Melissa de Vel-Palumbo

1. Transgender (hereon trans) people and people with innate variations of sex characteristics (hereon IVSC or intersex1) within prison systems are recognized as being at a high risk of harm due to ...

Sometimes people fail to sympathize-and may even relish-when people in the criminal justice system experience harms such as police brutality or inadequate care while in custody. These are harms that occur incidentally to one's involvement with the criminal justice system, as they are not prescribed by laws associated with arrest or conviction. The current research explores what causes people to justify such legally illegitimate harms. We expected that when people make essentialized character-based attributions about people who commit crimes (e.g., labeling them as fundamentally and enduringly "bad"), this can lead them to view incidental harms as deserved punishment. In Study 1 (N = 49), we provide initial qualitative evidence for this idea: participants who expressed indifference toward the suffering of incarcerated individuals tended to rationalize such suffering as punishment for perceived immoral character. In Study 2 (N = 258), the perception that people who commit crimes have an underlying and unchanging "criminal" character was positively related to tolerance for incidental suffering. In Study 3 (N = 537), describing a person's crime as stemming from an unchangeable immoral character increased participants' tolerance for incidental harms through heightened perceptions of the person's ongoing dangerousness. However, the unchangeable immoral character also appeared to reduce tolerance for harms through a competing, unexplained pathway. Taken together, the findings underscore the complex ways in which character-based explanations for crime influence whether justice-involved individuals are seen as deserving of moral concern. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Existing literature has yet to conceptualize and consolidate research on psychological essentialism and its relation to the criminal legal system, particularly in terms of explaining how individuals with justice involvement have been and could be differentially impacted across contexts. This article explores essentialism in the criminal legal system, including its potential consequences for inequity. We review research on essentialism as a psychological construct, its common applications to different social categorizations, and its trickle-down effects within the criminal legal system. Empirical work suggests that biases stemming from essentialism have the potential to severely affect individuals within the criminal legal system. Beyond assigning immutable properties across social groups, essentialism can give rise to biased attributions of responsibility and blame and affect decisions and behavior within three core domains of the criminal legal system: jury decision making, sentencing decisions, and public support for punitive policies. We propose future policy recommendations to mitigate the adverse effects of essentialism in the criminal legal system, focusing especially on how using and adopting person-first language (focusing on people before characteristics) across society and policy can help to combat bias across criminal legal domains. Future research is needed on how to best address the adverse effects of essentialism and its biasing effects in the criminal legal system, as well as to examine the effects of essentialism in different legal contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Self-punishment, the adverse treatment of the self as a response to own wrongdoing, seems dysfunctional on first sight. However, it may have interpersonal benefits, as it may affect how others perceive the offender. We argue that self-punishment communicates the offender’s reaffirmation of the violated values as well as their own status degradation. Consequently, observers may attribute more remorse to the offender who self-punish, which in turn may increase their willingness to reconcile with the offender. Four studies conducted in the US and Germany (Ns = 285, 609, 648 and 603) tested these predicted processes experimentally by crossing self-punishment with an explicit message of either value restoration or status degradation from the offender. We employed a measurement-of-process as well as a moderation-of-process approach to investigate the processes underlying the attribution of remorse. The results consistently showed that, in the absence of an explicit message, self-punishment increased third parties’ attribution of remorse to the offender, but not (or less so) when offenders issued either explicit message. Both explicit messages increased remorse attributions, but this was not further enhanced by self-punishment. This pattern of redundancy implies that self-punishment and messages of value restoration and status degradation are interchangeable in their effects on remorse perceptions. These findings indicate that self-punishment communicates value reaffirmation and status degradation, and through these mechanisms increases remorse perceptions that are linked to third parties’ willingness to reconcile with the offender. The findings provide experimental evidence for a communicative function of self-punishment that may facilitate the restoration of jeopardized relationships.

A key issue for policy makers and practitioners is finding a way to identify what constitutes a rehabilitative prison. In this study, aspects of a carceral experience that successfully ignite desistance journeys, or that “assist” desistance are identified and measured. We report the findings of a measure to do this, the Macquarie Assisted Desistance Instrument (MADI), which was co-designed with staff and residents in two correctional centers in New South Wales, Australia. Analysis of data from both prison staff and residents ( N = 604) revealed that the measure was generally coherent (unidimensional), internally consistent, and stable across time. In addition, those who felt their desistance journeys were being more strongly assisted reported a greater sense of self-efficacy, providing support for the idea that custodial experiences can lead to better rehabilitative outcomes. Suggestions for how to improve prison practice and more meaningfully to assist people to desist from crime are proposed.

Punishment is expected to have an educative, behaviour‐controlling effect on the transgressor. Yet, this effect often remains unattained. Here, we test the hypothesis that transgressors' inferences about punisher motives crucially shape transgressors' post‐punishment attitudes and behaviour. As such, we give primacy to the social and relational dimensions of punishment in explicating how sanctions affect outcomes. Across four studies using different methodologies ( N = 1189), our findings suggest that (a) communicating punishment respectfully increases transgressor perceptions that the punisher is trying to repair the relationship between the transgressor and their group (relationship‐oriented motive) and reduces perceptions of harm‐oriented and self‐serving motives, and that (b) attributing punishment to relationship‐oriented (vs. harm/self‐oriented, or even victim‐oriented) motives increases prosocial attitudes and behaviour. This research consolidates and extends various theoretical perspectives on interactions in justice settings, providing suggestions for how best to deliver sanctions to transgressors.

Defendants can deny they have agency, and thus responsibility, for a crime by using a defense of mental impairment. We argue that although this strategy may help defendants evade blame, it may carry longer-term social costs, as lay people’s perceptions of a person’s agency might determine some of the moral rights they grant them. Three randomized between-group experiments (N = 1601) used online vignettes to examine lay perceptions of a hypothetical defendant using a defense of mental impairment (versus a guilty plea). We find that using a defense of mental impairment significantly reduces responsibility, blame, and punitiveness relative to a guilty plea, and these judgments are mediated by perceptions of reduced moral agency. However, after serving their respective sentences, those using the defense are sometimes conferred fewer rights, as reduced agency corresponds to an increase in perceived dangerousness. Our findings were found to be robust across different types of mental impairment, offences/sentences, and using both manipulated and measured agency. The findings have implications for defendants claiming reduced agency through legal defenses, as well as for the broader study of moral rights and mind perception.

When we see others in pain, sympathy is often our instinctive and expected response. Yet in some cases, we may be indifferent to—and even take pleasure in—the suffering of others. Particularly, the public has historically expressed apathy toward and even endorsement of incidental harms experienced by those in the criminal justice system (i.e. catching a disease or experiencing abuse or neglect in custody). In this paper, we propose a new conceptual framework for understanding these views. We contend that people make character-based judgments to justify the incidental suffering of people who have committed crimes. By being in prison, or by having committed a crime in the past, one may be viewed as fundamentally distinct from other citizens—now categorized as a fundamentally “rotten” person who deserves any further suffering they might experience. We explore the nature of incidental harms suffered by those in the criminal justice system, as well as identify potential psychological and cognitive mechanisms that may underlie public indifference to such suffering, including psychological essentialism and immanent justice reasoning. Finally, we outline the legal and social implications of such views, and ultimately, propose ways in which future research might advance knowledge about this phenomenon.

Defendants can deny they have agency, and thus responsibility, for a crime by using a defense of mental impairment. We argue that although this strategy may help defendants evade blame, it may carry longer-term social costs, as lay people’s perceptions of a person’s agency might determine some of the moral rights they grant them. In this registered report protocol, we seek to expand upon preliminary findings from two pilot studies to examine how and why those using the defense of mental impairment are seen as less deserving of certain rights. The proposed study uses a hypothetical vignette design, varying the type of mental impairment, type of crime, and type of sentence. Our design for the registered study improves on various aspects of our pilot studies and aims to rigorously test the reliability and credibility of our model. The findings have implications for defendants claiming reduced agency through legal defenses, as well as for the broader study of moral rights and mind perception.

Around one in five prisoners report the previous or current incarceration of a parent. Many such prisoners attest to the long-term negative effects of parental incarceration on one’s own sense of self and on the range and quality of opportunities for building a conventional life. And yet, the problem of intergenerational incarceration has received only passing attention from academics, and virtually little if any consideration from policy makers and correctional officials. This book – the first of its kind – offers an in-depth examination of the causes, experiences and consequences of intergenerational incarceration. It draws extensively from surveys and interviews with second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-generation prisoners to explicate the personal, familial and socio-economic contexts typically associated with incarceration across generations. The book examines 1) the emergence of the prison as a dominant if not life-defining institution for some families, 2) the link between intergenerational trauma, crime and intergenerational incarceration, 3) the role of police, courts, and corrections in amplifying or ameliorating such problems, and 4) the possible means for preventing intergenerational incarceration. This is undeniably a book that bears witness to many tragic and traumatic stories. But it is also a work premised on the idea that knowing these stories – knowing that they often resist alignment with pre-conceived ideas about who prisoners are or who they might become – is part and parcel of advancing critical debate and, more importantly, of creating real change. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about more about families in prison.