Prisons and Social Structures in Late Capitalist Societies (original) (raw)

Spain: Class War in the New Punitive Normal (Justice, Power and Resistance - EG Journal vol1-2)

Justice, Power and Resistance (EG Group Journal), 2017

This article posits a materialist critique of recent penal transformations in the current context of the Spanish debtfare. The so called financial crisis has affected the economic structures, while reinforcing the symbiotic dimension of State-corporate power, and expanding punishment beyond the penal sphere – across most areas of public policing.

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.

Punishment

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.

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.