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

Thinking About Crime

Liquid FearLiquid Fear, by BaumanZygmunt. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2006. 188 pp. $19.95 paper. ISBN: 9780745636801.

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by WENDY BROWN New York, Zone Books (distributed by The MIT Press), 2010, 168 pp., 10 illustration $25.95, 19.95[pounds sterling] cloth, ISBN 978-1-935408-08-6. The future of independent and equal state sovereignties is in doubt, or so Wendy Brown argues in her monograph concerning the recent explosion in state-built border walls for keeping people either 'in' or 'out', and to differentiate between 'us' and 'them'. The author of this slim volume utilises the material, physical and psychological characteristics of walls to highlight a renewal of concern regarding the seeming imperviousness of global capital and other transnational forces to individual sovereign state power. The growing imbalance in strength between the global and the local forms in the author's view the central danger to longstanding frameworks of international relations and power-politics. Professor Brown argues in particular that, while walls may project an image of impregnability, the huge pressures being placed on traditional sovereign frameworks of governance by globalised forces have only strengthened the opposing contexts of virtual power over physical power, of open sourcing over material appropriation, of de-territorialised tentacle of control over fixed territorial limits, and so on. Accordingly, border walls can only project an image of statehood, soothe a growing sense of state powerlessness, and bolster national xenophobia against the 'outside other'. How do walls function as effective communicators? Professor Brown points to three central paradoxes of what walls represent and make visual: the power to open or block, to universalise or to exclude/stratify, and to allow virtual networking or to impose physical barriers to networking. After these binary themes are introduced, she develops two further ideas: first, that state sovereignties are today battling a larger 'sovereignty' of globalisation, in the sense of 'a higher power' or the 'power to decide', as advocated by such theorists as Carl Schmitt; secondly, that states utilise the visual symbolism of walling to project an underlying theological dimension of state power, by helping to produce sovereign awe ('God is on our side'). She develops this latter idea in particular to illustrate her premise that the more walls are built, the more 'real' state power diminishes. In turn, as walls are of dubious efficacy when faced with human inventiveness, wall-building states rely on their walls to project a more intense sense of state power, while in actuality, walls can serve only as visual coda, in the sense of the theatrical projection of a bounded, secure nation when nothing could be further from the case. For example, some walls foster a bunker mentality among those living inside them, while others securitise a way of life. Notable examples of walls today are detailed throughout the book, and include post-apartheid South Africa, which has built a complex internal maze of walls and checkpoints, and maintains a controversial electrified security barrier on its Zimbabwe border; Saudi Arabia, which has a ten-foot-high concrete post structure along its border with Yemen (soon to be followed by a similar wall at the Iraq border); and India, which has walled-out Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma, and has walled-in Kashmir, as well as mining, and placing barbed concertina wire along the Indo-Kashmir border. The building of walls, such as the 'Security Wall' in Israel to contain West Bank and Gazan 'terrorists', or that between the southern U.S. and Mexico, to prevent illegal migration, further illustrates the challenges and insecurities felt by the numerous states whose sovereignty is placed under severe challenge, particularly during the last half century, by the growing transnational flows of capital, people, technology, ideas, violence, and politico-religious loyalties. The importance of international institutions of economic governance such as the IMF and WTO, and in the last quarter century the ever-broader assertions of international law and individual rights, further illustrate a failing Westphalian world order of territorial sovereign states. …

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty

Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics

Over the first decade of this century, Spain was a primary destination of international migrants. Successive Spanish governments have addressed this phenomenon by implementing a number of control measures, largely aimed at securing external and internal borders. However, the persistence of the economic crisis has led to the readjustment of the whole system of migration control. This article intends to shed light on the underlying rationales of the current transformation of Spanish policies within this field. It will scrutinise the implications of the managerial turn in the Spanish apparatus of deportation and conclude by outlining a range of legal reforms grounded in a human rights perspective.

The Managerial Turn: The Transformation of Spanish Migration Control Policies since the Onset of the Economic Crisis

When analysing the features of the Spanish criminal justice system from the perspective of the late-democratisation of the Spanish polity, the system's evolution is characterised by an almost uninterrupted penal expansionism and a relatively prominent level of severity. This paper examines those features from the viewpoints of the legal reforms, institutional practices and collective perceptions and expectations experienced since the end of the dictatorial period. In addition, the article explores some reasons which may explain the relatively high punitiveness of the Spanish criminal justice system, before adding a coda on the changes of the penal system fostered by the Great Recession.

José A. Brandariz-García

Papers

The Managerial Turn: The Transformation of Spanish Migration Control Policies since the Onset of the Economic Crisis

An enduring sovereign mode of punishment: Post-dictatorial penal policies in Spain: