We are interested in how societies decide who should be criminalised, the extent of criminalisation, and the relationship between formal laws and their actual enforcement. Our research scope includes the decisions courts make between available punishments, and larger concerns such as proportionality, social and political motivations behind incarceration, punishment, and discretionary exercises of power. Our focus is on examining how structures of criminal law shape who is punished, what is punished, and why certain harms are criminalised while others remain under-enforced or unenforced. Our work reveals that the cyclical nature of criminalisation ensures that poverty is not merely punished once, but systemically reproduced through surveillance, guilty pleas and prolonged incarceration. Our holistic legal representation of vulnerable sections in cases of capital punishment and pre-trial incarceration has led us to raise systemic and philosophical questions about crime and punishment more broadly.