable guardians. Precautionary uncertainty focuses on potential impacts that are highly disabling and potentially wide-spreading (contagion, knock-on effects), asking how such impacts can be contained and recovered from. Risk and uncertainty are shown to be related to 'rational-instrumental' and 'deliberative-constitutive' approaches as developed by Fisher's work in the field of law, which offers a meta-narrative in relation to which they can be positioned. Finally, the paper asks if these two crime assessment methods should be seen as distinct or as merging. On the basis of criteria of conceptual sharpness, openness to public debate and justiciability, the authors champion the maintenance of a clear distinction between risk and uncertainty.

This article provides an analysis of the knowledge base of organised crime assessments and policy making in the European Union. It is argued that the current European organised crime (threat) assessments are no reliable and relevant instruments to make meaningful statements about organised crime. The data collection system of the current assessments is defective and to a large extent dependant on what Member States decide to disclose and not based on clear developed concepts, definitions and methods. There is no discernable "counting unit" as a basis for deducing threats or risks. More fundamental: the definition or criteria list used is defective, providing no basis for further deductions or conclusions. The conclusions of the open versions of the European reports are of a very general nature, not substantially different from what can be found in open sources. Though European decision making claims to be founded on these assessments, it looks more like a ritual incantation than a knowledge based process.

In recent years new instruments have been developed in Europe that allow sentenced persons to be transferred to their country of nationality/origin or permanent residence, where the sentence is then carried out. The most commonly referred to ratio legis for these regulations is the reintegration or rehabilitation of offenders. But is the optimization of offender reintegration really the objective and the result of these transfers? Reintegration features in many theories on the goals of punishment, and since Martinson proclaimed in the 1970s that `Nothing Works' a steady flow of publications has demonstrated that there are interventions that can reintegrate offenders successfully. The theoretical and empirical framework of rehabilitation is well developed, and it is therefore possible to explore which components of reintegration feature in regulations surrounding the transfer of prisoners. Rehabilitation can be divided in a number of components: orientation towards change, room for subjectivity in decisions on the length and type of sanction, the subsidiarity of the prison sentence, and attention to societal bonds. A critical evaluation of the intended goals of the transfer instruments in terms of whether they are reflected in the policies' implementation and application finds that some of these components appear to be present in the regulations, to some extent, but others are completely absent. Therefore the actual impact of transfer regulations may not be what the legislators intended.