Toward a Green-Cultural Criminology of “the Rural”

There are many connections between the various strands of critical criminology. Previously, we highlighted common issues between green and cultural criminology, while also noting some of the ways that each perspective could potentially benefit from cross-fertilization (Brisman and South in Crime Media Cult 9(2):115–135, 2013, Green cultural criminology: constructions of environmental harm, consumerism and resistance to ecocide. Routledge, Oxford, 2014; McClanahan in Crit Criminol. doi:10.1007/s10612-014-9241-8, 2014). In this article, we extend our analysis to consider green, cultural and rural criminologies through the exposition of several key issues, including “the rural” as local context in which exploitative global forces may exercise power; agribusiness and the food/profit chain; farming and the pollution of land, water and air; and finally, cultural/media images and narratives of rural life. We focus more specifically on this final intersectionality through an analysis of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), analyzing his depictions of rural people, environmental activists, and the rural environment through the issue of mountaintop removal. We conclude our article by identifying several examples of key directions in which the intersectionality of green, cultural and rural criminologies might proceed, including trafficking and abuse of farmworkers, harms associated with the cultivation of quinoa, and a critical interpretation of media and popular narrative depictions of environmental issues within rural contexts.     

Integrating non-Jewish immigrants and the formation of Israel's ethnic–civic nationhood: from Ben Gurion to the present

The aim of this article is to outline the development of Israel's citizenship and immigration policy from its inception to the present, emphasizing the invaluable role of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion. We argue that through a series of decisions pertaining to civic registration, immigration and naturalization of non-Jews, Ben Gurion set the fundamental principles of modern Jewish nationhood: on the one hand, he rejected the option of establishing a civic-Israeli nation, advocating Jewish-ethnic nationhood instead; on the other hand, this was an inclusive Jewish nationhood which incorporated cultural–territorial elements that were based on a secular interpretation of biblical sources. Despite inserting religious elements into Israel's immigration laws over the years, we claim that Ben Gurion's fundamental principles have for the most part remained in effect until today, constituting the key to understanding the nature of Jewish-Israeli nationhood in our times.     

The Unintended Consequences of Penal Reform: A Case Study of Penal Transportation in Eighteenth‐Century London

What were the consequences of penal transportation to the New World for eighteenth‐century British criminal justice? Transportation has been described by scholars as either a replacement of the death penalty responsible for its decline, or a penal innovation responsible for punishing a multitude of people more severely than they would have been punished before. Using data from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers and the Parliamentary Papers, this study examines sentencing and execution trends in eighteenth‐century London. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the passage of the 1718 Transportation Act that made transportation available as a penal sentence, thus enabling one to assess the “effect” of transportation on penal trends. This study finds that the primary consequence of the adoption of transportation was to make the criminal justice net more dense by subjecting people to a more intense punishment. While it was also associated with a small decline in capital sentences for some types of offenders, the adoption of transportation was also associated with an increase in the rate at which condemned inmates were executed. The study closes with a discussion of the conditions that may lead to law's unintended consequences, including the mesh‐thinning consequences observed here.