State Punishment Research Articles

The production of bedspace: prison privatization and abstract space

Abstract. This paper reports results from a critical discourse analysis of Annual Reports for Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group, Inc. (formerly Wackenhut), the two largest private prison firms currently operating in the United States. Considerable geographic scholarship has analyzed privatization, on the one hand, and imprisonment, on the other. However, geographers have paid less attention to explicitly for-profit imprisonment. In particular, geographers have overlooked or ignored the emergence of bedspace, a concept that now pervades penal discourse. Rather than continuing conventional public-versus-private prison debates, this paper identifies bedspace as the discursive common ground upon which private prison industrialists and the state actually converge. Applying Henri Lefebvre's theorization of "abstract space" to imprisonment, I argue that the discursive creation of bedspace produces a nondialectical representation of space that is fully commodified and bureaucratized. However, the paper concludes that this nondialectical space problematically severs the immanently human geography of imprisonment, which is a "messy" space that is always lived and experienced in particular ways, from its inanimate architectural infrastructure (i.e., beds). Beyond the potential ethical and empirical challenges raised by the production of such an abstract space, bedspace signals the discursive and material convergence of state punishment with capital flows that build and often move beyond prison boundaries while obscuring violent geographies.

Punishing States and the Spectre of Guilt by Association

Proponents of punishing states often claim that such punishment would not distribute to members of the state, and so it would not subject innocent citizens – those who did not participate in the crimes, or dissented, or even were among the victims – to guilt by association. This essay examines three features of state punishment that might be said not to distribute to citizens: it is burdensome, it is intentionally so, and it expresses social condemnation. Ultimately, I contend that when a state is punished, the burdens do distribute to citizens as intended, condemning burdens – that is, as punishment. Thus the nondistribution of punishment thesis fails as a response to the guilt-by-association objection.

Introduction: Ethics, Theology and the Contemporary Conundrum of State Punishment

Introduction: Ethics, Theology and the Contemporary Conundrum of State Punishment

Beyond Mass Incarceration?

Beyond Mass Incarceration?

"I's Natural Homicidal": Violence and Silence in Execution Poems

The inescapable presence of violence throughout George Elliott Clarke's oeuvre proposes that the silence imposed on the black community is only overcome through violence. The inevitability of violence is particularly evident in his collection Execution Poems. This collection recounts the “Tragedy of George and Rue,” cousins of his mother who killed and robbed a white taxi driver and were then the last people hanged as state punishment in New Brunswick. Through protagonists’ rationalizations for the crime and with their familial connection to him, Clarke collapses time and justice to place the black man outside of history and within violence. Silence then becomes a visceral experience for black males. Clarke suggests that Western society enacts its silencing of the black male through violence, thus combating this enforced voicelessness becomes a matter of violent vengeance: the only expression impossible to ignore. In a reflection of a peculiar position of blackness in Canada, the inescapability of violence for the black man who wishes to express his subjective being is grounded in a Western history of violence as retribution, which culminates in the diasporic struggle for black equality as enacted by black Americans. Clarke uses intertextual references to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and the iconic slave rebellion leader Nat Turner to locate his characters in a greater mythology of the battle for self-actualization, for a voice. Clarke himself is implicated in this violence, despite his recuperative ability to write poetry. The violence which drives the aptly titled Execution Poems reflects his belief that black literature still functions as a transgression for the wider community. Clarke posits the escape from this silence as an inherent act of violence.

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction

A Taste for Murder: The Curious Case of Crime Fiction

Communication, Punishment, and Virtue

AbstractThis essay suggests that while Antony Duff's model of criminal punishment as secular penance is pregnant with possibilities for theological reception and reflection, it proceeds by way of a number of separations that are brought into question by the penitential traditions of Christianity. The first three of these—between justice and mercy, censure and invitation, and state and victim, constrain the true communicative character of his account of punishment. The second set of oppositions, between sacrament and virtue, interior character and external action, and formal and moral reconciliation, subject the model of state punishment as secular penance to problematic liberal and libertarian constraints. A postsecular analogy, outlining a theology of the invitational nature of divine judgment, and drawing on Thomas Aquinas's account of penance as both sacrament and virtue, is proposed.

No way out: crime, punishment and the capitalization of power

The United States is often hailed as the world’s largest ‘free market’. But this ‘free market’ is also the world’s largest penal colony. It holds over seven million adults – roughly 5 % of the labour force – in jail, in prison, on parole and on probation. Is this an anomaly, or does the ‘free market’ require massive state punishment? Why did the correctional population start to rise in the 1980s, together with the onset of neoliberalism? How is this increase related to the upward redistribution of income and the capitalization of power? Can soaring incarceration sustain the unprecedented power of dominant capital, or is there a reversal in the offing? The paper examines these questions by juxtaposing the ‘Rusche thesis’ with the notion of capitalism as a mode of power. The empirical analysis raises an enigma: it suggests that the Rusche thesis holds under the normal circumstances of ‘business as usual’, but breaks down during periods of systemic crisis. During the systemic crises of the 1930s and the 2000s, unemployment increased sharply, but crime and the severity of punishment, instead of rising, dropped perceptibly.

The rule of law, security-development and penal aid: The case of detention in Haiti

The combination of flawed penality, crushing poverty and a natural disaster that devastated Haiti’s already fragile criminal justice infrastructure made the country a fitting candidate for a new kind of international aid effort, which we call penal aid. This international aid effort uses rule of law theories and practices to develop credible criminal justice institutions and reform penal practice throughout the world. According to rule of law measures, detention indicates flawed justice and a weak state, whereas trial and transformative punishment promotes global security and poverty reduction. The rule of law is a method for punishing better, a mechanism of international aid, a measure of global security and a means for the recognition of law-abiding states. Rule of law reconstruction is about international state-crafting and remaking Haiti in the image of a global penal state.

Queer Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State: Interrogating Sexual Investments in Punishment

This article examines the changing relationship between sexual politics and the carceral state. While sexual and gender nonconforming people have been historically punished for transgressing social norms, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in Europe and North America have begun to invest in the state punishment of others. Whether supporting hate crime legislation, calling for more police in gentrifying neighborhoods, or participating in police recruitment campaigns, organisations that formerly fought against criminalisation trends now actively support expanding forms of state violence and punishment. Focussing on examples from the British and US context—and drawing from the concept of ‘queer necropolitics’—this article considers how the carceral state has shifted from a key target of queer protest to celebrated guardian of sexual citizenship. Arguing that this process constitutes more than just another story of queer assimilation and co-optation, the article suggests this shift reflects a deeper reconfiguration of sexual politics, where citizenship norms and practices are increasingly infused with a chillingly punitive and deathly logic.

Review of Sarah Conly, <i>Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism</i>

This is a review of Conly's book Against Autonomy. The topic of state paternalism has gained increasing attention with the increased efforts by states and municipalities to regulate the consumption of unhealthy foods. The philosophical community owes Mayor Bloomberg a debt for his one-man efforts to regulate the addition of trans-fats in New York City restaurants, to post calorie information and his latest -- recently overturned -- ban on the sale of soda in larger than 16 oz servings. I haven't done the search but my guess is that John Stuart Mill has not been quoted so often since the Wolfenden report recommended homosexuality be legalised.The subject of paternalism is not only of interest to applied philosophers for it deals with theoretical subjects such as the nature of autonomy and liberty, the good of persons, prudence, self-knowledge, the principles governing the use of coercion, the justification of state punishment, and the limits of what we may consent to.

‘Penal populism’ and penological change in contemporary Japan

This article examines whether the concept of penal populism can be useful in understanding contemporary developments in Japanese criminal justice. In addressing this issue it is suggested that we need to draw a clear distinction between different conceptions of penal populism and, in particular, we should avoid equating penal populism with intensification of the severity of state punishment. A discussion of the Japanese experience highlights the importance of focusing on populism as a process by which new voices emerge and influence criminal justice policy as a result of an unmet demand for justice and security. This perception of a lack of security and justice is a global phenomenon that, nevertheless, expresses itself in distinctive, culturally specific ways. Although the extent of this shift should not be exaggerated, at least in a Japanese context, penal populism has contributed to an opening up of criminal justice and a disaggregation of state sovereignty.

Criminalizing the State

In this article, I ask whether the state, as opposed to its individual members, can intelligibly and legitimately be criminalized, with a focus on the possibility of its domestic criminalization. I proceed by identifying what I take to be the core objections to such criminalization, and then investigate ways in which they can be challenged. First, I address the claim that the state is not a kind of entity that can intelligibly perpetrate domestic criminal wrongs. I argue against it by building upon an account of the modern state as a moral agent proper, capable of both culpable moral and legal wrongdoing. I then consider objections to the intelligibility and legitimacy of subjecting states to domestic criminal processes, which primarily find their source in the assumption that such subjection would necessarily involve the state prosecuting, judging, and punishing itself. I argue that whether this (questionable) assumption is sound or not, it does not create the kinds of unsolvable quandaries its exponents think it does. I then move on to reject the distinct, yet related, objection that, at least in aspiring liberal jurisdictions, treating the state as a criminal objectionably involves extending to it various substantive and procedural guarantees that, given its nature and raison d’etre, it should not have. Finally, I discuss three central objections to punishing the state. First, that organizations like states do not have the phenomenal consciousness required to suffer punishment. Second, that the constant possibility of dispersion of state punishment amongst individual members stands in the way of its justification. Lastly, that whatever justification there may be for making things harder for the state in response to its culpable wrongdoing, such treatment need not be understood as punishment. While partially conceding the strength of these objections, I strive to loosen their grip in ways that show that justified punishment of the state, meaningfully understood as such, remains a distinct possibility. I conclude by contrasting supposed alternatives to the criminalization of states, and by contending that my analysis leaves us with enough to keep the possibility of state criminalization on the table as a justifiable response to state wrongdoing.

Criminal Justice in America: Constitutionalization Without Foundation

Criminal justice in America lacks foundation in three senses: historical, political, and substantive. The U.S. Constitution will continue to fail to place meaningful limits on American penal power without a radical reconceptualization of the challenge of state punishment in a modern democracy, i.e., ultimately as a fundamental question of political legitimacy. This paper explores the prospects for a constitutionalization of American criminal law, with some comparative glances at developments in other countries, notably Canada and Germany.

Feminism, Rape and the Search for Justice

Justice for rape victims has become synonymous with punitive state punishment. Taking rape seriously is equated with increasing convictions and prison sentences and consequently most feminist activism has been focused on reforming the conventional criminal justice system to secure these aims. While important reforms have been made, justice continues to elude many victims. Many feel re-victimized by a system which marginalizes their interests and denies them a voice. Restorative justice offers the potential to secure justice for rape victims, but feminist resistance has resulted in few programmes tackling such crimes. In After the Crime, Susan Miller evidences the positive outcomes of a restorative justice programme tackling serious offences including rape and recommends their development. However, her vision is ultimately limited by her recommendation of only post-conviction restorative processes and the implicit endorsement of the conventional criminal justice system. I argue that feminist strategy and activism must rethink its approach to what constitutes justice for rape victims, going beyond punitive state outcomes to encompass broader notions of justice, including an expansive approach to restorative justice.

Histories of Everyday Violence In British India

AbstractHistorians of British India and colonial rule more generally have inevitably had to approach the difficult subject of colonial violence. Often, however, historians have explored colonial violence by focusing on exceptional and spectacular moments. Recently two books have been published that shift the terms of the historiography by examining colonial violence as an aspect of everyday life in British India: Taylor Sherman’s State Violence and Punishment in India and Elizabeth Kolsky’s Colonial Justice in British India. This article examines the limitations of the established literature’s characterisation of colonial violence, before comparing the work of Kolsky and Sherman. Both of their studies demonstrate that physical violence was an intrinsic and everyday aspect of the colonial encounter in India, and they lay the groundwork for further studies of everyday colonial violence.

The Problem of the Body in Modern State Punishment

Modern, liberal democratic states and civilized, squeamish moderns would rather avoid the sights, sounds, and smells of the body in pain. So we eliminate them where that is possible and we hide them behind the scenes when it is not. The body thus creates a problem for modern liberal state punishment, especially in the United States, where nonphysical penalties, such as fines, restitution, or compensation, are notably underdeveloped and where mass imprisonment and capital punishment dominate the penal scene. The problem is that the human body is the unavoidable object of state punishment even when it is avowedly not punishment's target. It is this problem of the body, and the state's handling of it, that I would like to explore.

Classic text revisited: Slavery and the Penal System

In Slavery and the Penal System Thorsten Sellin set out to prove Gustav Radbruch's 1938 thesis that the modern ‘criminal law bears the traits of its origin in slave punishments’ (cited at p. viii). Within a relatively short book Sellin charts the history of state punishment from Ancient Greece to mid-twentieth century America, a review that manages to take in the penal systems of the Roman Empire and the European Middle Ages, as well as the development of Galley Slavery, Houses of Correction, the Bagnes, penal colonies in Siberia and Australia, and the US convict lease system. It is a massively ambitious work highlighting continuities in punishment from antiquity to modernity that show how key characteristics of penal systems have remained unchanged from their origins in slave punishments.

Law, Violence and Penal Reform: State Responses to Crime and Disorder in Colonial Malawi, c.1900–1959

The historical analysis of state punishment in colonial Africa has been dominated by studies of individual arenas and practices of judicial authority: prisons, detention, flogging, and the death penalty. This article on Malawi adopts a more holistic approach, focusing on ‘penality’ – the broader nexus of criminal justice infrastructure and discourses – rather than ‘punishment’, to explore the shifts and tensions within colonial judicial and penal policy. Drawing on sociological theories of punishment from Durkheim to Foucault, the development and functioning of such penality is analysed, beginning with a study of state concerns about African criminality, colonial courts and justice, before moving to an analysis of the forms and functions of state punishments. The article then explores state responses to large-scale disorder and rebellion in 1915 and 1959, and highlights how the experiences of colonial justice shaped Malawi's struggle towards independence.

State Violence and Punishment in India. By Taylor C. Sherman. (Royal Asiatic Society Series). pp. xi, 246. Abingdon, Routledge, 2010.

State Violence and Punishment in India. By Taylor C. Sherman. (Royal Asiatic Society Series). pp. xi, 246. Abingdon, Routledge, 2010.