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Abstract Human rights are a dominant framework for regulating prisons. However, there is little critical interrogation of human rights as they are actually translated into tools for governance. This article develops a critique of human rights by analysing and considering policy as a means of realising rights. It urges sustained and ethnographic attention to policy settings, arguing that policy exerts a form of agency. The article revisits critical criminological claims that reform expands penal control, examining this specifically in the context of human rights governance of prisons. To do so, it draws on the anthropology of policy and science and technology studies (STS) suggesting that these fields offer useful tools and insights in the study of policy. In the final part the discussion turns to three examples of human rights issues in the Scottish penal context to problematise rights‐driven penal policy and suggest directions for research.
Sarah Armstrong (Sat,) studied this question.