Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rsocp/n20/n20a15.pdf

The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary, society

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class

The author finally takes readers to the unrests in Athens (2008) and Istanbul (2013), which, given their specificities, have been perceived as more political than other cases in the book. Turkey, which had the fastest growing economy in Europe in 2011 appears to be not comparable to Greece, which was punished for its assumed economic incompetency by the EU authorities. In both geographies, however, Dikeç traces similar roots of urban rage, fuelled by increasing economic insecurity, authoritarian politics, and state strategies of urban transformation based on the outright selling of public land and urban space in the name of progress. A must-read for those interested in politics, policing, immigration, housing and social justice movements, Dikeç’s sharp and jargon-free language ensures that Urban Rage is accessible to a broad audience beyond the disciplinary borders of academia. Given the ambitious scope of the book, some chapters are stronger than others. It would have furthered Dikeç’s argument, for example, had he gone beyond London and the 1980s in the case of the UK. Urban rage in the UK has a longer history than the 1980s, one that co-united in the early 2000s, went beyond Brixton and Tottenham, into the ‘immigrant’ areas of the de-industrialised northern cities. Not fundamentally different from France, the British state was quick to target the affected areas, using transferred colonial strategies practised in Northern Ireland. The changing images of the ‘rioters’ – from black to south Asian to Muslim – also speaks to the imperial legacies and policies of the UK, past and present.

Incarcerating the Crisis: freedom struggles and the rise of the neoliberal state:

Neo-bohemia. Art and commerce in the postindustrial city (Joan Ganau)

Prisoner reentry is widely recognized as a hybrid project of poverty governance situated at the intersection of the welfare state and penal state. Numerous scholars have examined the devolved terra...

“A Program, Not the Projects”: Reentry in the Post-Public Housing Era:

This article seeks to investigate the ways in which conceptions of race and interact with symbolic violence, discipline and governmentality to produce a responsibilized subject willing to participate in the racialized forms of deference necessary for participation in the secondary labor market. It is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Career Development class in an agency that serves formerly incarcerated individuals who are primarily African American males. In order to meet job placement goals, the agency has focused job development efforts on the secondary labor market. The article focuses on the tensions that develop as program staff attempt to prepare class participants to accept these positions.

Learning to be a ‘Safe’ ex-con: race, symbolic violence and discipline in prisoner re-entry

This article uses analysis of 72 syllabi to investigate portrayals of Black urban communities in undergraduate Urban and Community Sociology courses taught in colleges and universities in t...

Constructing the ghetto: an analysis of the representation of Black urban communities in urban and community sociology courses

This article describes the ways in which the formerly incarcerated participants understand “hustling” and the “hustle.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Second Chance, a New York metropolitan area agency that serves formerly incarcerated persons and those who have had police contact, this article attempts to situate “hustling” within the carceral state. “Hustling” has a range of meanings. It is a form of labor performed to acquire material goods—the ability to “hustle” functions as a marker of an approved masculinity. “Hustling” also reflects power relations and can serve as a framework of reference. The participants in the study were routinely “hustled,” and they expressed concern that they were being “hustled” in the context of the programming offered at Second Chance. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for reentry programming.

Deirdre Caputo-Levine

Papers

Learning to be a ‘Safe’ ex-con: race, symbolic violence and discipline in prisoner re-entry

Constructing the ghetto: an analysis of the representation of Black urban communities in urban and community sociology courses

Deconstructing the Hustle: Investigating the Meanings of Hustling Within the Carceral State

Between Conflict and Critical Theories of Deviance and Crime