Showing papers in "Theoretical Criminology in 2010"

A general strain theory of terrorism

Abstract: This article reviews and critiques current strain-based explanations of terrorism, then draws on general strain theory and the terrorism research to present a general strain theory of terrorism. This theory states that terrorism is most likely when people experience ‘collective strains’ that are: (a) high in magnitude, with civilians affected; (b) unjust; and (c) inflicted by significantly more powerful others, including ‘complicit’ civilians, with whom members of the strained collectivity have weak ties. These collective strains increase the likelihood of terrorism for several reasons, but they do not lead to terrorism in all cases—a range of factors condition their effect.

Resisting punitiveness in Europe

Abstract: Criminological literature of the last decade is rife with tales and analyses of ‘increased’ or ‘new’ punitiveness in western countries over the last 20 or 30 years. This article starts from the fin...

Consuming security? Tools for a sociology of security consumption

Abstract: How does our understanding of private security alter if we treat security consumption as consumption? In this article, we set out the parameters of a project which strives—theoretically and empiric...

Legitimating police violence Newspaper narratives of deadly force

Abstract: Newspaper coverage of police-perpetrated homicides may reflect and promote public and official tolerance for police violence. Interpretive content analysis was performed on 105 news articles appearing in 23 major daily newspapers between 1997 and 2000 that center on incidents of deadly force. Using Thompson’s (1990) conceptual framework, patterns of ideological content were identified and analyzed. Most articles, subtly drawing upon iconic images of police professionals and vigilantes, cast victims of police killings as physical and social threats and situate police actions within legitimate institutional roles. Articles appearing after police killed Amadou Diallo are less likely to demonize both police officers and victims, partially reflecting efforts to frame deadly force and police racism as systemic issues.

Doing and undoing gender in policing

Abstract: This article assesses the utility of ‘doing gender’ as a framework for examining gender issues in policing. Drawing on a longitudinal study in an Australian police force, the article seeks to expla...

For penal moderation: Notes towards a public philosophy of punishment

Abstract: The 2008 financial crash, and the lessons it teaches us about the costs of unregulated excess, offers an opportunity to think anew about, and seek to temper, the enthusiasm for excessive punishment...

Advancing governmentality studies: Lessons from social constructionism

Abstract: Criminology has been significantly influenced by governmentality studies and the social constructionist perspective on social problems. Despite emerging in distinctive academic networks, this article elaborates how both programmes similarly focus on the simultaneous governance and constitution of problematized—often moralized or criminalized—conduct; imagine plurality, temporality and continuous failure of their subject matters; and presume language is constitutive. These similarities are discussed in order to show how the governmentality project in relation to criminology can learn from the social constructionist perspective on social problems. Using empirical illustrations, it is shown how governmentality studies can benefit from adopting constructionism’s concept of claims-making activities; attention to context; and earlier acceptance of the futility of cutting the cord with ‘the real’.

The transnational security consultancy industry A case of state-corporate symbiosis

Abstract: This article examines state—corporate organizational complexes within the transnational policing sphere. Its specific focus is upon the transnational security consultancy industry and its interaction with state security agencies. Exemplifying the proposed theoretical construct of state—corporate symbiosis, leading firms are held out as key facilitators for this ongoing close association between dominant interests. Their activities reflect how this security amalgamation imposes itself upon the agendas, discourse, methods and ideologies of the global policing environment. As well as highlighting the degree to which both behaviour and techniques traverse the state—corporate security nexus, this article also identifies core factors which have driven this convergence of interests. It concludes by suggesting that this evolution towards state—corporate symbiosis exacerbates those trends within transnational policing that prompt most concern, while undercutting those for which hope is harboured.

Neoliberal Penality: A Brief Genealogy

Abstract: The turn of the twenty first century witnessed important shifts in punishment practices. The most shocking is mass incarceration - the exponential rise in prisoners in state and federal penitentiaries and in county jails beginning in 1973. It is tempting to view these developments as evidence of something new that emerged in the 1970s - of a new culture of control, a new penology, or a new turn to biopower. But it would be a mistake to place too much emphasis on the 1970s since most of the recent trends have antecedents and parallels in the early twentieth century. It is important, instead, to explore the arc of penality over a longer course: to relate recent developments to their earlier kin at the turn of the twentieth century. What that larger perspective reveals is that the pattern of confinement and control in the past century has been facilitated by the emergence and gradual dominance of neoliberal penality. By neoliberal penality, I have in mind a form of rationality in which the penal sphere is pushed outside political economy and serves the function of a boundary: the penal sanction is marked off from the dominant logic of classical economics as the only space where order is legitimately enforced by the state. This essay traces a genealogy of neoliberal penality going back to the emergence and triumph of the idea of natural order in economic thought - back to the Physiocratic writings of Francois Quesnay and other economists during the 1760s. It is precisely their notion of natural order that metamorphosed, over time, into the modern idea of market efficiency that is at the heart of neoliberal penality.

Nodal wars and network fallacies A genealogical analysis of global insecurities

Abstract: In this article we examine three prominent discourses of security governance and suggest, through a critical review of organizational network theory, that the nodal model can offer theoretical, methodological and ethical benefits over alternative ones. These benefits, we argue, are especially pertinent to the analysis of contemporary global insecurities. The article closes by reflecting on two issues raised in the earlier analysis: how an awareness of discursive contiguity can help inform our understanding of nodal tendencies in global security governance; and how the methodological fallacy of ‘nodal-network equivalence’ plays out under conditions of the ‘war on terror’.

A criminal law for citizens

Abstract: Rather than appealing to penal parsimony as a constraint on the otherwise insatiable demands of the criminal justice system, we should develop a positive account of the proper aims of criminal law which shows parsimony, or moderation, to be integral to those aims. We can do this by developing a republican conception of criminal law as a law that citizens impose on themselves: such a law will be modest in its scope, and will provide a criminal process of trial and punishment that addresses those subjected to it with the respect due to them as citizens.

Policing, urban poverty and insecurity in Latin America: The case of Mexico City and Buenos Aires

Abstract: This article explains how, in the late 20th century, Latin America went through a transition in social-control policy that followed and paralleled the area’s transition from a pervasively authoritarian polity to a democratic one bearing a strong neoliberal imprint. Social-control strategies initially designed to serve a national-security doctrine mainly directed against political opponents morphed into strategies for the repressive government of the advanced marginal groups that for the most part live within economically deprived urban areas. The focus here will be on Buenos Aires and Mexico City. These two cases will be used to exemplify the way in which crime and public security in the Latin American megalopolis have become an important part of the political agenda and how the fears and concerns so amplified have stimulated strong neo-authoritarian pressures that in certain ways have stifled police-democratization processes which had got under way in both Argentina and Mexico in the last decade of the 2...

South African policing at a crossroads: The case for a ‘minimal’ and ‘minimalist’ public police

Abstract: This article explores the distinct but related notions of ‘minimal’ and ‘minimalist’ policing in the context of South Africa. We argue that these conceptions can shape a new vision for the future of policing in this country, one which is especially needed at a time when the political elites are seeking to re-militarize and centralize policing. This article searches for an answer to the question: Who should the public police be in emergent democracies where there is a plurality of policing providers, state and non-state? Drawing on research conducted in the city of Durban this article demonstrates that, to a large extent, policing is being carried out by agents other than the police. In this context, the article articulates a more circumscribed role for the police in a time (and place) of uncertainty, one that is anchored in local structures of strategic planning and regulation. Within such structures, non-state actors should be supported to play meaningful roles in ‘everyday policing’, but in ways that ar...

Do these prisons make me look fat?: Moderating the USA’s consumption of punishment

Abstract: Various observers have raised the question of how our penal appetite relates to broader patterns of consumption in western societies. Most recently, Ian Loader (2009) has suggested that our appetite for punishment, much like our appetite for ice cream and other high-calorie foods, has been accelerated by broad cultural and policy developments and queried how we might develop strategies to moderate it. The relationship is not simply metaphorical. The prison boom and the food binge, along with the housing bubble, constitute parallel developments in advanced liberal societies. While they may all be reflections of the kind of deeper structural change in these societies often labeled ‘neo-liberalism’, I would suggest their relationships are often more direct—and that they can possibly be analytically reversed, yielding insights as to how restraint in one domain might be mobilized within another. This essay seeks to back out some ideas about moderation in punishment from emerging strategies to fight obesity.

Historical criminology and the imprisonment of women in 19th-century Malta

Abstract: For many criminologists, theory matters more than evidence in historical studies. But can historical criminology really proceed on this basis? In this article, we argue for the importance of primary research, that is, analysis of documents that originate in the period of interest. Using examples from archived documents in a study of women imprisoned in Malta during the 19th century, we address four issues related to history and theory: gaining perspective from unfamiliar places, finding the beginning of historical processes, making discoveries from details, and recovering the significance of forgotten practices. In this, we wish to join a conversation about historical evidence and genealogical accounts in prison history. We will also contribute to the significant, but relatively limited, literature on prisons for women in the 19th century.

Punishing the Poor — a debate: Some questions on Wacquant’s theorizing the neoliberal state

Abstract: While in broad agreement about the growing importance of workfare and punitive tendencies in contemporary politics, this article raises four questions about Wacquant’s model of a neoliberal state. ...

Populist Leniency, Crime Control and Due Process

Abstract: This article identifies and discusses examples of populist calls against punishment and for leniency—a phenomenon here termed ‘populist leniency’. A penal moderate might find such populist opposition to punishment superficially appealing. However, drawing from Packer’s classic models of the criminal process, it is argued that both populist leniency and penal populism express ‘Crime Control’ values, the view that the proper role of the criminal process (and criminal justice) is to protect ‘law-abiding citizens’ from dangerous others. Since ‘Crime Control’ does not advocate any net reduction in penal power (and if anything, quite the opposite), the article asks whether Packer’s other model, ‘Due Process’, presents a more attractive potential resource for penal moderates, since this model offers a sceptical view of criminal justice, protecting individuals from unconstrained official power.

Security governance in transition: The compartmentalizing, crowding out and corralling of policing and security in Northern Ireland

Abstract: The article suggests that while the report of the Independent Commission on Policing (ICP) provides a police reform blueprint for Northern Ireland and elsewhere, it can also be seen as an attempt to engage more elliptically with contemporary debates in security governance vis-a-vis the increasingly fragmented nature of late-modern policing and the role of the state. A decade into the reform process in Northern Ireland and in spite of the networked approach postulated by the ICP, the public police continue to enjoy a pre-eminent place and little evidence exists of any significant weakening of state steering and rowing of security. The discussion proposes a tentative typology explaining the continued colonization of security spaces by the State using constituent attendant processes of compartmentalizing, crowding out and corralling.

Traversing sites of confinement: Post-prison survival in Sierra Leone

Abstract: In February 2006 a group of over 50 former fighters were released from Freetown’s central prison after over six years’ incarceration. This article traces the ways they handled the move from one for...

Neoliberalism’s penal and debtor states: A rejoinder to Loïc Wacquant

Abstract: Loïc Wacquant’s bold attempt to offer a new description of the neoliberal state is full of insights—many of which I can embrace. But the purpose of this essay is to raise questions about his arguments and in some cases to push them in new directions. I begin with a brief description of his sketch of the neoliberal state in order to be clear about what I see as the most important parts of his argument. Then I turn to a series of comments and questions about it. Insofar as his theory focuses on the neoliberal state’s relationship to the lower class, I begin by discussing that relationship and his analysis of the penal state, which he argues is an important appendage of the more general neoliberal state. This is followed by a discussion of the neoliberal state’s relationship to the middle and upper classes. Here I introduce the concept of the debtor state, another appendage of the neoliberal state but one that he overlooks even though it has had a dramatic impact on middle class behavior and may have helped sow the seeds for the ultimate demise of the neoliberal state itself. Much of this discussion focuses on the United States because he takes it to be the bastion of neoliberalism. I conclude with a comment on his tendency to over-generalize about the neoliberal state and side-step how neoliberalism has had rather different effects in different countries.

Comment on Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Theoretical Coda’ to Punishing the Poor

Abstract: Loïc Wacquant’s well-known work on urban poverty and criminalization has been very influential in left circles, and has been read by activists perhaps as much as by scholars. Personally, I’m pleased to see that the audience for left-wing analysis is not as small as mainstream media gurus suggest. And given the new popularity of Keynesian economics since the subprime crash, Wacquant may find an even larger audience. As someone whose formative years were spent in the socialist-feminist left of the midand late 1970s, and who has remained to the left of all social democratic and New Labour-ish options, I am extremely pleased with the popularity of Wacquant’s analysis. However, while politically he and I are on the same side, theoretically and methodologically there are major differences between his approach and mine, differences which are perhaps of some general interest. In fact, a very good way to begin a friendly debate is to point out that one of the key differences between Wacquant’s approach and mine is that I no longer believe (as did Althusser, second-wave feminism and Bourdieu) that theoretical differences are necessarily indicative of or hard wired to political differences. One thing that I have learned—from the dead-end 1980s debates about ‘feminist epistemology’ as much as from Nietzsche—is that successful political projects are more often than not pragmatic coalitions among people who want the same things but don’t necessarily have a common vision—or a common methodology (which is what social scientists have instead of a vision). The debate within which this comment appears is thus a good opportunity to explore basic philosophical differences that, contrary to the 1970s view of ‘praxis’, have very few if any political effects. Wacquant’s key proposal is to ‘reintegrate’ criminology and the study of social policy and social welfare. I wholeheartedly agree that criminal justice policy is not usefully regarded as a separate field of governmental activity (as most mainstream criminology does). The same politicians who pass law-andorder legislation have also been instituting harsher social assistance measures, Theoretical Criminology © The Author(s), 2010 Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav Vol. 14(1): 117–120; 1362–4806 DOI: 10.1177/1362480609352889

Forgetting the future Cause lawyering and the work of California capital trial defenders

Abstract: This article aims to push the boundaries of definitions of capital cause lawyering to include a more potentially radical ‘cause’ that takes on one key ideological underpinning of state killing: individualism. This article studies whether and how capital trial lawyers take up a ‘radical’ cause by challenging individualism. To the extent that they oppose state killing and illuminate social inequality, the defenders studied in this project engage in something beyond the parameters of their particular trials, and thus fall partially within current definitions of cause lawyering. However, considering that they are unaware of, avoid, or suppress subversive arguments within the expansive discursive space afforded by penalty phase proceedings, they may be ‘forgetting the future’ precisely so that their clients may avoid a death sentence. Rather, defenders construct narratives that portray a liminal conceptualization of the influence of social forces on human free will, a concept known in the defense bar as ‘diminished autonomy’.

Book Review: Sveinung Sandberg and Willy Pedersen, Street Capital: Black Cannabis Dealers in a White Welfare State, Bristol: The Policy Press, 2009; 208 pp.: 9781847421203, £65.00 (hbk):

Abstract: Consequently, social movement activism and education are also vital if violence against women—including but not limited to rape—is to be substantially diminished in and outside the USA in decades to come. For reasons both strictly legal and more broadly cultural, then, Caringella’s book is one that should be read by faculty and students in classes on gender, criminology, law, and legal studies. Most of all, her model needs to be noticed because Caringella’s aim is not just to interpret the world of power imbalances but to transform it.

Book Review: Bruce A. Arrigo and Dragan Milovanovic, Revolution in Penology: Rethinking the Society of Captives, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham, MD, 2009; 213 pp.: ISBN-13: 9780742563629, $70.00, ISBN-10: 0742563626

Abstract: Revolution in Penology is an ambitious, dense, and postmodern analysis of the ‘pains of imprisonment’—the harm inflicted upon criminal offenders through the exclusion and alienation of confinement (see Sykes, 1958; Goffman, 1961). Arrigo and Milovanovic argue that penal harm is inflicted not only upon prisoners but on prison guards, correctional staff, government officials, and the public. The attempt to punish offenders, the effort to extract the moral payback for the harm done to victims and society, in their view, produces more harm in society, limiting freedom and human potential. The entire society is degraded by the violence of imprisonment. What Arrigo and Milovanovic add to this critique is a refined sense of how language, discourse, ways of thinking, and shared expression contribute to the reproduction of penal harm. The very words used to explain and criticize the prison make the prison all the more real and permanent. We are trapped by language: we ‘are our own jailers, sentenced by our sentences, imprisoned by our words’ (p. 11). By developing ‘constitutive penology’, Arrigo and Milovanovic offer a sophisticated theoretical foundation to an emerging anti-penal harm movement critical of the 30 years prison boom and mass incarceration. First, Arrigo and Milovanovic, building on Henry and Milovanovic (1996), develop the idea of ‘constitutive penology’ as an analytical approach to examining the discourses, institutions, philosophies, and practices of punishing. In this perspective, language plays the central role in shaping and defining social relations and making them meaningful. Through repeated interaction and language, human actors make up the structures and institutions that shape social order but they are also constrained by the very same structures (on structuration theory, see Giddens, 1984). Here, crime and punishment are understood to be socially constructed as human actors create the meaning of crime and control and produce the social conditions conducive to crime. Crime and punishment are products of social relations, inseparable from cultural context (p. 5). Second, they then apply the concept of constitutive penology to explore and understand the ‘pains of imprisonment’, showing how language, texts and codes create the prison experience. Specifically, they focus on how language and Theoretical Criminology © The Author(s), 2010 Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav Vol. 14(2): 237–246; 1362–4806 DOI: 10.1177/1362480609356834