Punishment: New Trajectories in Law

This book expands the growing field of punishment ecology and advances an environmental theory of punishment that centralises Nature as a political force capable of exercising penal power.

In dialogue with post-humanist and new materialist thought, Punishment unsettles Western philosophy’s casting of nature as a passive, inert backdrop to human action. Instead, it foregrounds a Nature that resists, recalibrates in response to, and co-produces social practice. Asking what role this creative, responsive, more-than-human Nature plays in both the practice and lived experience of criminal punishment. Centring chemical and fungal agency, this book disrupts conventional legal narratives surrounding prisoner illness and the lethal injection, revealing how contemporary forms of penal power are entangled with the political economies of colonialism, racial capitalism, industrial agriculture, and resource extractivism. In bringing these entanglements into sharper focus, this book develops an ethics of punishment that moves beyond the individual and institutional frames of traditional sociolegal approaches to show how penal power is not only environmentally distributed but proliferates through material systems in ways that blur the spatial and temporal boundaries through which we typically organise the world and imagine our place within it.

This book will be a key text for criminologists, sociologists, jurists, and others interested in criminal law and penal theory.