Justifying 'Justice': Tracing the role of ignorance in the cultural politics of punishment in the UK

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Reflecting on the 10-year anniversary of the 2011 English 'riots', this fellowship explores how different forms of ignorance enabled and legitimised the state's swift and punitive social policy and penal reaction to the disturbances. In doing so, it seeks to advance current scholarship on the multifaceted role of denial, amnesia, silence and secrecy in maintaining and legitimising the policies and practices of the criminal justice system.The fellowship consolidates my doctoral research, which drew on original qualitative interviews (conducted in 2018) with prosecutors, sentencers and policymakers who were responsible for designing and delivering the swift and strikingly harsh penal response to the unrest; which was characterised by extraordinary severity at each stage (Lightowlers and Quirk, 2015; Pina-Sánchez et al., 2017). Alongside a raft of social policy responses targeting 'troubled families' and 'gang culture', this penal reaction disproportionately targeted young people from racialised and marginalised backgrounds (Amnesty International, 2018; Crossley, 2016; Williams, 2015). Using a critical discourse analysis approach, my thesis shows that four interlocking and overlapping kinds of ignorance enabled professionals to frame this reaction as proportionate, necessary and fair. I contend that these elements - dehistoricised and decontextualised understandings of crime, distorted, racialised and classed imaginations of criminality, highly selective imaginations of public opinion, and denial of the racialised and classed harms of punishment - work together to allow criminal justice professionals to justify the punitive and discriminatory aspects of the system within which they work. While scholars have long since alerted us to the crucial importance of deception, misinformation and mystification, as powerful social, cultural and political forces (Box, 1983; Cohen, 2001), work on this theme has accelerated in recent years, coalescing around the notion of agnotology as the study of ignorance and its crucial social and political functions (Gilroy, 2019; McGoey, 2016, 2019; Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008; Rayner, 2016; Sullivan and Tuana, 2007); emphasising the vital role of 'strategic unknowns' (McGoey, 2016) or 'orchestrated ignorance' (Canning, 2018) in shaping punitive social policy agendas and, to a lesser extent, criminal justice policy and practice (Barton and Davis, 2018; Scott, 2018). This fellowship offers an opportunity to make a significant contribution to this academic endeavour by exploring how ignorance, broadly conceived, shapes contemporary criminal justice policy and practice in the UK; and in particular, normalises and naturalises the well-documented overrepresentation of racialised and marginalised communities in the criminal justice system (Lammy, 2017; Williams and Clarke, 2018).Through the delivery of high quality publications, an academic symposium, a stakeholder workshop and a proposal for a future research project, the fellowship offers an ideal opportunity to progress my academic career by maximising the academic and non-academic impacts of my doctoral research, developing an excellent track record of publication, creating a network of scholars working on ignorance and criminal justice, and increasing my profile and standing as an expert in ignorance and criminal justice.Conducting this fellowship in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol will allow my research to contribute to, and benefit from, outstanding research across a range of disciplines including sociology, politics, social policy and criminology. Being mentored by Dr Elspeth Van Veeren, and being part of the Secrecy, Power and Ignorance research Network (SPIN) will provide unique opportunities for collaboration with world-leading scholars working on ignorance and secrecy, criminal justice, race and racism.