Penal Regime Research Articles

Prison places, foreign prisoners and the Danish welfare state: Towards a conceptualization of prison space as a welfare resource

In December 2021, the government of Denmark entered into a rental agreement with Kosovo whereby 300 non-EU foreign nationals convicted by the Danish criminal justice system would be sent to Kosovo to serve their sentence of imprisonment and await their subsequent deportation. Based on an analysis of the wording of the Agreements on the finances of the Danish Prison Service, the article argues that a conceptualization of prison space as a welfare state's scarce resource makes it possible to explain such rental agreement through the theories of welfare and penal nationalism. In doing so, the article contributes to the growing body of literature that exposes the inherently dual harsh-but-mild nature of the penal regimes of Nordic welfare states. The article concludes with a brief outline of the future challenges that can potentially arise once the Denmark–Kosovo rental agreement enters into force.

‘There is more than one sort of prison, Captain’: A popular criminology of prisons and penal regimes in Star Wars

In this paper we emphasise how science fiction, as a projection of the possible, can forewarn of dystopic dangers in emergent and future penal regimes. In this popular criminology we explore three archetypes of the prison as they have appeared across the Star Wars franchise: the panoptic prison; the labour camp; and the smart prison. The panoptic prison of the Galactic Republic invokes reflective nostalgia; prompting critical discussion of the deficiencies of the modern prison. Under the Galactic Empire prisons become labour camps, recalling the horrors of the Gulag as violent and cruel manifestations of underpinning ideology. Whilst the fall of the Galactic Empire signalled a return to governance based on democratic values, the representation of the smart prison in the New Republic continues to resonate as a techno-Gulag, reading as an allegory for a deeper crisis of liberal democracy. Analysed as such, prisons in Star Wars exist at the intersection of the past, present and possible futures of penal regimes, and in our current political climate can be a resource for resistance to technological trends and dystopic dangers. Star Wars, we conclude, and science fiction more broadly, is well-positioned to inform a radical re-imagining of future prisons and penal regimes.

Narratives of Rehabilitation in a South African Prison

Abstract How individuals incarcerated in the Global South engage with the official rehabilitative model remains largely under-documented. Through analysis of the narratives of men and women living in a large, medium-security correctional complex in Gauteng, South Africa, I argue that the grandiloquent official discourse of rehabilitation constitutes an important resource for those incarcerated. Highlighting the importance of local context in debates about carceral rehabilitation, I demonstrate that not only prisoners’ personal circumstances, but also the wider socio-economic context of enduring colonial legacies of structural inequalities shape their interactions with the penal regime. By foregrounding what those subjected to penal power make of their incarceration, I argue that the official rehabilitative discourse helps many to make sense of their predicament, actualise their lives, and sustain hope. I highlight how individual narrative strategies are channeled by and mapped on the official discourse of rehabilitation, free will, and personal responsibility, attesting to the success of the disciplinary project of the post-apartheid prison. I demonstrate how prisoners incorporate engagement with the rehabilitative model into a moral order of carceral cohabitation. I suggest that narrative work in the prison constitutes a nexus of individual needs and private aspirations and structural regimes of inequality, poverty, deprivation, and neglect.

The Howard League and liberal colonial penality in mid‐20th‐century Britain: The death penalty in Palestine and the Kenya Emergency

AbstractThis article analyses the Howard League's campaigning against the death penalty in mid‐20th‐century British colonies. It examines two case studies: the Howard League's campaign to limit the death penalty in the Palestine Mandate in the 1930s and their silence on mass executions during the Kenya Emergency in the 1950s. Drawing on Ben‐Natan's (2021) concept of the dual penal regime, we argue the Howard League concentrated its intervention in ordinary penal regimes and demarcated emergency penal regimes as outside its sphere of interest and influence. Consequently, it was silent on the penal excess of colonial authorities during periods of counter‐insurgency. Criminology as a discipline largely shares this demarcation of the penal measures associated with colonial wars, militarism and states of emergency as beyond its purview. Inclusion of these aspects of colonial penality into the criminological narrative highlights the significance of colonialism and colonial ways of thinking to penal liberalism.

‘One always looks for a compromise…’: Senior prison managers’ views of law, human rights and prisoner complaints in Germany

German prison legislation is based on a fundamental rights approach but there has been little examination of how those who should be instantiating a culture of rights in penal regimes – prison staff – view such laws and rights. This question is of cross-national importance. Holding considerable power over people in custody, examining the ways in which prison staff see and act on obligations to protect these individuals provides useful insights into how a culture of human rights in detention exists, or otherwise. In this article, we seek to contribute to the literature on human rights in the context of punishment by examining how senior staff in German prisons view legal regulation, prisoners’ rights, and the mechanism designed to protect them: complaints. Drawing on 24 interviews conducted in four prisons across two Federal States, we find that the principle of resocialisation, considered to be a core feature of German prison law, is influential on prison managers. German prison legislation links this principle to prisoners’ rights, including the right to complain. Managers valued the law as a form of guidance though were more positive about legal regulation when it was used by them rather than against them or the prison system. Some saw legal precepts as useful ways of defending themselves against threats of litigation or blame. While the study finds that law is highly present in prison manager culture in Germany, the principle of resocialisation in prison management practice may have created a view of prisoners as people to be in need, rather than worthy of rights.

Convicts: A Global History by Clare Anderson

Visitors to the Breton city of Brest can take the téléphérique from the edge of the city center across the Penfeld River to an arts complex housed in the old arsenal buildings high on the opposite bank. This cable car offers an unparalleled view of what was a huge penal-military-industrial complex, a set of docks and quays for the French navy, built largely by the labor of convicts incarcerated in the city’s riverside bagne—one of France’s largest prisons—and its galleys. When the prison was shut in 1858 for being too soft on its inmates, convicts were shipped across the oceans, under a law passed in 1854, to penal colonies in French Guiana and, after 1864, New Caledonia, where they cleared land, farmed, and built more infrastructure for the French empire. As Anderson’s new book demonstrates, the sorts of connections between empire, penal regimes, and labor revealed by convicts’ mobile lives give a different cast to both the history of punishment and global histories of imperial power and knowledge.Convicts is a history of “penal mobility” in two ways (7). First, it offers a comparative account of punishment practices across five centuries in not only all of the Western European empires, but also the newly-independent Latin American states, Russia, China, and Japan. This establishes the geographies (including some very useful maps) and demographics of the movement of convicts in each case, and then uses the similarities and differences between these examples to examine changing practices. This remarkable breadth of vision is achieved through original archival research, primarily on the British and French examples, and by drawing on and synthesizing the fruits of Anderson’s extensive and long-standing collaborative work on different convict labor systems within the European Union–funded “Carceral Archipelago” project (2013–2018).Second, this book contributes to our understanding of global history because penal mobility itself was global. European empires moved convicts (including rebels and political exiles, as well as those convicted of criminal activity) across the world from metropole to colony, from colony to colony (often in surprising ways), and sometimes from colony to metropole. For nation-states, such as Japan, Argentina, or Brazil, that used convict labor within, or more usually at, their borders, convict mobility was shaped by a globally networked discussion on the practice convened in print, government reports, and through penal tours and International Penitentiary Congresses held from 1872 onwards.Anderson’s aim and achievement in writing this volume is significantly to rewrite histories of punishment that have focused on incarceration, immobility, and the prison and, at the same time, to insert convicts into global labor history and the history of migration, from which they have been missing. Each of these are interdisciplinary concerns, and Anderson’s approach is shaped by and contributes to two key cross-disciplinary frameworks that have oriented studies of global history for at least the last thirty years—empire and knowledge. Part I of the book examines in detail how empires and states used convict labor (often alongside or instead of other forms of coerced labor) to secure territories and borderlands, to clear forests and transform other environments, to settle and farm, and to build crucial infrastructure. Part II shows how knowledge of the convict system itself was generated and circulated, but also that convicts were part of the production and circulation of global forms of knowledge about bodies, nature, and society, particularly in the nineteenth century.Convicts were involved in exploration and natural history at the margins of empire, but also in studies that used new techniques of bodily measurement and social science to test theories of medicine, criminality and race, and of changing social structures. While these are histories of power and control, Anderson is constantly alert to the ways in which convicts resisted, subverted, and moved against authority in order to make their own lives where they could and to produce, reproduce, and circulate radical and subversive political ideas.Overall, Convicts: A Global History is a remarkable achievement, a work of global history based on many years of research that restores a subaltern group to its place in the world through both a panoramic overview and the tracing of individual lives lived in extremis.

Surviving the Pandemic on the Inside: From Crisis Governance to Caring Communities

The COVID-19 global pandemic spurred unprecedented global lock downs and quarantines. In looking at the response to and the impacts of COVID-19 in Canadian prisons, we show how the global pandemic can illuminate the impacts of imprisonment to make them more tangible and relatable to the wider public who are largely disconnected from the prison experience. We begin this article by conceptualizing how ‘crisis governance’ produces new practices of penal operations that become problematically normalized, even after the crisis fades. This is reflected in the Correctional Service of Canada’s (CSC) “new normal” document, a strategic plan and management protocol introduced by federal corrections in response to the pandemic. To highlight the new penal regime, we focus our analytical efforts on the mental health impacts of the CSC’s COVID-19 new governance and response plan as they have been reported by way of lived experiences of federal incarceration in Canada throughout the pandemic. We argue that in their efforts to securitize the environment in light of the very real health risks that COVID-19 presents, the actions taken and not taken by prison officials and Canadian politicians primarily left prisoners isolated, disconnected, and without supportive resources, which aggravates underlying mental health conditions and creates additional emotional distress for vulnerable people. Not only can this approach detrimentally impact staff-prisoner relations, it also fails to consider the value of decarceration as an essential and possibly life-saving component of the correctional COVID-19 risk management response plan. We conclude by considering more humane recommendations that would instead prioritize the creation of “caring communities” where collectives of people support each other’s health and well-being, over punitive and austere management practices. Given that the detrimental effects of isolation are now also being felt to a certain extent by those who are not incarcerated, this penal move to a “new normal” should signal to the wider public the ongoing and exceptionally damaging implications of imprisonment.

Penal Welfare or Penal Sovereignty? A Political Sociology of Recent Formalization of Chinese Community Corrections

In this study, we address two observed gaps in existing accounts on Chinese community corrections (hereafter CCC): 1) lack of multilevel understanding of this penal institution’s local variations in a highly centralized penal regime; 2) inadequate scrutiny of political logics of, and the authoritarian state’s significance in, its recent formal introduction. Those limits may inhibit adequate understandings of state power and punishment in an authoritarian polity like China. To that end, we argue for a multilayered and hybrid conceptualization of CCC as an assemblage of penal welfare and penal sovereignty to understand CCC’s formation and function. Fracturing the holistic entity of CCC, our study challenges the approach to viewing it as a system of singular logics and unifying structure, and contrasts three modes of operational practices across localities—bureaucratic, professionalization, and technology-dominant models. Moreover, our analysis of its political functions suggests that in effect penal sovereignty subjugates penal welfare within contemporary Chinese penality. Far from heralding the full-fledged rise of Chinese penal welfare, this legal formalization represents a space created for the authoritarian state to penetrate political ideologies, and to reclaim, consolidate and exercise sovereign power through managerial penal strategies in a rapidly developing and differentiating society.

The Proliferation of Criminal Background Check Laws in the United States

Criminal record checks have become a widely used method for governing access to institutional attachments in the United States. State laws that authorize or require the use of background checks serve as one important source of criminal records’ expanded reach. The current study uses novel longitudinal data to examine the proliferation of these laws at the state level between 1982 and 2013. Panel analyses provide the strongest support for a model of racial classification, with the rate of background check adoption increasing as African-Americans represent larger shares of state criminal record populations. Considerable support is also found for racial economic threat and, to a lesser extent, ethnic economic threat. Background check adoption is only weakly associated with violent crime rates and other features of state-level penal regimes.

‘This is not what I signed up for’ – Danish prison officers’ attitudes towards more punitive penal policies

A humane approach to punishment has been integral to the work of the Danish Prisons and Probation Service. However, Danish penal policy has recently taken a punitive turn. What happens when punitive policies are adopted by a penal regime built on a humane approach to punishment? To address this question, this article focuses on prison officers at Vestre prison and how they adapt to punitive political decisions and prison policies. The increased focus on security in Danish prisons is considered, together with limitations set on welfare services available to non-citizen prisoners. Examination of officers’ subjectivities at Vestre prison shows that punitive penal policies have produced an environment fraught with tensions that affect prison work, institutional culture, and the officers’ professional identity. These findings also raise questions about the shifting nature of Danish penal power.

Commodified Justice and American Penal Form

This article seeks to analyze American penal law, ideology, and culture through the lens of Marxist theories of commodification and commodity fetishism. It first introduces the “first-order commodification of justice,” that is, the positing of a quantitative equivalence between offense and punishment. Next, it introduces the “second-order commodification of justice,” that is, the notion that the benefits of a particular penal regime can be reckoned alongside other social goods, mediated by the general currency of “utility.” It then considers some of the consequences of this commodification for the cultural meanings of justice and punishment in American culture. It pays particular attention to how the commodification of justice interacts in a mutually reinforcing way with racism. It concludes by arguing that commodified justice can perhaps be overcome through a transition to restorative/transformative justice paradigms, effectuated by an anti-capitalist, prison-industrial-complex abolitionist political praxis.

The dual penal empire: Emergency powers and military courts in Palestine/Israel and beyond

This article explores the duality of emergency powers and criminal law in old and new formations of empire. Set against the backdrop of the US “war on terror,” I link discussions around current articulations of empire and the treatment of “enemy combatants,” illuminating new connections between empire, emergency, and “enemy penology.” Focusing on Palestine/Israel, I explore the duality created by emergency powers and criminal law from the late British Empire to contemporary Israel/Palestine as an “imperial formation.” Through a genealogy of emergency legislation, military courts, and two case studies from the 1980s Israel, I show how emergency powers constitute a penal regime that complements ordinary criminal law through prosecutions of racialized enemy populations under a distinct exclusionary and punitive legality. Building on Markus Dubber's Dual Penal State, I demonstrate how the—openly illiberal—dual penal empire (i) suppresses political resistance (insurgency, rebellion, and terrorism) and (ii) institutionalizes enemy penology through emergency statutes and military courts. Thus, in imperial formations, such as Israel and the US—which deny their illiberal features—emergency powers are framed as preventive security and denied as part of the penal system, while enemy penology operates in plain sight.

Educational Consequences of Paternal Incarceration: Evidence from a Danish Policy Reform

ObjectivesThis study estimates the causal effect of paternal incarceration on children’s educational outcomes measured at the end of compulsory schooling (9th grade) in Denmark.MethodsI use Danish administrative data and rely on a sentencing reform in 2000, which expanded the use of non-custodial alternatives to incarceration for traffic offenders, for plausibly exogenous variation in the risk of experiencing paternal incarceration.ResultsThe results show that paternal incarceration does not affect academic achievement (grade point average), but that it does reduce the number of grades obtained, and–most importantly–roughly doubles the risk of not even completing compulsory school and getting a 9th grade certificate. These findings are driven mainly by boys for whom paternal incarceration appear to be particularly consequential.ConclusionsThe findings presented in this study highlight the presence of unintended and collateral consequences of penal policies–even in the context of a relatively mild penal regime. Effects are, however, estimated for a subgroup of Danish children experiencing paternal incarceration, and how results translate to other subgroups and beyond the Danish context is open for speculation.

Juvenile penal regime: An analysis of law projects

In this article we will analyze the field of dialogue regarding the lowering of the age of punishment in the legal setting in Argentina. We will rebuild the discursive formations, which are presented in the law projects with an entry date between the years 2017 and 2019 and whose objective is to modify the Juvenile penal Regime. In this sense, the guiding questions are formulated based on certain concerns about the relationship between youth and security, that is how these key-signifiers are articulated and co-constituted in a process of discursive disputes.

This is Denmark: Prison Islands and the Detention of Immigrants

Abstract According to mainstream criminology, Nordic societies with their generous welfare states are supposed to moderate, if not restrict, penal powers. In the case of migration, we see the opposite pattern. In Denmark, we see extended use of penal institutions and penal harms to contain and remove unwanted populations from the region, including proposals for a prison island and the confinement of migrants in 19th century prisons. To make sense of these developments and interpret its social meaning, we unpack the logic of the punishment–welfare nexus and Nordic exceptionalism. We find that Denmark expands penal power to regulate non-citizens, deter migration and uphold national interests. These repressive practices are not exceptions to the rule but rather illustrate the exclusionary edge and very nature of the penal regimes in Denmark, a Nordic welfare state.

Preventive detention of dangerous inmates: a dialogue between human rights and penal regimes

ABSTRACT As the terrain of this article, the term ‘preventive detention’ refers to the indefinite detention of serious criminal offenders for explicitly expressed preventive purposes after the expiration of a definite sentence. In order to fill the gap between human rights and penal regimes over preventive detention, this article believes that the scope of ‘punishment’ or ‘penalty’ should be emancipated from its conceptual definitions and moderately expanded in consideration of the liberty or rights at stake. It is also by taking such a step that the four legitimate penological grounds for detention could be incorporated into a sound discourse of human rights. Moreover, as the Kantian ‘moral agency’ being the normative basis of human rights, this article sets a limit for States to inflict both ‘indefinite sentences’ and ‘post-sentence preventive detention’ upon convicted inmates who are reasonably considered dangerous. However, even this proposal can be morally justified in accordance with current international human rights jurisprudence, its intrinsic discrimination against dangerous inmates and persons with mental disabilities from ‘normal’ offenders and human beings should not be ignored.

Ascenso y caída del Supermax: cómo el modelo de prisión estadounidense y la política penal ultrapunitiva llegaron a Colombia

En el contexto del programa antinarcótico estadounidense, Plan Colombia, durante la primera década del siglo XXI, agentes especiales de la Oficina Estadounidense de Prisiones (BOP, por sus siglas en inglés) se posicionaron en el corazón de la administración carcelaria colombiana. Su tarea fue liderar una reforma profunda del sector, basada en el régimen penal ultra punitivo y sus unidades de confinamiento supermax.1 Basado en un extensivo trabajo de campo con arquitectos de cárceles, presos y otros actores de los sistemas penales de Estados Unidos y Colombia, este trabajo analiza cómo la reforma fue preparada en el terreno, arrojando luces sobre los intereses y las expectativas parcialmente divergentes de ambos gobiernos en el contexto neocolonial del Plan Colombia. Mostramos cómo, por una parte, la reforma tuvo un éxito parcial en la militarización de la vida carcelaria y en la desurbanización del sistema de prisiones, aislando espacialmente a los presos de su entorno social y familiar. Por otra parte, mostramos que la reforma eventualmente falló, por razones políticas e institucionales, al no lograr su objetivo declarado de modernizar las prisiones colombianas.Desde una perspectiva más teórica y basados en literatura reciente sobre la movilidad de las políticas y las formas arquitectónicas,3 el trabajo argumenta que la introducción de las prisiones supermax en Colombia es un llamativo caso en el que una política móvil y un tipo arquitectónico ambulante coinciden y se complementan mutuamente. También sugiere que para mejorar nuestro entendimiento de cómo el espacio es producido en la arena global, se deben considerar más sistemáticamente las interconexiones entre los circuitos de la política y las movilidades de la arquitectura.

Beyond the western crime drop: Violence, property offences, and the state in Turkey 1990–2016

Temporal changes in crime have long attracted scholarly attention. Much research on the recent trajectory of crime rates is dominated by the crime drop thesis in western democracies, with only little input from other societal contexts. The present work offers the first explorative inquiry into a subset violent and property crimes in Turkey over the last quarter-century. Data collected from judicial records, police reports on offences, prison and causes of death statistics are read primarily through the lens of state response to crime, with the notable exception of homicide. Results reveal partial evidence for a declining behavioral trend in the case of homicide – a finding that furthers current debates about the crime drop thesis. Rather mixed evidence is documented for robbery, theft and assault, but a common marked increase in the number of offences, suspects and convicts received into prison. Implications are discussed by reference to the emergent punitive turn in the Turkish penal regime, and enhanced police capacity to control crime.

POLICING, INCARCERATION, RACE, AND PROTEST AFTER FERGUSON

Abstract This article asks whether mass incarceration is a system and whether harsh treatment in that system is motivated by explicit and implicit racial bias. To describe this system, I adopt an alternative term, “penal regime,” which has the benefit of permitting a more inclusive and systematic account of law enforcement, courts, and corrections. My analysis is based on the important fact that US penal regimes are democratic and, to be understood in context, must be tied to American punitive and racial attitudes as expressed through the discretion of elected officeholders. I find that a racial empathy gap explains some important problems with criminal justice, and I argue that protest speech about police conduct may cross the empathy gap in a manner that deserves significant theoretical attention and practical support.

New Punitiveness on the Move: How the US Prison Model and Penal Policy Arrived in Colombia

AbstractWithin the neocolonial context of ‘Plan Colombia’ in the early 2000s, agents of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) took up position in the heart of the Colombian penitentiary administration to lead a reform based on the United States’ ultra-punitive penal regime. This paper analyses how the reform was set up on the ground, shedding light on the partially divergent expectations of the two governments. Drawing on recent literature on the mobility of policies and built forms, the paper argues that the introduction of US-inspired prisons in Colombia is a striking case where a mobile policy and a travelling architectural type coincided and complemented each other.