Penal power in America: Forms, functions and foundations

It is now common in the sociology of punishment to lament that comparative penology has not matured as an area of research. While there have been seminal works in the comparative canon, their conceptual tools tend to be drawn from grand narratives and macro-structural perspectives. Comparative researchers therefore lack concepts that can help capture the complexity of penality within a single nation, limiting the cross-national perspective. Why is this relative lack of comparative refinement still the case? This article investigates this question by looking specifically at penal exceptionalism, a concept central to comparative penology. While punitiveness as a comparative and descriptive category has been critiqued, its converse, penal exceptionalism remains prevalent but undertheorised. Examining exceptionalism reveals that it is not merely the macro-structural approach to comparison that has limited the development of cross-national sociology of punishment, but the Anglocentric assumptions, which are the bedrock of comparative penology. In this essay, I argue that penal exceptionalism versus punitiveness is an Anglocentric formulation. These taken-for-granted assumptions have become so central to the comparative enterprise that they act as a barrier to developing new innovative comparative frameworks and concepts. The article concludes by suggesting some methodological strategies that are intended as a way of helping comparative penology to expand its toolkit and support the ongoing development of more equitable criminological knowledge.

Section: Penal Exceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exceptional states: The political geography of comparative penology

Brangan

2020

“…Reviewing the historical processes that molded American penality into its contemporary form, we observe the concern with penal control increasingly taking precedence and shaping the direction of penal change (Garland, 2017; National Research Council, 2014). Of course, the historical record is by no means univocal, and scholars disagree about the background causes that might explain why American punishments became so much more severe in the period since 1980.…”

Section: American Penality As Penal Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 12 Garland (2017) summarizes the history. As Campbell and Schoenfeld (2013: 1379) write, the penal policies that emerged after the 1980s exhibited “one primary goal: to incarcerate or “supervise” masses of criminal offenders for long periods of time.” See Crimmins (2018) for a discussion of the emergence of this principle, and Department of Justice (1992) report The Case for More Incarceration for an explicit example.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Penal controls and social controls: Toward a theory of American penal exceptionalism

Garland

2019

Self Cite

This article argues that to explain American penal exceptionalism, we have to consider America’s exceptional levels of punishment together with America’s exceptional levels of violence and disorder, while understanding both of these as outcomes of America’s distinctive political economy. After specifying the multiple respects in which American penality is a comparative outlier, the article develops a new theorization of modes of penal action that reveals the extent to which the US has come to rely on penal controls rather than other kinds of punishment. This over-reliance on penal controls is viewed as an adaptation to the weakness of non-penal social controls in American communities. These social control deficits are, in turn, attributed to America’s ultra-liberal political economy, which is seen as having detrimental effects for the functioning of families and communities, tending to reduce the effectiveness of informal social controls and to generate high levels of neighborhood disorganization and violence. The same political economy limits the capacity of government to respond to these structurally generated problems using the social policy interventions characteristic of more fully developed welfare states. The result is a marked bias toward the use of penal controls.

“…I use the term banishment, as opposed to exclusion (Beckett and Herbert, 2010), because as I argue, these are penal phenomena. They are meted out against those considered deviant – as a substitute for imprisonment or some other form of ‘penal control’ (Garland, 2017: 18) and involve ‘public shaming’ and stigmatization. Whilst unlawful, banishments are mostly ignored by the state and thus, as I argue, are tacitly accepted.…”

Section: Analytical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Three warnings and you’re out’: Banishment and precarious penality in South Africa’s informal settlements

Super

2019

This paper asks how punitive forms of non-state punishment play out on the margins of the state, in informal (shack) settlements in South Africa. My focus is on the practice of forcing those who are suspected of certain offences to leave their homes in informal settlements. I refer to this as ‘banishment’ and argue that it is a ‘penal phenomenon’ which is intimately tied to the general precarity that residents experience on a daily basis. The paper examines the ways in which these formally illegal, but nonetheless legitimate practices, draw on and reconfigure liberal state punishment. I use my study to make a broader theoretical point about the interplay between lawful state punishment and unlawful punishment on the periphery of the state. The blurred boundaries between legal (state) violence and illegal (but nonetheless legitimate) violence are particularly ‘visible’ in situations of ‘precarious penality’ – a term that I use to describe the unstable, violent and exclusionary penality that manifests in situations of socio-economic precarity, particularly in contexts of inequality, high rates of violent crime and a delegitimated rule of law. In these circumstances ‘non-state’ punishment contributes to the construction and maintenance of group boundaries and fulfils a similar function to ‘formal’ punishment. Thus, I ask whether it makes sense to exclude ‘non-state’ public authorities which act against ‘criminality’, when asking what or who constitutes the penal field and, when measuring state punitiveness?