Ian O’donnell
Biographic Data
| ID | 3430853 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian O’donnell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | O’donnell |
| SIGNATURE | O’DONNELL I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Dublin |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 98 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Prison Life: Pain, Resistance, and Purpose
How prisons around the world shape the social lives of their inhabitants Prison Life offers a fresh appreciation of how people in prison organize their lives, drawing on case studies from Africa, Europe and the US. The book describes how order is maintained, how power is exercised, how days are spent, and how meaning is found in a variety of environments that all have the same function – incarceration – but discharge it very differently. It is ba…
The Kerry Babies, criminology, and Reinhart Koselleck
The Kerry Babies case was a criminal investigation that followed the discovery of a dead infant on a beach in the southwest of Ireland in April 1984. Charges were laid and dismissed. A tribunal of inquiry into alleged police malpractice followed, and the case returned to the courts 35 years later. This paper takes a multidimensional approach to historical time, drawing on the works of German philosopher Reinhart Koselleck to analyse the case, its…
The Transformation of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program
Malgré les efforts répétés pour réduire sa taille, nous montrons que le Programme canadien des travailleurs étrangers temporaires (TÉT) a évolué de telle sorte depuis 2000 que les TÉT forment maintenant plus de quatre pour cent de la main-d’œuvre au Canada – une multiplication par cinq de leur proportion. Cette main-d’œuvre est de plus en plus spécialisée, dispose de permis de travail à long terme et est susceptible de demander la résidence perma…
Penal Culture in Ireland
Ireland enjoys a level of imprisonment around half that of England and Wales and one-eighth that of the USA. However, this is not the result of structured policy choices. Several factors generally associated with penal severity are evident in that crime is (episodically) salient and lethal violence has risen, there is low trust in government, little evidence of deference to experts, and the principles of justice are seldom articulated. Countervai…
Local response in health emergencies: Key considerations for addressing the Covid-19 pandemic in informal urban settlements
This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and sanitation, which makes standard advice about social distancing and washing hands implausible. There …
Texas Triptych
The art of imprisonment
Governments
By deciding whom to execute and whom to spare, the fledgling Irish state was asserting its sovereignty and flagrantly displaying its power to deflect the law from the lethal outcome it was otherwise bound to reach. The unregulated nature of executive clemency stood out against a background of bureaucratic decision-making which strove to be open, consistent, and dispassionate. This chapter examines what can be learned about how executive clemency …
Extraordinary Courts
While governments attributed the retention of capital punishment to the threat posed by the IRA, simultaneously they railed at the ineffectiveness of the ordinary courts. The jury had long been vulnerable to outside influences, whether this involved its packing with members supportive of the authorities or its intimidation by subversive elements. A complicating factor, especially in political crimes, was sympathy for perpetrators which could tran…
Undoing Death II
This chapter continues the analysis of death penalty cases resulting in commutation. Some involved men who were in possession of arms that they used to devastating effect for a miscellany of reasons. All of these killings occurred between August 1922 and December 1923, as the country was embroiled in, and then emerging from, a period of civil war. Others exhibited signs of mental instability which fell short of establishing legal insanity. Some b…
Release
This chapter analyses the onward destinations of prisoners sentenced to death who avoided execution. The trend in time served by men convicted after jury trial varied, with those convicted in the 1930s serving longest. For non-jury cases the trajectory was emphatically upwards: 21 months for the single case in the 1930s compared with an average of 287 months for those processed in the 1980s. Men whose sentences were commuted served more than twic…
Postscript
Ireland ceased being a killing state by degrees. The final execution took place on 20 April 1954 when Michael Manning felt Albert Pierrepoint place a noose around his neck.1 A carter from Limerick, Manning had ambushed and suffocated Catherine Cooper, a nurse forty years his senior. This was a brutal crime involving a vulnerable victim who was badly beaten and sexually assaulted. By Manning’s own account he was making his way home after a day’s d…
Undoing Death I
Capital punishment has been described as a ‘lottery’, implying that it operates at random; but in Ireland a pattern can be discerned. Murderers who avoided execution fell into one of six categories, with a clear gradient in how sympathetically they were viewed, as indicated by the duration of their coercive confinement and the likelihood that mercy would be recommended. At one end of the scale were those who destroyed an unwanted child, 92 per ce…
Justice, Mercy, and Caprice
Justice, Mercy, and Caprice is a work of criminal justice history that speaks to the gradual emergence of a more humane Irish state. It is a close examination of what can be learned from the National Archives of Ireland about the decision to grant clemency to men and women sentenced to death between the end of the civil war in 1923 and the abolition of capital punishment in 1990. Frequently, the decision to deflect the law from its course was an …
Blurring the Separation of Powers: Clemency and the Death Penalty in Ireland
There is a tripartite separation of powers in Ireland and no organ of state may interfere with the functions exclusively ascribed to another. The legislature sets the parameters of punishment through the enactment of laws. The judiciary imposes punishment. The executive becomes involved in exercising clemency. The boundaries may seem clear but they are porous. When capital punishment was under consideration judges, legislators, governors general,…
Prisoners, Solitude, and Time
Prisoners, Solitude, and Time is an examination of two overlapping aspects of the prison experience that, despite their central importance, have not attracted the scholarly interest they deserve. The first of these is the degree to which prisoners can withstand the rigours of solitude. While the deleterious effects of penal isolation are well known, little systematic attention has been given to the factors associated with surviving, and even triu…
Time and isolation as performance art: A note
In a series of five year-long works the Taiwanese-American artist Tehching Hsieh captured critical aspects of the prisoner’s experience including the meaning of time, the rigours of solitary confinement, the impact of homelessness and the pressures of inescapable company. These were performed in unambiguously stark, and deeply personal, terms. In a way these pieces of art might be considered partial prison parables which point to, but do not expl…
The Life Sentence and Parole
Taking the life sentence as the new ‘ultimate penalty’ for many countries, this paper explores the factors associated with the release of life-sentence prisoners on parole. The Republic of Ireland is selected as a case study because it is in the unusual position of being influenced by European human rights norms as well as by the Anglo-American drive towards increased punitiveness. As an apparent outlier to both the human rights and punitive appr…
The Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland
The history of capital punishment in post-Independence Ireland has received scant scholarly attention. This essay is an attempt to set out what can be learned about the executed persons, the executioners, and the politicians whose inaction (not reforming the law) and actions (deciding against clemency) brought the two former groups together. The death penalty was deployed strategically against IRA members during the early 1940s as part of a packa…
Crime and punishment in the Republic of Ireland: A country profile
The colonial origins of the Irish criminal justice system can be seen its buildings, laws, procedures, and practices. When change occurs it is often driven by events rather than emerging from a deliberative process that draws on evidence and expertise. The murders, in the space of a fortnight in 1996, of a journalist and a police officer, led to heightened anxiety about crime and its consequences. This was accompanied by a toughening of the polit…
Going Home for Christmas: Prisoners, A Taste of Freedom and the Press
This article explores the extent to which prisoners in the UK and Republic of Ireland are permitted to leave prison to join their families for the Christmas festivities. It is argued that the willingness to allow such absences provides insights into divergent penal policies and contrasting socio‐cultural attitudes towards prisoners and imprisonment (and, tangentially, the meaning of Christmas). In the Republic of Ireland the use of temporary rele…
Gallous stories or dirty deeds? Representing parricide in J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World
The most famous play in the history of Irish theater, J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World has been oddly neglected in sociology and criminology. This article examines the provenance of the violence around which Playboy’s dizzying text swirls, namely, a tragicomic parricide seemingly twice committed. In particular, we ask: is the text plausible? Though Synge’s authorial intentions are not open to complete reclamation, we explore first, h…
Killing in Ireland at the Turn of the Centuries: Contexts, Consequences and Civilising Processes
Late nineteenth-century homicides in Ireland had several distinctive characteristics. They took place in every county, were largely a male preserve, and regularly involved elderly victims. Heavy drinking was a factor in many lethal squabbles and workplace disputes sometimes resulted in impulsive, but savage, attacks. Weapon use was uncommon and the range of penalties imposed by the courts was wide. In the closing decade of the twentieth century t…
Stagnation and Change in Irish Penal Policy
Anyone with even a cursory interest in the prison system of the Republic of Ireland will be struck by how quickly one arrives at the frontiers of knowledge. Getting the measure of penal policy issues is not so much a question of weighing up competing claims for understanding and sifting the accumulated evidence, as attempting to paint a crude, and hopefully not too distorted, picture of a landscape that is mostly in shadows. Where there is a meas…
Recidivism in the Republic of Ireland
As prison populations increase, the need for successful reintegration of ex-prisoners becomes more pressing. The challenge of what has become known as `re-entry' has stimulated an extensive body of research, much of it concentrated in a small number of jurisdictions and concerned with levels and predictors of recidivism. The limited geographic breadth of the research effort has hindered our capacity to consider theoretically relevant questions, s…
Local response in health emergencies: Key considerations for addressing the Covid-19 pandemic in informal urban settlements
This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and sanitation, which makes standard advice about social distancing and washing hands implausible. There …
Coercive confinement in the Republic of Ireland: The waning of a culture of control
In Ireland until recently, a range of institutions other than prisons was utilized to confine those deemed to be deviant. It seems clear that rather than becoming more punitive (if this is estimated by the number of individuals coercively confined) the country has become considerably less so over the past 50 years. In 1951, despite high emigration providing a safety valve, more than 1 percent of the population was behind closed doors in prisons, …
The Politics of Intolerance--Irish Style
Journal Article The Politics of Intolerance—Irish Style Get access Ian O'Donnell, Ian O'Donnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Eoin O'Sullivan Eoin O'Sullivan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1 January 2003, Pages 41–62, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/43.1.41 Published: 01 January 2003
Recidivism in the Republic of Ireland
As prison populations increase, the need for successful reintegration of ex-prisoners becomes more pressing. The challenge of what has become known as `re-entry' has stimulated an extensive body of research, much of it concentrated in a small number of jurisdictions and concerned with levels and predictors of recidivism. The limited geographic breadth of the research effort has hindered our capacity to consider theoretically relevant questions, s…
Violence and social change in the Republic of Ireland
Prison Rape in Context
Journal Article Prison Rape in Context Get access Ian O'Donnell Ian O'Donnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 44, Issue 2, March 2004, Pages 241–255, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/44.2.241 Published: 01 March 2004
Assault in Prison: The 'Victim's' Contribution
Assaults in prison occur for diverse reasons. Understanding the role of the victim can help to explain the assault. In this article, concepts developed to analyse the victim's contribution to crimes outside prison are applied to interpersonal violence within penal institutions. A close examination of 96 prison assaults showed how activities which are considered routine in custody increased the risk of assault. Victims contributed to their victimi…
The Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland
The history of capital punishment in post-Independence Ireland has received scant scholarly attention. This essay is an attempt to set out what can be learned about the executed persons, the executioners, and the politicians whose inaction (not reforming the law) and actions (deciding against clemency) brought the two former groups together. The death penalty was deployed strategically against IRA members during the early 1940s as part of a packa…
Lethal Violence in Ireland, 1841 to 2003
Journal Article Lethal Violence in Ireland, 1841 to 2003: Famine, Celibacy and Parental Pacification Get access Ian O’Donnell Ian O’Donnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 45, Issue 5, September 2005, Pages 671–695, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azi015 Published: 22 February 2005
Prisoners, Politics and the Polls: Enfranchisement and the Burden of Responsibility
In 2006, the Irish Government introduced legislation to allow prisoners to vote. Drawing on international developments in jurisprudence and criminal justice, this article examines the background to, and wider significance of, this change in the law. A lack of political and media opposition ensured the relatively unnoticed passage of this reform through Parliament. Prisoners had their first opportunity to exercise the franchise in 2007. While the …
The epidemiology of suicide on the London underground
The Transformation of Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker Program
Malgré les efforts répétés pour réduire sa taille, nous montrons que le Programme canadien des travailleurs étrangers temporaires (TÉT) a évolué de telle sorte depuis 2000 que les TÉT forment maintenant plus de quatre pour cent de la main-d’œuvre au Canada – une multiplication par cinq de leur proportion. Cette main-d’œuvre est de plus en plus spécialisée, dispose de permis de travail à long terme et est susceptible de demander la résidence perma…
Killing in Ireland at the Turn of the Centuries: Contexts, Consequences and Civilising Processes
Late nineteenth-century homicides in Ireland had several distinctive characteristics. They took place in every county, were largely a male preserve, and regularly involved elderly victims. Heavy drinking was a factor in many lethal squabbles and workplace disputes sometimes resulted in impulsive, but savage, attacks. Weapon use was uncommon and the range of penalties imposed by the courts was wide. In the closing decade of the twentieth century t…
Unravelling Criminal Justice
A follow-up study of attempted railway suicides
Suicide and HIV disease
It has been suggested that HIV infection is associated with an increased risk of suicidal behaviour. This paper reviews the literature on suicide in patients with HIV disease and discusses methodological problems encountered in studying the incidence of suicide in this population. A snowballing method was used to identify cases of suicide in patients who were receiving treatment for HIV disease in a central London health district. The possible un…
A follow-up study of attempted railway suicides
The epidemiology of suicide on the London underground
Unravelling Criminal Justice
Armed and Dangerous? The Use of Firearms in Robbery
Recent years have witnessed substantial and sustained increases in the number of armed robberies recorded in England and Wales. Drawing upon an analysis of police records and interviews with convicted armed robbers, this study explores the circumstances in which such offences take place and the extent to which the guns used in robbery are actually capable of discharging lethal shot. It is hoped that this investigation will increase understanding …
Routine Victimisation in Prisons
Discussions of safety in prisons often emphasise the grossest forms of interpersonal violence, such as murder and sexual assault. However, a focus on spectacular acts of violence obscures the mundane, day‐to‐day victimisation which characterises institutional life. This study, based on an inmate survey and in‐depth interviews, provides a snapshot of the range and nature of ‘outine’victimisation. It builds on the prisoners'own accounts of assault,…
Assault in Prison: The 'Victim's' Contribution
Assaults in prison occur for diverse reasons. Understanding the role of the victim can help to explain the assault. In this article, concepts developed to analyse the victim's contribution to crimes outside prison are applied to interpersonal violence within penal institutions. A close examination of 96 prison assaults showed how activities which are considered routine in custody increased the risk of assault. Victims contributed to their victimi…
A New Paradigm for Understanding Violence: Testing the Limits of Lonnie Athens's Theory
There is a burgeoning literature on the aetiology, performance and consequences of violence. Research straddles a variety of disciplines including law, sociology, psychology, anthropology, criminology, military history and theology. The 'violentization theory' of Lonnie Athens is seldom encountered in the literature, although it provides an interesting way of re-framing traditional questions about violence as a process. This article serves as a c…
The Politics of Intolerance--Irish Style
Journal Article The Politics of Intolerance—Irish Style Get access Ian O'Donnell, Ian O'Donnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Eoin O'Sullivan Eoin O'Sullivan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 43, Issue 1, 1 January 2003, Pages 41–62, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/43.1.41 Published: 01 January 2003
Imprisonment and Penal Policy in Ireland
The penal landscape in the Republic of Ireland has changed significantly since the mid‐1990s. Most notably, the average daily prison population grew swiftly at a time when recorded crime was falling. This contradictory trend was due to a combination of factors including the politicisation of the debate about crime, a build up of long‐sentence prisoners, an expansion of the remand population and a reduction in the use of early release to ease over…
Sociology of Crime, Law, and Deviance, Vol. 4: Violent Acts and Violentization
Prison Rape in Context
Journal Article Prison Rape in Context Get access Ian O'Donnell Ian O'Donnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 44, Issue 2, March 2004, Pages 241–255, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/44.2.241 Published: 01 March 2004
Violence and social change in the Republic of Ireland
Lethal Violence in Ireland, 1841 to 2003
Journal Article Lethal Violence in Ireland, 1841 to 2003: Famine, Celibacy and Parental Pacification Get access Ian O’Donnell Ian O’Donnell Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 45, Issue 5, September 2005, Pages 671–695, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azi015 Published: 22 February 2005
Coercive confinement in the Republic of Ireland: The waning of a culture of control
In Ireland until recently, a range of institutions other than prisons was utilized to confine those deemed to be deviant. It seems clear that rather than becoming more punitive (if this is estimated by the number of individuals coercively confined) the country has become considerably less so over the past 50 years. In 1951, despite high emigration providing a safety valve, more than 1 percent of the population was behind closed doors in prisons, …
Governing Through Crime: How The War On Crime Transformed American Democracy And Created A Culture Of Fear
Governing Through Crime is a satisfyingly nuanced book. It highlights the manifold harms of the war on crime across a variety of social institutions in the United States. These range from the incarceration binge that has characterized the last quarter of a century to the increasing vulnerability of schools, families and workplaces to a crime control mentality that is as pernicious as it is omnipresent. The effect of this new dispensation is to su…
Prisoners, Politics and the Polls: Enfranchisement and the Burden of Responsibility
In 2006, the Irish Government introduced legislation to allow prisoners to vote. Drawing on international developments in jurisprudence and criminal justice, this article examines the background to, and wider significance of, this change in the law. A lack of political and media opposition ensured the relatively unnoticed passage of this reform through Parliament. Prisoners had their first opportunity to exercise the franchise in 2007. While the …
Stagnation and Change in Irish Penal Policy
Anyone with even a cursory interest in the prison system of the Republic of Ireland will be struck by how quickly one arrives at the frontiers of knowledge. Getting the measure of penal policy issues is not so much a question of weighing up competing claims for understanding and sifting the accumulated evidence, as attempting to paint a crude, and hopefully not too distorted, picture of a landscape that is mostly in shadows. Where there is a meas…
Recidivism in the Republic of Ireland
As prison populations increase, the need for successful reintegration of ex-prisoners becomes more pressing. The challenge of what has become known as `re-entry' has stimulated an extensive body of research, much of it concentrated in a small number of jurisdictions and concerned with levels and predictors of recidivism. The limited geographic breadth of the research effort has hindered our capacity to consider theoretically relevant questions, s…
Going Home for Christmas: Prisoners, A Taste of Freedom and the Press
This article explores the extent to which prisoners in the UK and Republic of Ireland are permitted to leave prison to join their families for the Christmas festivities. It is argued that the willingness to allow such absences provides insights into divergent penal policies and contrasting socio‐cultural attitudes towards prisoners and imprisonment (and, tangentially, the meaning of Christmas). In the Republic of Ireland the use of temporary rele…
Gallous stories or dirty deeds? Representing parricide in J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World
The most famous play in the history of Irish theater, J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World has been oddly neglected in sociology and criminology. This article examines the provenance of the violence around which Playboy’s dizzying text swirls, namely, a tragicomic parricide seemingly twice committed. In particular, we ask: is the text plausible? Though Synge’s authorial intentions are not open to complete reclamation, we explore first, h…
Killing in Ireland at the Turn of the Centuries: Contexts, Consequences and Civilising Processes
Late nineteenth-century homicides in Ireland had several distinctive characteristics. They took place in every county, were largely a male preserve, and regularly involved elderly victims. Heavy drinking was a factor in many lethal squabbles and workplace disputes sometimes resulted in impulsive, but savage, attacks. Weapon use was uncommon and the range of penalties imposed by the courts was wide. In the closing decade of the twentieth century t…
Crime and punishment in the Republic of Ireland: A country profile
The colonial origins of the Irish criminal justice system can be seen its buildings, laws, procedures, and practices. When change occurs it is often driven by events rather than emerging from a deliberative process that draws on evidence and expertise. The murders, in the space of a fortnight in 1996, of a journalist and a police officer, led to heightened anxiety about crime and its consequences. This was accompanied by a toughening of the polit…
The Life Sentence and Parole
Taking the life sentence as the new ‘ultimate penalty’ for many countries, this paper explores the factors associated with the release of life-sentence prisoners on parole. The Republic of Ireland is selected as a case study because it is in the unusual position of being influenced by European human rights norms as well as by the Anglo-American drive towards increased punitiveness. As an apparent outlier to both the human rights and punitive appr…
The Death Penalty in Post-Independence Ireland
The history of capital punishment in post-Independence Ireland has received scant scholarly attention. This essay is an attempt to set out what can be learned about the executed persons, the executioners, and the politicians whose inaction (not reforming the law) and actions (deciding against clemency) brought the two former groups together. The death penalty was deployed strategically against IRA members during the early 1940s as part of a packa…
Political science (31 works) · Criminology (28 works) · Sociology (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (19 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Prison (14 works) · History (13 works) · Irish and British Studies (12 works) · Law (11 works)