Beyond Persecutory Impulse and Humanising Trace: On Didier Fassin’s The Will to Punish

Abstract

Developed from the Tanner foundation lectures for 2016, The Will to Punish is a one hundred page essay which draws upon the author's perspectives as an anthropologist, an ethnographer, and a genealogist in the mode of Foucault and more especially Nietzsche to consider the nature of punishment in modern western, capitalist, societies. The argument was developed alongside the contributions of three North American-based scholars of the penal system, Bruce Western, Rebecca McLennan and David Garland, and it provides a punchy, challenging, vision of modern criminal justice and punishment from a critical point of view. It is organised around three basic questions: what is punishment? why does one punish? And who gets punished? There is a degree of overlap between the answers to these questions, since the what, the why and the who are necessarily connected, but overall, the framework of the lectures enables Fassin to launch a set of arguments that, while not necessarily novel, nicely bring out the different angles on orthodox positions that a critical perspective offers. It could be said to provide something of a state of the art summation of the general lines of critical thought, raising questions about critical method, what has been achieved, and what else there is still to do.

Restoration, abolition and the loving prison: Jimmy Boyle and Barlinnie Special Unit

“…While acknowledging reparative and restorative elements in British prisons, I claim that penal systems, especially prison systems, are punitive and persecutory, albeit with a ‘humanising trace’. Teasing out the argument of Didier Fassin's (2018) critical work on French and US criminal justice, I would say that British prisons are persecutory in the major and reparative in the minor key (Norrie, 2019b). Attempts at treating the prisoner as a whole person rather than as an object of control and discipline remain, but in a marginal way dominated by the overarching setting.…”

Realism, dialectic, justice and law: an interview with Alan Norrie

“…Norrie 1996bNorrie , 2000cNorrie , 2003Norrie , 2019aNorrie , 2019cCarvhalo and Norrie 2017), Criminal Law and Philosophy (e.g. Norrie 2007aNorrie , 2015Norrie , 2019bNorrie , 2019d and New Criminal Law Review (e.g. Norrie 2008Norrie , 2010bNorrie , 2011, as well as other forums (e.g.…”