British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2005

26 April 2005

Abstracts

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Dr Heather Hamill

Crime and Punishment in Belfast

For over thirty years the Republican and Loyalist paramilitary organisations in Belfast, Northern Ireland have consistently sought to prevent crime and punish offenders by employing a variety of informal, localised strategies, rather than rely upon the statutory criminal justice system. This system often involves exclusion and violent assault in the form of paramilitary punishment attacks. Yet, despite such harsh measures, there exists a small group of young offenders known as hoods, who rather than try to avoid the violent punishments act in a way that suggests they invite such attacks. They make little effort to disguise their identities whilst committing offences, and victimise paramilitary members by stealing their cars and damaging their property. Hoods will also turn up, by prior appointment, to receive their punishment. This lack of specific deterrent effect violates the rational norm on which deterrence is founded, that certainty and severity of punishment will prevent re-offending, and has puzzled many local people, paramilitaries, criminal justice practitioners and politicians for some time. Using ethnographic data, this research shows how this persistent and risky offending amounts to a signalling game, the aim of which is to display hard-to-fake signals of 'toughness' to other hoods and thereby gain greater prestige. Violent physical punishment feeds into this game, increasing the hoods status by proving that they have committed an offence of enough magnitude to warrant such sanctions, and showing how they can 'courageously' take punishment and remained undeterred.

Dr Heather Hamill is a University Lecturer in Sociology and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. She was an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews (Modern History) and completed her masters and DPhil in Sociology at the University of Oxford before becoming a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. She is co-author with Diego Gambetta of Streetwise: How Taxi Drivers Establish their Customers' Trustworthiness (New York: Russell Sage) to be published in June 2005.