We would like to focus on the findings of our mixed methods study: Esp. the concept and classification of dangerous place (in German: “gefährliche Orte”) from the perspective of the police. By definition, this is a place where "it can be assumed that people regularly meet, prepare or commit criminal offenses (...)" (Saxon State Parliament 27.08.2020). Within these locations, police are given additional powers to stop and question individuals, and activities which are not normally banned in public (e.g. consumption of alcohol) may be prohibited. The defining of dangerous places has increased exponentially within Germany as a supplement to proactive policing practices, but they are not without controversy: it is often unclear why certain areas are defined as dangerous while others are not. How do police define and conceptualize a place as dangerous? How is this definition reflected in situational police practices and the relationship between police and community residents? We will escort police patrol officers while they are working in these kind of places within an ethnographical pilot study. It is beneficial to take a closer look at how the police works as a (re)producer of public safety and to examine how the work of the police can impact security and threat perceptions among the population (e.g. fear of crime). This can be seen even in minor details, such as the overlapping use of police foot patrol and the police van as a ‘mobile outpost,’ or in the tension between more passive police observation and an active engagement with residents. We use also a questionnaire study on society’s perception of police checks in these places. We will attempt to untangle the defining of dangerous places as a tool to govern or orient police work and the active maintenance of the definition through practices related to crime-prevention and law enforcement.

Criminological research is becoming increasingly preoccupied with the question of atmosphere. Our paper contributes to this emerging body of work an argument for atmosphere as place and as image, through an account of the atmospheres of two institutional locations of law and criminal justice in Japan – the community police box, or koban, and the legal precinct. Through an account of walking with criminal justice and law, this paper will attend to the events, materialities and intensities of koban and legal precincts.

The extensive network of police boxes across Japanese cities constitutes a means of communicating an atmosphere of reassurance and order: the police box is the architectural space in which Japanese community policing is located, designed as both ordinary and a visual landmark within a neighbourhood. The legal precinct, formed by courts, prosecutorial services, police departments, and government bureaucracies, offers an intensive clustering in urban space. In researching these places, we used a range of ethnographic, aesthetic and cultural methods, such as interviewing, analysing media representations, and mapping the physical locations of koban and precinct, but here we argue that it is necessary to participate in the technique of walking in order to understand the ways in which atmospheres make themselves felt by and known to the researcher and to the official or citizen. As such, this paper argues for the immersive, participatory and temporally mobile craft of walking as a central technique for criminological research on atmospheres of law and criminal justice.

Instagram and other forms of social media can provide significant tools for activism, particularly in relation to largely invisible forms of harm such as public harassment. Recent feminist scholarship has articulated the possibilities and limits of digital spaces as sites of informal justice in response to sexual violence. However, to date, this work has primarily been conceptual, or focused on the experiences of survivors ‘speaking out’ online. There has been less consideration of how users engage with street harassment activist accounts, and the extent to which activist posts might be encountered as a site of justice. In order to address this gap, we present findings from an analysis of posts and user comments from two Instagram accounts: @CuteCatCalls and @CatCallsofNYC. We consider, firstly, the extent to which engagement with activist posts might contribute to achieving a sense of justice in response to street harassment. Beyond this, drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, we argue that digital activist accounts function as affective economies, with the performance or achievement of ‘justice’ deeply entangled with the affective potential of digital spaces. In the case of our data set, the circulation of ‘disgust’ was a notable feature of these affective economies. The affective economies of digital spaces both enable a sense of recognition and justice, while simultaneously working to exclude and delimit whose and which experiences are intelligible.

Prisons have traditionally been designed as sex-segregated institutions. Interestingly, the construct of gender has been overlooked in prison research, where the experiences of queer folks have been explored only in terms of deviance, sexual violence and discrimination. The recent outrage over the allocation of transgender prisoners in the UK has demonstrated a societal and institutional preoccupation with gender and space, which calls for a more comprehensive understanding of how gender is enacted and regulated in custody. This is especially relevant in female prisons, where the institutional rhetoric is qualitatively different and generally harsher than its male counterpart, to the point where institutional modes of control have been criticised of attempting to “refeminise” offenders.

The current study investigates how the female prison space reproduces heteronormative practices of social control, disguised as risk management and rehabilitation tools, to the detriment of both cisgender and gender non-conforming individuals. By bridging concepts from the fields of Queer Criminology and Carceral Geography, this project engages in an emotional mapping exercise with 10 individuals with lived experience of the female prison system in the UK, with the purpose of exploring how forms of embodied carcerality, and the emotions and memories associated with the prison space, can impact notions of gendered subjectivity. By making space for a queer exploration of identities and experiences within the carceral, the criminological potential of this study rests in its ability to engage with creative methods and interdisciplinarity in order to bring about a radical and abolitionist outlook towards the future, where the utility and persistence of carceral practices are continuously questioned in light of the disproportionate harm they cause.