Prisons and Social Structures in Late Capitalist Societies (original) (raw)
Punishment, Marxism, and Political Economy
The political economy of punishment is a critical approach within the sociology of punishment that hypothesizes the existence of a structural relationship between transformations of the economy and changes in the penal field. Inspired by a neo-Marxist framework, this materialist critique of punishment explores—from both a historical and a contemporary perspective—the connections between the reorganization of a society's system of production and the emergence, persistence, or decline of specific penal practices. Thus, materialist criminologists have investigated the parallel historical emergence of factories as the main sites of capitalist production and of prisons as the main institutions of punishment in modern societies. Scholars in the field have also explored the correlations between incarceration rates and socioeconomic indicators, such as unemployment rates, poverty levels, welfare regimes, and labor markets. This materialist framework has been criticized in mainstream criminological literature for its alleged economic determinism. In particular, critiques have focused on the theory's tendency to overlook the cultural significance of punishment and the politico-institutional dimensions of penality, as well as on its exclusive emphasis on the instrumental side of penal practices as opposed to their symbolic dimensions. In response to these critiques, some recent works have tried to integrate the old political economy of punishment with epistemological tools from different disciplinary fields in order to overcome some of the limitations of the materialist approach. This broadening of the structural paradigm in criminology could point toward the envisioning of a "cultural political economy of punishment." Particularly in its more recent iterations, the materialist critique of punishment provides a powerful lens for investigating current transformations in the penal field, such as the advent of mass incarceration and the ongoing prison crisis in the United States.
The Sage Handbook of Marxism, 2022
Since the early 1980s, global processes of capitalist transformation across Western societies have revolutionized both the field of production and the complex of governmental institutions, practices, and technologies that, in the aftermath of World War II, had consolidated into the Keynesian welfare state (Jessop, 1996, 2016; Mishra, 2014). The neoliberal paradigm of governance that has come to dominate Western societies through the last quarter of the twentieth century has resulted in a drastic redistribution of social wealth toward the top of the racial and class hierarchy, a vertical increase in economic inequalities, an acute precarization of work within increasingly segmented labor markets, a massive attack on workers' rights, and a systematic dismantling of the social safety net that had been instituted in the wake of the Keynesian compromise between capital and labor (Bonefeld, 2017; Harvey, 2005; Schram, 2015). In this sense, the neoliberal revolution has involved an organized assault against the economic relevance and political centrality of industrial labor-and, specifically in the USA, against the radical struggles for racial justice that had emerged from the civil rights movement (Camp, 2016; Flamm, 2005; Parenti, 1999: 3-44). These transformations, legitimized through the neoliberal dogmas of absolute flexibility, ruthless competition, and rugged individualism, have significantly reshaped the field of social and penal control in much of the Western world.
Global Mobility and Penal Order: Criminalizing Migration, A View from Europe
2012
Globalization has increased the flow of people across Europe, bringing economic expansion and ethnic diversity. Open political borders have enhanced European integration and interdependence, creating a cosmopolitan European Union full of transnational citizens. Alongside this increased mobility, state coercion has been quietly on the rise. Since 1990, nearly every European democracy has increased incarceration, locking up common criminals and those perceived to be outsiders. Foreign nationals are overrepresented in nearly every European prison, making up over 50 percent of the prison population in Greece, 35 percent in Spain and Italy, for example, or 28 percent in Sweden. At the same time, the intensification of border control-the regulation of both territory and group membership-has subjected a growing number of people to detention and expulsion, as immigration itself has become, in part, criminalized. The controversial expulsion of the Roma, EU citizens, from France in the summer of 2010 and the large scale detention of North African migrants in Lampedusa, Italy during the Arab Spring of 2011, among other events, graphically illustrate the rise of state coercion, directed particularly against those perceived to be foreigners and mobile. This article analyzes the current state of the literature that brings us closer to understanding how and why European democracies resort to the criminal law and penal sanctioning to resolve broader conflicts over globalization, national identity, and economic restructuring by excluding others and by desperately trying to control and contain mobility.
MARKET-STATE-PRISON UNDER SPANISH NEOLIBERALISM
2019
At the end of the 1970s, Spanish prisons ‘hosted’ a minimum of 8,500 people. Thirty-five years later, the prison population had multiplied by nine, to almost 77,000 prisoners in May 2010. The progressive tightening of legislation and the consequent lengthening of the sentences are the main (although not the only) causes of this boost in institutional abduction. The Spanish penitentiary bubble is the result of a broad dynamic with economic, political, cultural and sociological dimensions, and the dominant criminological perspective has little to say about any of this. Since the mid-eighties, officially reported crime rates have not shown any valid correlation with punitivity, as defined by the rate of imprisonment. That missing link between crime and punishment, only in appearance paradoxical, notes ‘the futility of any approach to the function of the penal system from a strict normative description’ (Bergalli 1996). All these aspects can only be observed with the instruments of a bunch of social disciplines that, generally, do not belong to legal disciplines or training processes of legal experts.
Debates about the trajectory of prison rates in the US, on one hand, and about the prospects of the neoliberal international order, on the other hand, suggest the time is ripe for a reappraisal of penological scholarship on the relationship between neoliber- alism and imprisonment. With the aim of responding to this challenge, this article considers the relevance of the so-called ‘neoliberal penality thesis’ as a framework through which to interpret recent and ongoing developments in US imprisonment. We first set out the core propositions of the thesis and engage with a range of critiques it has attracted regarding the role of crime and government institutions, the evolution and functions of state regulation and welfare provision, and reliance on imprisonment as an indicator of state punitiveness. We then outline the principal arguments that have arisen about the direction of contemporary prison trends in the US, including since Donald Trump was elected to the presidency and took office, and proceed to distil their commonly opaque treatment of the intersections between neoliberalism and impris- onment, also clarifying their respective implications for the neoliberal penality thesis in light of the main critiques levelled previously against it. In so doing, we go beyond the penological field to take into account concerns about the vitality of neoliberalism itself. We conclude that international politico-economic developments have cast considerable doubt over the pertinence of neoliberalism as an organising concept for analysis of emergent penal currents.