Punitive Turn Research Articles

Crimscapes. Kulturanthropologische Perspektiven auf Politiken der Kriminalisierung

At the end of the last century, criminalisation has become a globally accepted mode of governing social problems. Using two policy fields, sea rescue in the Mediterranean and combating hate speech on the internet, we propose a cultural anthropological perspective on the punitive turn and the politics of criminalisation. Using the concept of crimscapes, we describe the dynamic landscapes that unfold around criminal justice interventions, in which new figures of threat and vulnerability emerge, moral orders are restructured and new constellations of actors and practices are brought to the fore. By relating different policy fields, understood as local articulations of global dynamics of criminalisation, the concept also points to the ambivalences of this policy, which can also have an enabling and protective effect alongside exclusionary, stratifying and punitive effects. This underlines the need for critical cultural anthropological research that highlights the ambivalences and contradictions of criminalisation and contributes to an informed critique that is not based solely on normative evaluations, but can also draw attention to unintended effects and contradictions in political debates.

From “wait ‘em out” to push them out: Teachers’ reflections on passive and active modes of racialized school exclusion

Much has been written about the school-to-prison pipeline and the larger punitive turn within schools in the United States. This research has documented disturbing racialized disparities and disproportionate impacts on youth who are diagnosed with disabilities. While this scholarship has highlighted how marginalized youth encounter exclusionary forms of punishment, what is often missing is an understanding of how practitioners experience the policies, practices, and consequences of the school-prison nexus. In this study, the unique career experiences of individuals who worked as both teachers and juvenile justice practitioners in the Southwestern United States are analyzed. The reflections of practitioners who worked at both ends of the school-to-prison pipeline uncover a range of exclusionary practices in schools that is broader than what current conceptions suggest. This study adds important nuance to the literature by revealing how some educators facilitate school dropout through passive modes of racialized exclusion in addition to those that actively push out minoritized students. The article outlines three distinct categories of racialized school exclusion, examines their impacts, discusses how subtle modes of exclusion may relate to more overt punishments, and explores the broader context under which this range of “passive” to “active” modes of educational exclusion develops and operates.

Disciplinary welfare and the punitive turn in criminal justice: Parallel trends or communicating vessels?

When it comes to the relationship between social policy and penal policy, existing scholarship often focuses on the penal–welfare tradeoff, according to which countries with large and generous welfare states tend to have lower incarceration rates and less harsh treatment of offenders. We know much less about the relationship between the punitive turn in criminal justice and the use of discipline within social policy. Has there been a parallel trend of law-and-order policies and stricter benefit conditionality, a kind of ‘criminalization’ of welfare beneficiaries, as critical scholarship suggests? We test this idea for the first time with quantitative data, using public spending on public order and safety and unemployment benefit conditionality data for 18 rich democracies between 1990 and 2012, that is, the period when a punitive turn as well as the rise of activation and workfare is said to have taken place. Contrary to the critical literature, we do not find evidence of parallel trends toward more discipline in both areas, but rather a negative relationship of ‘communicating vessels’, where a greater use of disciplinary tools in social policy is associated with stagnating or even shrinking spending on police and prisons. Moreover, this pattern tends to emerge under conditions of higher welfare state generosity. These findings have important implications about the role of state ‘discipline’ in contemporary policymaking.

Børns møde med det danske straffesystem

AbstractOne of the shared features of the Nordic countries’ approach towards children in conflict with the law is that there is no distinct criminal justice system for children. Children in conflict with the law are treated within the same system as adults, albeit with specific regulations and sanctions designed specifically for them. The fact that children are handled within the same system as adults raises the question of whether and how the ‘punitive turn, Nordic style’, which, according to criminological scholars, emerged during the 1990s, has influenced the treatment and punishment of children within the criminal justice system. This question is particularly relevant as children are protected by specific human rights provisions, most notably the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Based on a descriptive statistical data analysis, this article explores whether a change in the use of sanctions towards children in the Danish criminal justice system can be observed in the period from 1980 to 2020. The findings are related to a discussion about children’s entitlement to special protection under the CRC.

Border Abolitionism

AbstractThis article proposes border abolitionism as both a political and an analytical framework for deepening critiques of border, migration, and asylum regimes worldwide. Abolitionist perspectives have been associated primarily with questions of criminalization and mass incarceration and thus articulated as a project of prison abolitionism. Importantly, migrant detention and deportation comprise another major pillar of the entrenchment of the carceral state. While critical migration scholarship and No Borders activism have been confronted with the increasing criminalization of immigration and a more general punitive turn in immigration enforcement, engagements with carceral abolitionist perspectives have largely been quite recent. Seemingly disparate struggles increasingly bring into sharper focus a multifaceted critique of what we call the confinement continuum. Not reducible to detention in migrant jails, the confinement continuum is the nexus of heterogeneous modes of confinement that migrants experience, from the fundamental condition of being stuck or trapped in a border zone to the consequent forms of border violence, as well as other forms of coercion that characterize the more general racialized sociopolitical condition of migrant subordination far beyond any physical border site and encompassing the full spectrum of migrant everyday life. Thus, migrants’ and refugees’ struggles and demands exceed a narrow focus on borders alone and frequently enact an incipient politics of abolitionism: migrants and refugees challenge the interlocking bordering mechanisms affecting them while always also repudiating and resisting the biopolitical constrictions that confine them to degraded conditions of life and articulating broader claims for social justice and visions of new and better ways of life.

The politics of sanctioning the poor through welfare conditionality: Revealing causal mechanisms in Uruguay

AbstractWhat explains the ‘punitive turn’ toward more stringent conditionalities in welfare policies? Answering this question is crucial in a region such as Latin America, where cash transfers have proven politically consequential for incumbents. Our argument emphasises the role of electoral competition in shaping a government's decision to adopt a more punitive approach to conditionalities. We use process tracing to test our argument in a case involving a change from relatively lax to more stringent conditionalities in Uruguay's system of conditional cash transfers (CCTs). We also test other explanations from the welfare conditionality and the welfare and policy change literatures. We find that, as public opinion increasingly turned against state assistance to the poor, the opposition politicised the issue of non‐enforcement of conditionalities. This led Uruguay's left‐wing government to shift to more stringent enforcement of conditionalities to avoid alienating members of its electoral base who were not CCT beneficiaries. Our findings contribute to the current debate on why and how governments choose to sanction welfare recipients as a response to political dynamics, both in developed and developing regions.

Reconsidering Penal Stability in Canada Through a New Sentencing Severity Index

Changes to criminal sentencing practices are often multifaceted and complex to interpret. This article proposes the development of a new sentencing severity index which simultaneously considers the type of punishment mobilized as well as the scale of that punishment. It does so in the context of important reforms to Canadian sentencing, examining the possibility of a punitive turn in Canadian criminal justice through this new index. Data were drawn from Canadian adult criminal courts collected through Statistics Canada’s Integrated Criminal Court Survey between 2005/2006 and 2016/2017. The analysis is based on instances where either custody or probation were the primary sentence of a case. We show that the underlying makeup of Canadian sentencing has changed over time. Custodial sentences are more frequent, but shorter, while probation sentences are fewer, but longer overall. However, in combining these dimensions (frequency and length), the index suggests that overall sentencing severity remained generally stable. Nevertheless, considerable changes across offence type and jurisdictions were observed. The article points to the importance of nuancing the assessment of penal practices with multiple parameters to better understand penal reform and transformation. The new index provides a tool which helps to do so.

From Segregation to Suspension: The Solidification of the Contemporary School-Prison Nexus in Boston, 1963-1985

Current scholarship emphasizes the adoption of “zero-tolerance” policies as the cause of the punitive turn in school discipline. The focus on “zero tolerance,” however, has obscured how and for what offenses schools most commonly issue suspensions, namely non-attendance and “classroom disruption.” Using Boston as case study, this article situates the formation of the contemporary school-prison nexus in the decades following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and argues the preservation of educator discretion shaped its structure. Beginning in the decade prior to Boston’s court-ordered desegregation, it analyzes how white Bostonians racialized conceptions of safety and crime to sustain segregation and how that rhetoric shaped the city’s preparations for and implementation of desegregation. It examines how police conduct combined with educators’ disciplining power repurposed the racist logics undergirding segregation to make schools active institutions in spurring carceral expansion and later mass incarceration.

The Racial Geography of U.S. Public Opinion at the Punitive Turn

The Racial Geography of U.S. Public Opinion at the Punitive Turn

Public health approaches to youth involvement in violence: Examining stakeholders’ perspectives in Australia and the United Kingdom

Australia and the United Kingdom (UK) have each witnessed a ‘punitive turn’ in relation to youth justice responses. A lack of contextualisation, such as the impact of trauma and adverse childhood experiences on young people, is often overlooked by media outlets, governments and policymakers, in favour of individual pathologisation of young people. In direct contrast to these punitive responses, the public health approach (PHA) has emerged particularly in the UK; and it identifies experiences of trauma as one of the leading causes of violence within communities. Drawing on the perspectives of those working with children and young people, we critically explore whether the implementation of a PHA could be an effective approach to addressing the underlying causes of young people's involvement in violence. The paper focuses specifically on a case study of the youth justice system in Victoria, Australia and draws on domestic and global perspectives of key stakeholders, to consider whether the introduction of a PHA in Victoria, Australia, would position young people's diverse needs at the centre of policy change in youth justice and better outcomes for young people and communities.

Striking the Balance? On the Relationship Between Public and Private Security in Western Countries

AbstractMuch writing in comparative criminology on the punitive turn and developments in Western penal states has focused on how the state provides security to its citizens. However, the number of private guards exceeds those of police officers in many European countries, and private security services carry out numerous law and order tasks. Our paper links the literature on private security with comparative penal policy studies. It explores how the cross-national variance in the relative importance of public and private security—which we term ‘the security balance’ – can be explained by quantitatively analysing data on public and private security in 23 European countries from 2009 to 2018. We contribute to the literature on crime and politics by highlighting the significant role of private security in today’s balance of security provision.

Brazilian prisons in times of mass incarceration: Ambivalent transformations

AbstractMost of the scholarship on the ‘punitive turn’ has claimed that there have been two main trends in punishment since the 1970s: the rise of incarceration rates (quantitative dimension) and the worsening of prison conditions (qualitative dimension). Scholars argue that, in parallel with the rise of mass incarceration, there has been a fall of the rehabilitative ideal. In this view, prisons in core countries have basically operated as a warehouse, working towards neutralisation and incapacitation. Both trends are also viewed as reflecting a global convergence of penal policies. The analysis of the Brazilian case challenges this supposed universality. Drawing on official prison data, reports from non‐governmental organisations, and secondary data, I argue that mass incarceration has not been accompanied by the same qualitative changes to prisons in ‘Western countries’ and Brazil. First, features of the so‐called warehouse prison, such as low levels of prison activities, have always been present in Brazilian prisons, and are not an effect of mass incarceration. Furthermore, the consequences of mass incarceration in Brazilian prisons have, in fact, been ambivalent and, in some cases, may have alleviated inmates’ suffering, rather than intensifying experiences of confinement. Finally, instead of neutralising and controlling criminals, Brazilian prisons under mass incarceration have contributed to the emergence, empowerment, recruitment and organisation of gangs, whose powers now transcend the physical barriers of prison walls.

From Punitiveness to Authoritarianism: Examining the Sources of Public Support for the Use of State Violence in Latin America

Prior work on the sources of public punitiveness and the expansion of the penal state emphasizes the importance of various anxieties associated with late modernity. Specifically, theorists posit that the expansion of neoliberal policies has been attended by animus against marginalized social groups, anxieties about economic and social conditions, and fear of crime—public sentiments which have legitimized the expansion of a penal apparatus that has undermined democracy. In the present study, we extend the traditional focus on punitiveness to include support for authoritarian forms of state power. Using of cross-national survey data (n = 13,071) from 16 Latin American countries collected during a period of democratization and the region’s “punitive turn,” we find that the social sensibilities from late modernity also drive support for autocratic forms of government. Further, our analyses reveal an indirect association between these attitudes and authoritarianism that operates through punitiveness. Our findings also suggest a “democracy paradox.” Examining country-level moderating factors, we find that these associations are more salient in countries with higher levels of democratization and social inclusion, which are thus particularly vulnerable to the democracy-eroding pressures of “governing through crime.” We discuss the implications of these findings for Latin America as well as democracies in the Global North.

The Political Development of Schools as Cause and Solution to Delinquency

AbstractThis article offers a comprehensive history of the development of the federal role in education and juvenile justice policy from the 1950s to the 1970s. We argue that the issues of juvenile delinquency and education became linked during this period and policies that were enacted reflected the belief that education was a solution to delinquency. In the mid-twentieth century, a broader variety of approaches to antidelinquency, such as public job creation for youth, began to fall out of favor and education became elevated as the primary policy area for addressing delinquency outside the criminal justice system. Policy makers frequently justified federal involvement in education by arguing that schools were central to antidelinquency efforts. Drawing educational institutions into the fight against delinquency made schools susceptible to the punitive turn in crime policy. Ultimately, these developments have introduced punitive policies into schools and pushed antidelinquency efforts away from broader structural reforms.

Gideon's Cold War Origins

Gideon's Cold War Origins Amanda Bell Hughett (bio) Sara Mayeux, Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. vii- 271 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $26.95 In 1963, the Supreme Court in Gideon v. Wainwright declared in a rare unanimous decision that criminal defendants who cannot afford to hire a lawyer have a right under the Sixth Amendment to an attorney paid for by the state. It was an "obvious truth," Justice Hugo Black wrote for the Court, "that in our adversary system of criminal justice any person haled into court who is too poor to hire a lawyer cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him."1 At the time, Gideon was widely applauded by the press, public, and leaders of the legal profession. The following year, in 1964, Anthony Lewis, a reporter for the New York Times, canonized Gideon as one of the most revered court decisions with the publication of his book-length account of the case, Gideon's Trumpet. Lewis depicted Gideon as a crucial step toward realizing the Constitution's promise of equal justice under the law. Today, however, articles bemoaning the struggles of overworked and underpaid public defenders—who now represent eighty percent of the accused—regularly appear in the news.2 Public defenders, it seems, are no match for better-resourced prosecutors. Defenders manage hundreds of cases, making it impossible for them to dedicate sufficient time to each of their clients. In a rush, they often encourage clients to waive their right to a trial and accept guilty pleas in hopes of getting the lightest possible sentence, even when clients maintain their innocence or claim police misconduct. As sociologist Matthew Clair revealed in his recent ethnographic study Privilege and Punishment (2020), public defenders' inability to meet their clients' needs shapes the attorney-client relationship, leading clients to see their attorneys as adversaries rather than advocates. To them, public defenders seem like another cog in the machinery of mass incarceration. What happened? What accounts for the gap between Gideon's promise and current practice? [End Page 96] Sara Mayeux's Free Justice (2020) answers these questions by illuminating the ideological terrain that gave rise to the idea of public defense. At the center of her story are elite lawyers who, she shows, played an outsized role in shaping the nation's approach to indigent defense. These men, educated at prestigious law schools and employed at corporate firms, occupied the broad liberal middle of twentieth century politics. They took it upon themselves to speak as the voice of the legal profession through local and national bar associations. Mayeux argues that it was their "deceptively partial" embrace of public defenders during the mid-twentieth century that created many of the conditions that continue to plague contemporary defenders' offices (p. 16). While popular accounts tend to depict Gideon's promise as later betrayed by conservative judges and tough-on-crime politicians, Mayeux demonstrates that today's problems were baked in from the beginning. They are the result of choices made by some of Gideon's most influential champions: members of the legal profession. Free Justice is first and foremost a cultural history of the legal establishment, its values, and its shifting conception of lawyers' role in a liberal democracy. But it also speaks, albeit indirectly, to the body of scholarship concerning liberals' role in the construction of today's punitive criminal justice practices. Recent works on the carceral state—most notably William J. Stuntz's The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (2011), Naomi Murakawa's The First Civil Right (2014), Elizabeth Kai Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (2016), and Max Felker-Kantor's Policing Los Angeles (2018)—make clear that the post-1960s punitive turn was a bipartisan project. Not only did liberals seek to outmatch conservatives by proposing "tough" legislation of their own, but their focus on proceduralism and professionalization helped legitimize and further entrench the criminal justice system's race and class inequalities. By making the system more rights-based and rule-bound than it had been in the past, liberal...

‘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.

Michael S. Sherry, The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War

Michael S. Sherry, <i>The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War</i>

Criminology in Perspective: An Analysis of Trends in Normative Expectations, Research Orientations, and Policy in Recent Decades

The field of criminology has experienced rapid growth in the last three decades. During this time the field has become institutionally independent, but at the same time, the impact of criminological research on policy has been declining in the face of a populist punitive turn. These developments call for a reflexive introspective account of the state of the discipline. Using qualitative methods, we analyse the Presidential Addresses given at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) over 30 years. This analysis yields factors that pertain to normative questions, research orientations, and policy that speak to the state of the field today. We assess changes in the relative weights of these factors over time, corresponding to changes and historical developments in world affairs. In addition, we compare the ASC addresses to a limited number of recently published addresses given at the annual meetings of the European Society of Criminology. Our results critically expose trends and tensions in criminology, and point to a rise in the importance attributed to “big picture” analysis, with increasing attention to normative considerations and social context.

The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War. By Michael S. Sherry

<i>The Punitive Turn in American Life: How the United States Learned to Fight Crime Like a War</i>. By Michael S. Sherry

The Role of the ‘Cities for Change’ in Protecting the Rights of Irregular Migrants in Spain

Have the new municipalist pro-migrant policies succeeded in protecting the rights of irregular migrants? Cities in Spain have powers to design and implement services and programs aimed at the reception and integration of immigrants. Cities can also include those who are in vulnerable conditions, guaranteeing them access to healthcare, minimum income coverage or labour training, regardless of the immigration status. However, old municipal politics have been characterised by pragmatism, being mainly focused on regular immigrants. Besides, there has been a restrictive and punitive turn in immigration policy directly connected to the economic recession and austerity as of 2008. To explore what possibilities do cities have to expand and protect the rights of irregular immigrants, we analyse in this contribution the cases of Madrid and Barcelona for the years 2015–2019 when progressive municipalists fronts ruled the cities. Based on the textual analysis of policy documents and in-depth interviews with political parties, street-level bureaucrats and activists, we first examine the competencies that municipalities have in migration matters and mainstream approaches in Spain. Then we discuss the action of the new municipalism, focusing the analysis on four political measures that have been rebel and innovative in protecting irregular immigrants, namely, the proactive census, the prevention of irregularity, access to healthcare and changes in police protocols. These real experiences allow us to argue that cities can achieve changes in the way state control is enforced. However, the analysis also shows tensions between the political will and institutional constraints.