Carceral Imaginaries in Science Fiction: Toward a Palimpsestic Understanding of Penality

The palimpsest of outdoor penal labour in California, 1915–2000

“…And, conversely, striking continuities when path dependence prepared us to see change and innovation. Striving to reconcile the established value of path dependence for theorising stability and its rich promise for studies of punishment and criminal justice (Rubin, 2023) with its limitations for explaining our empirical case, we proposed a blended version of this framework in dialogue with recent theorising on palimpsestic penality (Quinn, Canossini & Evans, 2020). We suggested that outdoor penal labour in California is akin to a palimpsest -a blurry combination of practices, framings, and rhetorical justifications assembled and interpreted by skilled and variously motivated penal administrators.…”

“…Palimpsestic penality uses ancient palimpsests as a metaphor for theorising penal change (Quinn, Canossini & Evans, 2020) – an application we extend to consider the oft‐neglected presence of penal stability (Rubin, 2023). Before the printing press, texts were printed on parchments made of animal hide, which was expensive and scarcely available, so they were reused by scraping off previous writing and overlaying it with new text.…”

“…To better understand this case, we weld together historical scholarship on path dependence with a recent foray into analogising punishment as palimpsestic (Quinn, Canossini & Evans, 2020). Following Rubin (2023), we see theories of path dependence as holding tremendous promise for studies of punishment – particularly as a way to sharpen focus on penal stability amid scholars’ arguably more acute attention to penal shifts, ruptures and change.…”

“…Our article is structured as follows. First, we introduce our theoretical framework, expanding Quinn, Canossini & Evans's (2020) concept of palimpsestic penality in dialogue with Mahoney & Thelen's (2010) types of institutional evolution. Next, we describe our methods, summarising the archival documents on California's prison highway and forestry camps between 1915 and 2000 and how we analysed them.…”

“…What we need for this case (and likely other criminal justice phenomena) is a more dynamic way of understanding paths as intersecting, combining and separating over time. Thus, we bring to bear Quinn, Canossini & Evans (2020) in thinking about palimpsests: pieces of writing in which old text is partially erased, making room for new, but leaving traces of what came before. Our central contention is that the prevailing forms of outdoor penal labour in California did not persist because some set of previous conditions or events made their abolition unthinkable or even undesirable per se -as strict theories of path dependence would suggest.…”