418 Theoretical Criminology 21 (4) to democracy over the past few decades (eg South Africa), as well as those struggling with longer histories of violence (eg Brazil). Contributors take up these issues and others as they examine the role of the state as a driver of penal order and how, in turn, penal order shapes the character and contours of the state. By examining sites of penal power outside Anglo-American mass incarceration, this special issue propels our understanding of these dynamics in new ways. For example, contributors address unequal policing in Latin America, vigilante justice in South Africa, border control in Northern European, contested state sovereignty in Southern Europe, the high murder rates of black women, the fractured nature of penal reform in Michigan, and the mass surveillance of former inmates in the USA. In each of these cases they bring new insights into how state power is intimately connected to penal orders. That is, criminal law, discourse, and punishment are often central in producing and reproducing equality, citizenship, and belonging. Though the articles in this special issue take on different regions, different sites of penal power, and different kinds of democratic states, common themes emerge. In particular, all of these articles challenge scholars to think more systematically about the nature of the state, the relationship between state form and political membership, and how contestation across time and place shapes a state’s penal apparatus. State forms vary over time and place, and even, sometimes, across differently situated state agents operating at the ground level. How should the state be defined, vis-à-vis criminal justice and punishment? Are penal orders separable from race, class, and gender stratification and other hierarchies of political membership? How are state and non-state actors deployed by the state penal apparatus to define citizens, equality, and the social order? What opportunities are available for contestation and change?

In their opening article, Ashley Rubin and Michelle Phelps argue for greater conceptual clarity in what we mean by the term “carceral state”. Though the term is frequently invoked, it is deployed in very different ways. This variety, they suggest creates conceptual confusion and limits our ability to make more meaningful claims about the constitutive relationship between state form and criminal justice actors and actions. Through a case study of Michigan, Rubin and Phelps argue that the carceral state is comprised of “a diverse array of state actors, from bureaucratic leaders down to the front-line staff implementing policy change”. Their findings illustrate the need for studies that more closely examine how state actors and institutions engage in the actual activities of punishment, rehabilitation, reform, and so on.