Why Prison?

Das Buch Why Prison (David Scott, ed., Cambridge Studies in Law and Society, Cambridge University Press 2013) enthält folgende Beiträge:

Foreword: on stemming the tide Thomas Mathiesen

1. Why prison? Posing the question David Scott
2. Prisons and social structure in late-capitalist societies Alessandro De Giorgi
3. The prison paradox in neoliberal Britain Emma Bell
4. Crafting the neoliberal state: workfare, prisonfare, and social insecurity Loïc Wacquant
5. Pleasure, punishment and the professional middle class Magnus Hörnqvist
6. Penal spectatorship and the culture of punishment Michelle Brown
7. Prison and the public sphere: toward a democratic theory of penal order Vanessa Barker
8. The iron cage of prison studies Mark Brown
9. The prison and national identity: citizenship, punishment and the sovereign state Emma Kaufman and Mary Bosworth
10. Punishing the detritus and the damned: penal and semi-penal institutions in Liverpool Vickie Cooper and Joe Sim
11. Why prison? Incarceration and the great recession Keally McBride
12. Ghosts of the past, present, and future of penal reform in the United States Marie Gottschalk
13. Schooling the carceral state: challenging the school to prison pipeline Erica Meiners
14. Why no prisons? Julia Oparah
15. Unequalled in pain David Scott.

Kapitel 7:

This chapter argues that the breakdown of American democracy partially accounts for the unprecedented rise in incarceration over the past thirty years. Americans by and large have retreated into the private sphere and eroded the quality and character of the public sphere. These dual processes have major implications for the rise of state coercion against marginalised social groups. By becoming detached from the public sphere, by being ‘alone together’ as Sherry Turkle (2011) explains it, Americans have become detached from a sense of mutual obligation and civic responsibility, instead experiencing social isolation and social polarisation, exacerbated by the growing economic crisis. This social reality has weakened the emotional and political support necessary to sustain inclusive public policies and instead has unleashed the corrosive powers of the state, particularly against those most vulnerable – the poor, the under-educated and racial and ethnic minorities.

At the same time, however, there has been a significant counter-movement to mass imprisonment: de-escalation and reintegration. By bucking the national trend, some American states have maintained relatively low imprisonment rates and have done so not by insulating public policy from public demands, but rather by engaging ordinary people in a more open and participatory democratic process – a process oriented toward public welfare rather than private self-interest. A more vibrant civic life can support mild penal sanctioning, contrary to conventional claims about punitive populism. A reinvigorated public sphere may provide a way out of such excessive and repressive crime control policies.

Kapitel 8: In the mill of academia it is within prison studies and penology that the ‘issue’ or ‘problem’ of imprisonment is addressed. That makes perfect sense in many respects. It promotes specialisation and expertise, it clarifies the demarcations between different academic specialities (such as psychiatry on the one hand, or population studies on the other) and it introduces a certain level of efficiency and predictability into universities’ academic endeavour.

Occasionally these separations are breached. This was the case, for example, with Bernard Harcourt’s (2006) analysis of aggregate institutionalisation figures in the USA since 1928. Penologists and penal theorists have tended to look only at imprisonment figures and thus have spoken in recent times of a new ‘hyper-incarceration’ phenomenon. Yet if incarceration (involuntary detention) is taken to include mental health detainees also, the run-up in prisoner numbers of the last twenty years or so – this so-called imprisonment boom, or ‘mass imprisonment’ – barely brings levels of aggregate incarceration back to the rates of the 1940s and 50s. Yet the singular focus on punishment and imprisonment continues.

Ironically, then, we might agree with Aldous Huxley’s (1936: 122) character Anthony in Eyeless in Gaza who, in defending completeness over single mindedness, observes: ‘That’s the trouble of all single minded activity; it costs you your liberty. You find yourself driven into a corner. You’re a prisoner.’ Is this, then, the final irony of prison studies and penology, that they came eventually to embody precisely that which they studied?

Kapitel 9:

Over the past decade, nationality has become an increasingly central topic in incarceration practices. In England and Wales, foreign national prisoners are now identified to immigration authorities, transferred into specific prisons for ‘foreigners’, and in some cases, are detained indefinitely in prisons under immigration powers after the conclusion of their criminal sentences. These developments have been met and propelled by the growth of the immigration detention estate, which since 1993 has expanded to 10 times its original size. Today, at any given moment, more than 13,000 foreign nationals are incarcerated in a web of different custodial institutions, some governed by the criminal law, others beyond its reach. In this context, criminologists can no longer treat the prison as an institution bounded by the nation-state. Instead, we need to examine how the prison produces the nation-state and reaffirms its sovereignty. Seeking to start that discussion, this chapter draws on the voices of prisoners and detainees to explore the prison’s role in migration control. Comparing testimonies from ‘foreigners’ in a range of British incarceration facilities, we argue that the prison works together with the detention centre to promote an exclusionary notion of British citizenship reifying the link between citizenship, sovereignty, and rights.

Kapitel 14:

Since the late 1990s, a vibrant anti-prison movement has emerged in the USA in response to the hyper-incarceration of predominantly racialised minorities from distressed urban communities. This movement has popularised the term ‘prison-industrial complex’ to describe a symbiotic relationship between politicians, corporations, media and correctional institutions that generates political and economic profit from penal expansion. Movement actors – described as the ‘new abolitionists’ – identify connections between the incomplete abolition of slavery and the rise of the prison-industrial complex and push for a radical rethinking of how society responds to harm. This chapter argues that any examination of the role of the prison must consider the insurgent knowledge produced by these anti-prison activists. It then examines five arguments for the end of prisons put forward by the new abolitionists and explores how activists have mobilised around them as the basis for political praxis. The chapter closes with a discussion of moratorium, decarceration and community accountability as steps toward an abolition that is lived now rather than in some future utopia.

In early 2012, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) wrote a letter to forty-eight states in which it offered to assist them in managing ‘challenging correctional budgets’ by purchasing publicly owned prisons (Kirkham, 2012). In return for the injection of much-needed resources into the budgets of cash-strapped states, the state would sign a management contract of at least twenty years with CCA guaranteeing a minimum 90 per cent occupancy rate. Barely veiled behind the rationale of enhanced efficiencies and mutually beneficial public-private partnerships was a Faustian bargain that would have locked states overburdened with the financial consequences of uncontrolled prison expansion into continuing a failed social experiment with hyper-incarceration. CCA’s move was designed to buy long-term insulation against the risks associated with decarcerative strategies, such as sentencing and parole reforms, which are increasingly appealing during an economic downturn.

Kapitel 15:

Since the late 1990s, a vibrant anti-prison movement has emerged in the USA in response to the hyper-incarceration of predominantly racialised minorities from distressed urban communities. This movement has popularised the term ‘prison-industrial complex’ to describe a symbiotic relationship between politicians, corporations, media and correctional institutions that generates political and economic profit from penal expansion. Movement actors – described as the ‘new abolitionists’ – identify connections between the incomplete abolition of slavery and the rise of the prison-industrial complex and push for a radical rethinking of how society responds to harm. This chapter argues that any examination of the role of the prison must consider the insurgent knowledge produced by these anti-prison activists. It then examines five arguments for the end of prisons put forward by the new abolitionists and explores how activists have mobilised around them as the basis for political praxis. The chapter closes with a discussion of moratorium, decarceration and community accountability as steps toward an abolition that is lived now rather than in some future utopia.

In early 2012, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) wrote a letter to forty-eight states in which it offered to assist them in managing ‘challenging correctional budgets’ by purchasing publicly owned prisons (Kirkham, 2012). In return for the injection of much-needed resources into the budgets of cash-strapped states, the state would sign a management contract of at least twenty years with CCA guaranteeing a minimum 90 per cent occupancy rate. Barely veiled behind the rationale of enhanced efficiencies and mutually beneficial public-private partnerships was a Faustian bargain that would have locked states overburdened with the financial consequences of uncontrolled prison expansion into continuing a failed social experiment with hyper-incarceration. CCA’s move was designed to buy long-term insulation against the risks associated with decarcerative strategies, such as sentencing and parole reforms, which are increasingly appealing during an economic downturn.