Theoretical Criminology 16(2)

Theoretical Criminology, 2012: Volume 16, Issue 2

Special Issue: Theorizing Punishment’s Boundaries

Theorizing punishment’s boundaries: An introduction
Kelly Hannah-Moffat and Mona Lynch

Articles

Subjectivity and identity in detention: Punishment and society in a global age
Mary Bosworth

This article draws on ethnographic research that I conducted in five British immigration removal centres from November 2009 to June 2011, and considers the challenges these institutions pose to our understanding of penal power. These centres contain a complex mix of foreign national citizens including former and current asylum seekers, those without visas, visa over-stayers and post-sentence foreign national prisoners. For many non-British offenders, a period of confinement in an immigration detention centre is now, effectively, part of their punishment. What are the implications of this dual confinement and (how) can we understand it within the intellectual framework of punishment and society?

Digesting men? Ethnicity, gender and food: Perspectives from a ‘prison ethnography’
Rod Earle and Coretta Phillips

Drawing from an ethnographic study of men’s social relations in an English prison, this article explores the potential of attending closely to men’s practice for the light it may shed on the boundaries of punishment. Interviews with prisoners and fieldwork experiences reveal something of the way prison acts on an ethnically diverse group of men. Focusing on the way men use cooking facilities on the prison’s wings, the article explores the way men make food for themselves and each other and thereby occupy prison space with unconventional (and conventional) gender practice. Using intersectional perspectives the article shows how practices of racialization, racism, conviviality and coercion are woven into the fabric of prison life. These quotidian experiences are juxtaposed against the question of how prisons and prisoner populations represent a spectrum of violence in which gender dynamics remain under-examined. By providing glimpses of men’s lives in an English prison to reveal aspects of the ways masculinities and ethnicities interact to shape a penal regime the authors offer some resources for, and perspective on, the theorization of punishment’s boundaries.

The purloined prisoner
Sora Y. Han

This article argues, in the form of demonstration, for the necessity of disciplinary openness in punishment and society scholarship. Theories about the political culture of punishment and sentimental accounts of the toll mass incarceration takes on the personal lives of millions are insufficient for developing a critical knowledge of the relationship between race, law and gender. Approaching the object of the letter unfettered by traditional disciplinary methods, the article traces the centrality of the prisoner’s letter in the lifeworld of punishment. The letter is analyzed as both itself a paper-trail, and the subject of various other forms of paper-trails, including prisoners’ First Amendment rights jurisprudence, official political rhetoric, and cinematic production.

Theorizing the role of the ‘war on drugs’ in US punishment
Mona Lynch

Numerous scholars have described how the ‘war on drugs’ has played a central role in US penal change, especially its racialized impact. Yet there remain aspects of this ‘war’ that are under-explored in punishment and society scholarship. This article delineates five distinct modes by which the contemporary regulation of drugs in the USA speaks to penal change, and in so doing suggests that its reach is much more diffuse, insidious, and variegated than suggested by prevailing conceptualizations of the drug war–punishment relationship.

Shifting and targeted forms of penal governance: Bail, punishment and specialized courts
Kelly Hannah-Moffat and Paula Maurutto

Studies of punishment have focused predominantly on emerging forms of penal governance, and the revival of punitive forms of punishment. Although this research helps to raise concerns about forms of penal excess and neoliberal penal patterns, it does not clarify how these strategies co-exist with, modify and are re-assembled with older and sometimes seemingly contradictory penal strategies. Our article examines how practices used by Canadian specialized courts are changing the parameters of punishment and thereby challenging the prevailing theories about neo-liberal punishment. Specialized courts are motivated by therapeutic and preventative goals, and they rely on relationships with local community groups to create a new range of interactions with the court and the offender. Our analysis of how bail strategies and techniques are altered in specialized courts provides a valuable context in which to analyse emerging theoretical issues associated with the management of risk, community/court interactions, the connotation of ‘therapeutic justice’ and the subtext of punishment and penal change.

Mapping the shadow carceral state: Toward an institutionally capacious approach to punishment
Katherine Beckett and Naomi Murakawa

The expansion of the US carceral state has been accompanied by the emergence of what we call the ‘shadow carceral state’. Operating beyond the confines of criminal law and justice institutions, the shadow carceral state expands penal power through institutional annexation and legal hybridity, including: (1) increased civil and administrative pathways to incarceration; (2) the creation of civil ‘alternatives’ to invalidated criminal statutes; and (3) the incorporation of criminal law into administrative legal processes in ways that enhance state carceral power. Although legal doctrine deems civil and administration sanctions to be ‘not-punishment’, we call for a broad understanding of penal power and the carceral state.

Comment

Analyzing punishment: Scope and scale
Mariana Valverde