Showing papers in "Punishment & Society in 2005"

Criminogenic needs and the transformative risk subject: Hybridizations of risk/need in penality

Abstract: This article examines the discrepancies between theories of risk and penality and emergent strategies of risk/need identification and management. Working back from the strategies themselves, I argu...

Beyond populist punitiveness

Abstract: Much of the survey data on public knowledge and attitudes to sentencing and punishment gathered over recent years have suggested that the public in western jurisdictions support harsher punishment and have diminishing confidence in the criminal courts. The results of research on the same issues using focus groups, deliberative polls or other methods which provide more information or allow respondents to discuss their views with others, appear to suggest that these punitive attitudes become more moderate as well as more complex and contradictory. Recent research in Scotland has produced similar results. What do these results mean? Are the public punitive or not? The argument presented here is that punitive attitudes exist alongside more rational and more reflective attitudes. Part of the explanation for this is that attitudes are, at least in part, an artefact of the methodology used to discover them. This does not mean that they are not real and substantial, but rather that public opinion is much more nuanced and contradictory than it appears from survey research. This interpretation raises different challenges for political leadership and policy making.

Penal populism in New Zealand

Abstract: This article examines the growth, influence and limits of penal populism in New Zealand. In this country, it argues, there were four crucial factors associated with this: disenchantment with the ex...

Detention of asylum seekers in the UK and USA Deciphering noisy and quiet constructions

Abstract: Moral panic theory continues to be applied to a range of phenomena, allowing sociologists to refine our understanding of negative societal reaction aimed at people who are easy to identify and easy...

The detention of asylum seekers in the UK Representing risk, managing the dangerous

Abstract: Media and political representations of asylum seekers and refugees have been infused with language denoting images of ‘danger’, ‘criminality’ and ‘risk’. Despite attempts to provide for those seeking asylum in the UK, those in need have frequently been stigmatized and criminalized. Policies and practices, intended to respond to those fleeing economic hardship or political persecution, have been guided by such depictions. This article illustrates the use of detention as a mechanism for purportedly securing the containment and removal of ‘illegals’. While the use of detention may be seen as an attempt to deter ‘undeserving’ asylum seekers from seeking sanctuary in the UK, this article argues that this practice is, in effect, a fundamentally punitive method to assuage public fears concerning supposed ‘risk’ and potential dangers to ‘security’.

Prisoner society in the era of hard drugs

Abstract: A telling indication of the decline of ethnographic prison sociology is the paucity of research on drugs and their influence on the prisoner social world. Based on long-term fieldwork in a medium-s...

Capital punishment and American culture

Abstract: INTRODUCTION This is an essay about capital punishment and American culture. Its point of departure is the recent publication of several books and articles suggesting that the USA’s retention of the death penalty is an expression of an underlying cultural tradition that creates an elective affinity between American society and the execution of criminal offenders. The implicit – and sometimes explicit – claim of this new literature is that today’s capital punishment system is an instance of ‘American exceptionalism’, an expression of a deep and abiding condition that has shaped the American nation from its formative years to the present. I want to take issue with this idea. I want to reject this culturalist version of American exceptionalism and to resist the notion that there is something deep and abiding about American culture that propels its judicial system towards capital punishment. In taking issue with these specific propositions and the books in which they are developed, I suggest an alternative way of understanding the continuation of capital punishment in the USA after 1972. In the course of this discussion, I also raise some more general issues about concepts of ‘culture’ and their use in the sociology of punishment.

The impact of medical issues on the job stress and job satisfaction of jail staff

Abstract: The work environment of corrections has received a great deal of attention, with several empirical studies focusing on the causes and consequences of employee job stress and job satisfaction. Resea...

Modelling penal transformation

Abstract: Using a systems analytical framework, this article explains how and why the Scottish penal system has followed a different trajectory to a number of its European and US counterparts. It highlights ...

Social disruption, state priorities, and minority threat A cross-national study of imprisonment

Abstract: Understanding the use of punishment becomes increasingly important as imprisonment rates in many nations have fluctuated irrespective of crime rates. Controlling for violent crime, inequality, modernization, and economic stress, this research examined three diverse hypotheses about the sources of imprisonment in a sample of 100 nations. Consistent with expectations, nations that retained use of the death penalty had a greater use of imprisonment. More surprising was the finding of a clear and consistent relationship between imprisonment and countries with common law legal systems, as well as newly independent nation-states. Finally, this study reveals a significant – although inconsistent – association between population heterogeneity and imprisonment. While punishment research has often focused upon the relationships between economic variables and imprisonment, these findings suggest that theories of formal social control will remain incomplete until the roles of political, cultural, and structural condi...

‘If we are tough on crime, if we punish crime, then people get the message’ Constructing and governing the punishable young offender in Canada during the late 1990s

Abstract: Through a detailed analysis of media reports and debates in the House of Commons over the late 1990s, this article explores the construction and proliferation of Canada’s punishable young offender. I suggest that the creation and dissemination of this discursive category resulted in calls for a new ethic of punishment that emphasized protection of the public from risks associated with youth crime. Media, political, and public concern about the punishable young offender propelled the Federal government’s announcement that it would replace existing youth justice legislation (the Young Offenders Act) with a tougher law premised on a framework of ‘accountability’. I begin by situating recent developments in Canadian youth justice policy domestically and internationally. Next, I highlight how the punishable young offender has been manifest in, and governed through, increasingly harsh penalties, austere punishments, and high rates of incarceration. Finally, I argue that calls for the punishment and intrusive re...

Thinking about penal equivalents

Abstract: Authors have pointed to multiple dimensions of crime and punishment, and in particular, the need to understand both the roles of instrumental and expressive elements. The latter dimension - the exp...

Women’s imprisonment in Spain:

Abstract: Even though Spain has one of the highest rates for the incarceration of women in Europe - 9 per cent of the total prison population - women’s imprisonment is one of the most neglected subjects of a

The reduction of women’s imprisonment in England and Wales Will the reform of short prison sentences help?

Abstract: The Government published a separate strategy for women offenders and established the Women’s Offending Reduction Programme to co-ordinate cross-government initiatives that target women’s offending ...

The penitentiary system in Spain: The use of imprisonment, living conditions and rehabilitation

Abstract: This article examines how close the Spanish penitentiary system comes to fulfilling an ideal role for the prison in the system of punishment based on: (a) limitation of the use of imprisonment; (b) normalization of prison life; and (c) early reintegration into society of prisoners in the process of rehabilitation. On the basis of official reports and data of the years 1996-2003, it is first shown that although non-custodial punishments have produced a reduction in the use of imprisonment, this effect has been extensively compensated for by the increased period that prisoners have to serve before parole is granted. Second, although prison conditions have improved considerably since the 1990s, the system continues to suffer from some important shortcomings. Finally, the article compares the use of open prison and parole in the two administrations that manage Spanish prisons (the Catalan administration and the General Administration of the State) and explores the relationship between a policy based on rehabi...

Book Review: Punishment and politics: Evidence and emulation in the making of English crime control policy

Abstract: It would be interesting to know precisely when Michael Tonry first conceived this text, and finally completed it. For, whether or not designed as such, it now represents his swan song to the UK. After a stint of five years at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology he has returned to the United States. His links with Europe are in future apparently to be with the Netherlands. These personal details may be relevant – because Punishment and politics constitutes the most sustained full-frontal assault on New Labour, and possibly any previous English administration’s, ‘law and order’ policies that I can recall coming from a senior academic. Though he begins by being ‘puzzled’ about the direction of the Government’s current policies, ‘wonders’ about it and is ‘perplexed’, Tonry’s is not a subtle, tentative or slanting critique. His analysis exhibits no doubts. This is an imperious, trenchant and eloquently delivered head-butt of a critique delivered by a researcher who is getting out, who has had enough, who does not any longer expect to win friends in high Whitehall places, who has concluded that England is not the country it was. No longer ‘rational, decent and moderate’, England’s criminal justice policies are pronounced increasingly ‘hyperbolic’, following in the ‘cruel and simplistic’ wake of the USA, employing ‘xenophobic right-wing’, anti-crime, rhetorical language. ‘Blair, Le Pen and Fortuyn are’, Tonry concludes, ‘an odd and unexpected trio’ (p. viii). The thread that runs through Tonry’s account comprises his answer to a question. Why do policy makers adopt bad policies? They do so, he argues, for one of four reasons – poor evidence, ignorance, ideology or self-interest. In the case of New Labour, he maintains, their penal policy – he focuses primarily on sentencing – is explicable in terms of a mixture of ideology and self-interest. That is, New Labour, despite their avowed commitment to ‘evidence-based policy’, have adopted policies ‘primarily for symbolic reasons, without knowing or caring whether they will work’ (p. ix). They have engaged in ‘popular punitivism’ (Bottoms, 1995), for cynical (knowing they will not work) rather than respectable democratic reasons (see Roberts et al., 2003). Thus, to take an example from Tonry’s thesis, the Government’s introduction, in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 s. 189, of what is colloquially called ‘custody minus’ – in effect a new version of suspended prison sentences for minor, repeat offenders who might previously have received a short custodial sentence and who, if they breach the conditions of the order, are immediately to be imprisoned – will fail to achieve the Government’s avowed aim of reduced resort to imprisonment. It will fail because all the evidence regarding this group of offenders shows that they have the highest reconviction and breach rates. The measure is also likely to have a net-widening effect. Indeed, the measure will only not fail all evidential tests if sentencers and probation officers wilfully circumvent PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY 7(2)

The prison furlough programme in Greece Findings from a research project in the Male Prison of Korydallos

Abstract: Although the prison furlough programme in Greece was first implemented in 1990, it has received little academic attention ever since. In an effort to fill that gap, this article reflects on some of the main aspects of the programme and poses some key research questions. To what extent do furloughed prisoners fail to return to the establishment on time? What is the proportion of those who fail to return at all? Why are foreign applicants less likely to receive licences than Greeks? Which factors do the prison authorities consider in their risk assessment of furlough applicants? Which are the weaknesses of the existing correctional legislation? Based on the findings from a four-month research project in the Male Prison of Korydallos - the largest establishment in Greece - I deal with these questions which have important implications for the ‘what works’ debate in Greece.

Path dependence, culture and state-level execution policy: A reply to David Garland

Abstract: The career of capital punishment in the United States has only recently begun to receive the attention from scholars of law and society that it has long deserved (see Sarat, 2001; Banner, 2002; Whitman, 2003; Zimring, 2003). David Garland’s essay in this issue adds to this boomlet, and my delight in his entry in the capital punishment sweepstakes is only slightly diminished by our differences. There is much, particularly toward the end of Garland’s essay, that I agree with (compare Zimring and Hawkins, 1986a and Zimring, 2003), but those agreements are not the reasons the editors have invited my comments. In his detailed criticism of my recent book, I think Professor Garland has misinterpreted the available evidence on two key issues and misread the book on two others. These matters are the focus of this note. My response will be organized under three headings and a summary, beginning with a quibble about the conclusion Garland ascribes to my book, then analyzing the Garland and Zimring differences on ‘vigilante values’ and finally complaining about a small assortment of Garland’s interpretation of parts of my book.

State form, labour market and penal system The new punitive rationality in context

Abstract: Around the turn of the 19th century, Vincent van Gogh painted - to subsequent international renown - his famous picture ‘The Round of the Prisoners’. It presents a well-known image: a circle of prisoners that completely embraces the perimeter space of a prison courtyard. This circular vision is composed by people who truly seem to be moving around, painted by a magic hand. One century later, we can think about another circular view, rather less artistic. The new millennium presents a terrifying figure: according to the most rigorous and official data (from the UN), there are at present about 8,700,000 prisoners all over the world. Nowadays, this human contingent can form another ‘round’, another circular view: such a number could go twice around the world. A gloomy and hard vision for a sensitive artist: What has happened? What is going on?

Response to Garland

Abstract: My book is not about capital punishment in contemporary America. I talk a great deal about historic forms of capital punishment; and I certainly do mention the fact that the death penalty is sometimes imposed in the USA today. Nevertheless, when it comes to contemporary American law, I focus overwhelmingly on other punishment practices, as David Garland half acknowledges at a few points in his thoughtful critique. There is a reason for this. The social dynamic of capital punishment is quite distinctive. Death is associated with peculiar anxieties, and triggers peculiar and complex religious responses. There is good reason to expect the death penalty to develop somewhat differently from other forms of punishment, as I said (perhaps too cryptically) in my book,1 and so I deliberately chose to ignore most of the literature on American capital punishment in doing my study. My book is mostly about other matters: practices of imprisonment, concepts of criminal liability, the law of non-capital sentencing. It is about the broad array of workaday legal doctrines that make life so much harsher for ordinary American offenders than it is for their German or French counterparts. Nevertheless, many of Garland’s objections certainly do apply to the claims that I did make, and I am glad to have the opportunity to respond. My book offered the following arguments. American punishment is far harsher than punishment in France and Germany, the dominant legal cultures of northern continental Europe.2 No sociology of ‘modernity’ can provide any explanation for this striking, and often deeply disturbing, divergence. What can explain it? There are some possible answers whose importance my book does not deny – notably answers having to do with religious traditions and race relations. Leaving those possible explanations aside, though, my book explores two others. First, American punishment is more degrading, in ways that reflect a much broader American pattern: American law generally shows a comparative lack of concern for personal dignity. This is as true of the law of tort as it is of the law of punishment. Second, American law is unmistakably the product of a weaker state tradition. In particular, where criminal justice remains largely the province of trained bureaucrats in continental Europe, it has become highly politicized in the United States. The book is devoted to investigating the significance and history of these differences. With regard to degradation in punishment, it offers the following argument. Patterns of degradation are fundamental to the working of punishment, in ways that have been comparatively neglected. Punishment works largely through degrading the person punished. Indeed, a disturbing urge toward degradation is always present whenever

Huddled masses: Immigrants in detention

Abstract: American immigration law has long been complex, ideologically biased and controversial. In the wake of the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks on American centers of power, US immigration policy has become even more Byzantine. Yet in virtually no other area of law have American courts been as deferential to Congress and the executive branch as immigration (see Legomsky, 1984; Schuck, 1984), a tradition that often gives immigration authorities wide leeway in their operations. For this and other reasons, despite the attention to and controversy over immigration policy (as well as detention abuses in places like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib), most Americans remain unaware of the capricious and summary treatment ordinary immigrants receive while in detention. The books under review here reveal that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and its successor organization, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),1 have a long-standing practice of mistreating immigrants in detention that violates fundamental conceptions of due process and fair play. Both books cover some of the same territory, but in different ways, complementing one another nicely. Michael Welch focuses on the changes in immigration policy between 1996 and 2001 and their effects on detention, and Mark Dow examines immigration detention both preand post-9/11. Dow’s book takes a journalistic perspective on the subject, offering a wealth of detail about individual cases that serves both to humanize detainees’ plight, and to convey the vast scope of the problem. Welch’s book is scholarly in tone and style. While he only briefly touches on the post-9/11 environment, his book is highly relevant to scholars, both because the problems he details continue today, and because he thoughtfully frames the issues surrounding immigration in a larger socio-political context. Welch usefully analyzes immigration policy in sociological and criminological terms.

Delivering demons, punishing wives False imprisonment, exorcism and other matrimonial duties in a late 20th-century manslaughter case

Abstract: This article provides an analysis of R v Vollmer and Others, Australia’s most famous ‘exorcism-manslaughter’ case, in which a woman, Joan Vollmer, underwent an ‘exorcism’ performed by four people, resulting in her death. We examine how taken-for-granted distinctions were collapsed during the resulting trial - distinctions between crime and punishment, exorcism and punishment, church and state, the past and the present, law and religion, reason and unreason and between a demon and a woman. We show how the defence argument for the reality of demonic possession normalized the bizarre, while simultaneously exoticizing the mundane or ‘traditional’ criminal case involving a husband defendant and a dead wife. The apparent assumption on the part of the police and the media that this case was bizarre serves to veil the fact of its relative ordinariness. A wife is killed, and the lethal punishing violence inflicted on her body downplayed, to be reinterpreted in the legal context as somehow a consequence of something she herself precipitated. Our analysis of the Vollmer case provides a novel perspective on that always intriguing conundrum of crime and punishment.

Book Review: Prison architecture: Policy, design and experience:

Abstract: As Stephen Shaw notes in his concluding chapter to this volume which has stemmed from a 1998 symposium on prisons architecture, this subject has been of little interest to academics, reformers and administrators (with one or two exceptions, such as the editors of this volume). This, I think, is a great pity. For academics, as Robin Evans (1982) beautifully illustrated, the architecture of nineteenth century prisons is just as an important key to understanding their place in modern society as their internal arrangements. Indeed, given the symbolism attached to the display of premodern and early nineteenth century penal arrangements in Foucault’s (1978) Discipline and punish, it now seems regrettable that this theme was not followed through in the book’s subsequent exposition of the birth of the prison. For historians, prison architecture has the potential to be understood as an important feature of our cultural heritage as, in relation to the United Kingdom, Allan Brodie and colleagues (Brodie, Croom and Davies, 1999) have skilfully demonstrated. For reformers and administrators there is much to be learned from past architectural and design mistakes. The now notorious Risley prison, built in the north of England in the 1960s, was intended to throw off the dark, gloomy legacy of Victorian prisons building. Smaller cells became the order of the day in this era of prison building, based on the assumption that their inhabitants would spend most of the day outside of them – working, learning, training and so on, as befits the expectations of a humane prisons programme in a civilized society such as Britain. If the architects at work on these designs are not to be blamed for the subsequent cramming of three, sometimes four prisoners into one of these cells for up to 23 hours a day as a result of the unanticipated growth of the prison population in the 1970s and 1980s, they must surely take some responsibility for not bothering to ask pertinent questions about sanitary and hygiene arrangements when these prisons were being designed. In addition, architectural design is of considerable importance to situational crime prevention within the prison, as Weser notes: ‘when inmates feel safe, the likelihood of violent behaviour is lessened’ (p. 52). But here too, ‘there has been little discussion of the role of design in influencing the likelihood of inmates’ violent behaviour’ (p. 48). So will this book kindle interest where there has been so little before? I am not sure, unfortunately, particularly in relation to the stimulation of academic interest, since the standard of papers presented here is something of a mixed bag. There is a tendency in some for the obvious to be stated; for example, ‘personal safety is of prime importance to inmates, staff and other prison users, and its provision is a basic duty of the prison authorities . . .’ (p. 45). Elsewhere, important issues are raised, but because of the rather narrow range of contributors (an imbalance perhaps between academics and those from the policy and prison building and design sectors) are not developed as they have the potential to be. For example, the chapter by Derbyshire on ‘Architects and prison experience’ notes that in the United States, ‘since many of the federal prisons are located in city centres, the architects take great care to establish an attractive public interface, balancing the need for the building to look approachable with the necessary symbols of incarceration and acknowledging demands of civic pride in sensitive urban design’ (p. 56). Does this mean, then, that there is a greater tolerance for the visibility of prison in urban America than in the rest of the English-speaking world, where prison building PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY 7(1)

Book Review: Beyond criminology: Taking harm seriously:

Abstract: Michel Foucault once argued that criminology was the ‘alibi’ upon which the criminal justice system depends. When future generations of social scientists look back to an outof-control criminal justice system at the turn of the 21st century, they will question not what was being done to excuse, but what their colleagues were doing to challenge its counter-productive expansion, its exorbitantly rising economic costs and its less measurable but undeniably huge social costs, indicated most graphically in terms of the mass criminalization and marginalization of young people. What criminology desperately needs at this juncture is the ability to look beyond the ready-made landscape of statedefined crime in order to regain some perspective, a vantage point far enough removed from official definition and moral panic; a vantage point that is sufficiently disconnected from the evaluative demands of criminal justice agencies. For this reason, criminologists cannot afford to ignore Beyond criminology, a truly groundbreaking text which proposes a new perspective from which to approach the study of crime and criminal justice. The starting point for the text is that the category of ‘crime’, as currently constructed, obscures some of the most socially harmful acts and omissions. For, the crimes that are generally dealt with by the apparatuses and technologies of crime control involve only a minority of individually produced harms, many of which would not appear very high on any objective scale of social harm. The text demonstrates how criminology, by failing to deconstruct ‘crime’, shifts the academic gaze away from the social harms and violence that are either ignored or inadequately controlled by the criminal law. The conclusion is that, in order for the discipline truly to sever its parasitical relationship with the state, it is not enough just to resist state-defined research agendas, but it must also step outside the organizing categories of the criminal law and embrace a new concept of social harm. Collectively, the contributions demonstrate, often with forensic precision, the importance of conceptualizing the cumulative effects of harms where some may be crimes and others not. Thus, as Pantazis’ chapter (‘Gendering harm through a life course perspective’) shows, harms experienced by women can only be understood by interrogating the intersection of poverty and patriarchal social relations that combine to diminish drastically women’s life chances ‘from the womb to the grave’ (p. 215). The dense statistical analysis provided by Dorling (‘Prime suspect: Murder in Britain’) argues for an analysis not of a select group of individuals in the manner of a pathologist or detective, but for a collective investigation of the victims of thousands of murders that have taken place over many years. His investigation follows the demographic variations in murder victims: who were they; what type of areas did they live in; with what were they murdered? How did those patterns change over time and how did they change PUNISHMENT AND SOCIETY 7(4)

Book Review: When prisoners come home: Parole and prisoner re-entry:

Abstract: with the defendant and tended to recognize how race and class play a role in capital punishment – from articulating the role of both in capital defendants’ lives, to recognizing how their fellow jurors refuse to acknowledge such influence, and indeed in some cases may let their own race and class biases shape deliberations. Such resisters, though, are rarely successful at swaying the entire jury toward a life verdict, and are more likely to be bullied, demeaned and treated as outsiders themselves within the decision-making process for challenging the hegemonic narratives held by the majority until they succumb to the group’s pressure. In the end, it is through these mechanisms, FleurySteiner infers, that American capital trial process ‘invests in inequality’. The book’s greatest contribution is its articulation of the narrative process that shapes capital jury decision making, particularly as told by the former jurors themselves. Their recall of how the decision was made, how the defendant was viewed within their group, their reconstruction of the reasons for his criminal behavior and their experiences as resisters or as jury members who resisted the resisters reveals the complex interplay of broader cultural narratives, the uniquely awesome demands of their role as capital jurors and the small group dynamics that take place in such a setting. The stories of the resisters are particularly troubling, poignant and illuminating in that they demonstrate the sheer strength of those hegemonic narratives that tend to lead to death sentences. Thus, this book offers the reader fascinating empirical evidence that illustrates how and why citizens who sit on capital juries are able to come to sentence fellow citizens to death. Mona Lynch San Jose State University, USA