This book provides a nuanced, critical analysis of desistance from crime, particularly through the lens of women’s experiences. It develops desistance theory by interrogating the concept of normalcy, highlighting how normative societal expectations cause harms on desistance journeys. Through this lens, the book uncovers tensions between desistance as a journey towards societal (re)integration and the resistance desisters experience when encountering state institutions and social norms. Being no longer part of the old life, and not yet part of the new, desisters face both familiar and unfamiliar harms. A key conceptual contribution is the book’s critique of normalcy as both an aspirational and oppressive goal. The work illustrates how the pursuit of mainstream inclusion can expose desisters to both new and continuous harms. These include surveillance and stigma, social and literal death, gendered violence, and economic precarity. By engaging with feminist and temporal criminological theories, the book sheds light on how desisters’ experiences reveal the dark side of normalcy, calling into question whether its pursuit is wholly desirable. With its focus on the intersections of gender, stigma, and social control, this work advances academic debates on desistance, proposing a rethinking of how criminal justice systems and support frameworks engage with those transitioning out of criminalized lifestyles. It will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, desistance, gender studies, recovery from addiction, and to practitioners and policy-makers in these fields.

In response to the recent ‘spectral turn’ within criminology this book presents, for the first time, a concise, comprehensive, approachable and critically engaged guide to hauntology for criminological researchers and graduate students.

Hauntology is, in essence, a mode of analysing the repressions, absences and lacks that shape our social world. The book outlines how criminological researchers may welcome hauntings into their work, to escape the ontological tethers of administrative criminology and to reveal the importance of absence in their work. Specifically, the book is structured around key criminological themes, from prisons to the environment, and examines how the lens of ‘haunting’ helps unlock new critical enquiry by revealing the voices that are all too often buried. In doing so, it presents an examination of how hauntological concepts can be ‘read’ criminologically as well as addressing how they can be used to expand criminological imagination.

Throughout the book, we use hauntology to amplify the significance of justice within criminology as an intellectual and ethical endeavour. We argue that a spectral attitude bolsters our ability to ‘do justice’ to our research, our questions, our participants, our subjects, our objects, and what counts as criminological knowledge.

The book is guided by the following objectives:

• To introduce the importance of hauntology for encountering the spectres repressed within criminological knowledge and research.

• To outline the key concepts of hauntology to offer new critical insight into their application across the field of criminology.

• To examine the multiple ways hauntology stretches the ontological and epistemological foundations of criminological research.

• To produce an approachable, comprehensive and theoretically driven compendium that both motivates and guides current and future research across all areas of criminology.

Hauntology: An Introduction for Criminologists is a guide for criminologists that is designed to, for the first time, help direct future hauntological research and enhanced learning capacity across the discipline of criminology.

This article explores the courthouse as a socio-temporal threshold, where past harms are rearticulated and future outcomes are yet uncertain. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in two Swedish district courts, the study examines how courthouse architectures and atmospheres structure experiences of anticipation, uncertainty, and emotional dissonance for those navigating criminal trials. Drawing on sensory approaches within criminology, the analysis traces how courthouses materialize legal neutrality through affective absences (e.g. emotional restraint, sterile design) and spectral presences (e.g. punitive iconography, historical residues). The article shows how courthouses are not merely sites for adjudication, but charged environments that both manifest and obscure enduring hierarchies and tensions around justice; on individual as well as structural levels. In doing so, the article reconceptualizes the courthouse as a socio-legal space that collapses binaries of public/private, presence/absence, and past/future—offering new insights into how justice is imagined, encountered, and spatially embodied in legal spaces.

This article explores how Swedish lay-judges assess victims’ credibility in district court. Previous studies have explored how biases and emotional expressions impact credibility assessments. Adding to this, the present study analyses how lay-judges assess courtroom credibility from an intersectional perspective. Based on 24 in-depth interviews with lay-judges, the study explores three intertwined layers of credibility: appearances, narratives and emotions. The analysis concludes that these layers actualize balancing acts for both victims and the lay-judges assessing them. These layers of credibility can compound for victims, making them particularly credible in the eyes of the lay-judges, especially if and when they perform victimhood in line with expectations set by their intersectional characteristics. 

Drawing on observations in Swedish district courts, this chapter explores how masculinities and victimhood are performed in ways that contradict or underscore the assigned roles of plaintiff and defendant. Three themes showing how men both seek and avoid victimhood in court are analysed: heroic rescuers; capable victims; and fearful men. Heroic rescuers were plaintiffs who presented themselves as protecting women and children from violence. Capable victims often held professional positions of power, such as police officers and security guards, which they tried to leverage in the courtroom to balance victimhood and masculinity—with varying success. Fearful men were observed among both plaintiffs and defendants, and they performed victimhood in line with the traditional expectations of victimhood, through emotions such as fear, distress, and weakness. These themes show that the script associated with the victim-role is not exclusive to plaintiffs. Instead, it is fluid: sought after, avoided, or opposed as part of multiple masculinity performances in the courtroom.

Through a study of ten commercially published prison autobiographies, Haunting Prison: Exploring the Prison as an Abject and Uncanny Institution unveils how prison is narrativized and socially represented as an abject and uncanny institution, shedding new light on what prison is and does in Western carceral imaginations.

Culturally constructed ideals and stereotypes are part of collective sense-making processes. One such stereotype is Nils Christie's ideal victim. The present study discusses how the ideal victim shares key features with another cultural stereotype: the damsel in distress. Moreover, the study addresses attempts at subverting such stereotypes, which can be found in the women avengers of rape-revenge narratives. Studies of rape-revenge narratives have elucidated how such stories (re)imagine rape victimhood and survival in Western and Nordic culture, in ways that question the ideal victim qua damsel and her underlying patriarchal ideologies from a feminist perspective. However, such critique has led to the creation of other stereotypes and ideologically complex and even problematic portrayals of rape and victimization. Through a semiotic analysis of portrayals of a popular rape-revenge protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, the present study discusses how different ideologies surface, converse, and collide in fictional narratives of rape, survival, victimhood, revenge, and retribution. The study finds that while embodying resistance to the damsel, Lisbeth Salander also embodies aspects of the patriarchal ideologies that keep the damsel in place, thus creating an ideologically complex image. This creates a space for questioning the cultural understanding of rape, victimhood, and resistance.