Beyond Punishment: The Penal State's Interventionist,Covert, and Negligent Modalities of Control

This article investigates the involvement of the penal state in the lives of criminalized people as a controlling force that takes multiple forms. We offer the concept of modalities of penal control and identify three such modalities in addition to expressive punishment: interventionist penal control is accomplished in extralegal ways; covert penal control is hidden from public view; and negligent penal control is characterized by the absence of action by state actors. This article illustrates empirical cases of each modality, using data from three distinct projects based in Chicago, southern Wisconsin, and nationwide. The data include observations of post‐prison groups and homes, interviews with criminalized people and nongovernmental organizational (NGO) staff, statutes, and regulations. This expanded understanding of penal state involvement extends beyond the understanding that characterizes discussions of mass incarceration and highlights the need for comprehensive reform.     

Editorial

This article discusses the emergence of the prison system in Sweden during the nineteenth century against the background of the broader context of prison history. Although the number of prisoners had quadrupled already in the first half of the century, it was in the second half that the system was developed. As in many other nations, a heated debate took place on the question of which of the opposing systems – the Philadelphia or the Auburn system – should be chosen. In Sweden this battle between the systems ended with an almost total victory for a Philadelphia‐like system, i.e., on the principle of solitary confinement. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a system built on solitary confinement expanded at the same time as the penal policy took on a more disciplinary character, a tendency that became especially evident at the turn of the century. This expansion continued even after many other nations more or less abandoned solitary confinement. This article argues that this expansion was the result of several factors, the most important being the unprecedented disciplinary possibilities of solitary confinement. The article also argues that this development created a form of ‘successful’ institutions, i.e., well administered, secure and calm institutions, which became one important reason for the remarkably high degree of legitimacy that the Swedish prisons have enjoyed during the twentieth century.     

Reclaiming the Power to Punish: Legislating and Administrating the California Supermax, 1982–1989

This article examines how increasingly punitive prison conditions, epitomized by the birth and spread of the supermax prison, developed in the United States. This analysis builds on a growing literature about the “new punitiveness” of U.S. punishment policy and its global proliferation. This article shifts the focus away from the policies that have led to increasing rates of incarceration, however, and toward the policies that have shaped the conditions of incarceration. Drawing on archival research and more than 30 oral history interviews with key informants, I examine the administrative and legislative processes that underwrote the supermax innovation in California in the 1980s. During California's late twentieth‐century prison‐building spree, prison administrators deployed multiple rhetorics of risk to extend their control over conditions of confinement in state prisons. As the state invested billions of dollars in prison building initiatives, legislators, who were focused primarily on building prisons faster, ceded authority over prison design and conditions to prison administrators. In the end, rather than implementing legislative policy, prison administrators initiated their own policies, institutionalizing a new form of “supermax” confinement, pushing at the limits of constitutionally acceptable practices.     

The rise of the penal state in Latin America

The recent work of Loïc Wacquant identified the emergence of the penal state as a core feature of the global expansion of neoliberalism and the neoliberal government urban marginality. Drawing on Wacquant’s theoretical and conceptual reflections, this article analyses the emergence of a Latin American form of penal statecraft. By taking an in-depth look at the increasing criminalization of urban marginality in contemporary Latin America as well as the related developments in the local prison system, the single most important institutional expression of the Latin American penal state, important commonalities and differences between the penal statecraft experiments throughout Latin America and the countries of the ‘developed world’ are highlighted.     

The Institutional Hearing Program: A Study of Prison-Based Immigration Courts in the United States

This article presents the findings of the first research study of the Institutional Hearing Program (IHP), a prison-based immigration court system run by the U.S. Department of Justice. Although the IHP has existed for four decades, little is publicly known about the program's origin, development, or significance. Based on original analysis of archival records, this study makes three central contributions. First, it traces the origin and growth of the IHP within federal, state, and municipal correctional facilities. Notably, although the IHP began in 1980 as a program to deport Cuban asylum seekers held in civil detention in an Atlanta prison, it now operates to deport noncitizens serving prison sentences in twenty-three federal prisons, nineteen state prison systems, and a few municipal jails. Second, this article uncovers the crucial role that prison-based immigration courts have played in shaping the design of carceral institutions around the priorities of an immigration system that primarily targets Latinos for deportation. Third, this article shows how immigration courts embedded in carceral spaces have served as influential, yet overlooked, incubators of changes to immigration law and practice that today apply to all immigration courts, not just the IHP. These findings have important implications for contemporary understandings of the relationship between immigration detention, racialized control of migration, and penal punishment.     

IMPRISONMENT LENGTH AND POST‐PRISON EMPLOYMENT PROSPECTS

This study considers the relationship between imprisonment length and employment outcomes. The data are a unique prospective, longitudinal study of Dutch pretrial detainees (N = 702). All subjects thus experience prison confinement of varying lengths, although the durations are relatively short (mean = 3.8 months; median = 3.1 months). This contrasts with prior research that was limited to the study of American prison sentences spanning an average of 2 years. These data thus fill a gap in the empirical base concerning short‐term confinement, which is the norm in the United States (e.g., jail incarceration) and other Western countries. Using a comprehensive array of pre‐prison covariates, a propensity score methodology is used to examine the dose–response relationship between imprisonment length and a variety of employment outcomes. The results indicate that, among prison lengths less than 6 months in duration, longer confinement is largely uncorrelated with employment. In contrast, among spells in excess of 6 months, longer imprisonment length seems to worsen employment prospects.     

Youth In Prisons and Training Schools: Perceptions and Consequences of the Treatment-Custody Dichotomy

Transfer (or waiver) of juveniles to criminal court is one of the most extreme responses to serious youth crime. Although many states have recently revised their transfer statutes, and the number of juveniles prosecuted as adults increases each year, little research has been conducted to assess the correctional experiences of delinquent youth convicted in criminal court and sentenced to adult prison. Evaluations of such experiences are important to policymakers and juvenile justice officials who are considering juvenile transfers as a strategy for securing longer and harsher confinement for offenders. Based on interviews with 59 chronic juvenile offenders placed in state training schools, and 81 comparable youths sentenced to adult correctional facilities, this article presents a comparison of offenders' perceptions of their correctional experiences. Juveniles incarcerated in training schools give more positive evaluations of treatment and training programs, general services, and institutional personnel than do those youths in prison. Juveniles housed in institutions which emphasize security over treatment — i.e., prisons — are more often victimized during their confinement than youths in the treatment-oriented training schools. Once placed in prisons, adolescent inmates are more likely to be victims of prison violence and crime from both inmates and staff. These research results suggest some paradoxical effects of the treatment-custody distinction implicit in judicial waiver practices. The differential socialization into crime and violence for youths in adult prisons may increase the risks of having these types of behavior repeated by transferred youths once released.     

Overview of Language Rights in the International Criminal Law Sentencing Models

This paper examines the ‘deep-end’ of the international justice process—the incarceration of persons convicted in specially constituted international criminal tribunals and courts for gross violations of human rights, genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes with a focus on language rights of such prisoners who are commonly serving sentences in foreign prisons. The punishment phase of the international justice process and its effects are not easily quantifiable and have been largely hidden from view. Although international criminal law asserts that equal treatment before the law requires that there be no significant disparity in punishment regimes from one sentence-enforcing country to another, comparative penology shows that there are considerable differences in the conditions of confinement and the nature of correctional services in the prison systems of different countries. This has a direct impact on post-sentence procedural and rehabilitation rights of which language rights from a key part. In this specific context, and drawing from existing literature, the paper therefore examines the extent to which enforcement practice conforms to the ideal of equal treatment espoused by the tribunals.     

State Power and Penal Rhetoric: A Historical Analysis of the Prison System in Taiwan

The aim of this study is to present a construction of the history of the prison system in Taiwan in the context of the intertwined structures of penal discourses and the governmentality of the state. The prison system in Taiwan has been subject to different ruling political regimes, ranging from colonised, authoritarian to liberal-democratic systems between 1895 and the present. The history of imprisonment can be divided into six stages, each of which consists of distinct governmental strategies that shape prominent penal discourses. My purpose was to uncover the exercising power of governmentality, further shaping, guiding and affecting the penal discourses via rationalities and technologies upon which prison administration depends.

Penal and Prison Policy on the “Sunny Side of the Alps”: The Swan Song of Slovenian Exceptionalism?

The article considers penal and prison policy in Slovenia by illustrating and confronting the roots, development and main features of Slovenian vis-à-vis Scandinavian penal “exceptionalism”. It first explores economic, social and political developments that made both Scandinavian and Slovenian penal regimes, in terms of stability and leniency of penal policy, low imprisonment rates and quality of prisoner treatment, to some degree exceptional if confronted with regimes of the vast majority of western countries. Further, the authors explore what consequences and implications the recent punitive tendencies have for Slovenian exceptionalism and whether they jeopardize or perhaps even threaten mild penal order, which the country on the “sunny side of the Alps” has been building since the 1970s. Finally, the authors try to find out whether, in spite of the declining welfarism and rising punitiveness, Slovenian-style penal exceptionalism has a chance to revive and endure.     

Predicting troublemaking offenders: A discriminant analysis

Violence, attempted escapes, thefts, persistent rule violations, and other extreme forms of maladaptive prison behavior have created problems for correctional authorities since congregate confinement became the watchword in American corrections. The evolution of prisoner classification programs has aided prison administrators in their attempts to recognize potential behavioral problems but the subjective nature of a number of state classification models has resulted in a continuous wave of litigation and fiscal constraints. The objective of this paper is to provide a prediction model to assist in the classification of adult prisoners. Data on all members of the Georgia adult, male prison population from 1971 to 1978 were used as a baseline. A sample was chosen from inmates in long-term disciplinary segregation whose files contained all necessary demographic, psychometric and judicial variables. A discriminant analysis of these two groups identified 14 variables which correctly assigned inmates in 85% of the cases. The predictive variables include both demographic and personality characteristics.     

The moving targets of penal abolitionism: ICOPA,past, present and future

The history of the International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) is explored, assessing major trends shaping the current growth of carceral practices and offering suggestions for the future of the conference movement. The goal here is to facilitate the expansion of abolitionism by describing the changing nature of what is to be abolished. A discussion of the emergence of prison abolitionism and of the ICOPA is presented, describing the shift in focus from prison to penal abolition. Taking these developments and character into account, an abolitionist gaze must be expanded to reflect a carceral abolition project, encompassing contemporary penal abolitionism while acknowledging the proliferation of carceral practices and spaces outside the traditional penal system.     

Contemporary prison overcrowding: short-term fixes to a perpetual problem

Since the United States began using incarceration as its cornerstone of punishment for those who transgress the law, this method of discipline has been fraught with problems. One of the most ubiquitous problems found within correctional institutions are the conditions inmates are forced to live in particularly, when penal facilities are overcrowded. These conditions have led to extensive litigation, compelling the judicial system to change. Although overall conditions have improved, a perpetually increasing inmate population continues to plague correctional systems as costs continue to rise. As state budgets have become strained during the economic downturns, many states’ officials view less punitive measures as possible solutions to the excessive costs of administering punishment and overcrowded inmate populations. Due to facility overcrowding, several states have actually been placed under federal court order to reduce their inmate population in order to protect inmates’ constitutional rights. Although this has resulted in a change of policies to help alleviate prison overcrowding, there is little evidence these are anything more than short-term fixes to a problem with no end in sight.     

劳役制度的历史嬗变及人文思考

劳役制度是统治集团凭借国家强制力为后盾,在拘束、限制犯人人身自由的基础上,强制犯人进行劳役,形成的制度.该制度作为一项重要的监狱管理制度,历经了一个由产生、发展到逐步完善的过程,具有丰富的内涵及特征.探讨劳役制度,对劳动教育改造人犯,有着重要的借鉴价值和现实指导意义.     

Penal harm medicine: state tort remedies for delaying and denying health care to prisoners

In prison and jail subcultures, custodial personnel are committed to the penal harm movement, which seeks to inflict pain on prisoners. Conversely, correctional medical personnel are sworn to the Hippocratic Oath and are committed to alleviating prisoners' suffering. The Hippocratic Oath is violated when correctional medical workers adopt penal harm mandates and inflict pain on prisoners. By analyzing lawsuits filed by prisoners under state tort law, this article shows how the penal harm movement co-opts some correctional medical employees into abandoning their treatment and healing mission, thus causing denial or delay of medical treatment to prisoners. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

废除无期徒刑的思考——兼论相对不定期刑的替代性价值

长期以来，在我国有期徒刑和死刑之间存在着广袤的“刑期真空地带”，无期徒刑的刑期已名不副实。从制度主义的视角来看，保留死刑也好，抑或是废除死刑设立终身监禁刑也罢，都存在着如何合理地解决好“有期”与“无期”之衔接的问题。从刑罚价值上看，无期徒刑既失去了其存在的正当性基础，也不具有了可行性，理应废除。为此建议，应在刑法上确定一种新的刑种——“相对不定期刑”替代现行“无期徒刑”，以弥补我国现行刑法制度设计上的罅隙。     

Remanding Women in Custody: Concerns for Human Rights

Concern about the increasing population of women in prison has tended to focus on the sentencing of female offenders. It is often overlooked that about one in five women held in custody is there on remand, awaiting trial or sentence, and that most of them will not receive a prison sentence at the end of the process. This article examines the legal grounds for a custodial remand and explores the extent to which individual rights guaranteed under the European Convention are adequately protected. It is argued that women are particularly disadvantaged by the laws governing bail and by their practical application in the criminal justice system; and that the pre-trial detention of so many women routinely violates the spirit of the Convention by allowing questionable claims to social utility to prevail over the right to liberty and to a fair trial.     

“REPATRIATING” LOW‐WAGE WORK: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRISON LABOR REPRIVATIZATION IN THE POSTINDUSTRIAL UNITED STATES*

Applying Rusche and Kirchheimer's theory regarding labor markets and penal change, this paper examines recent initiatives to expand the labor force participation of federal and state prisoners. Globalization and labor market transformation have increased the potential value of prison labor as a subcontracting component of post‐Fordist production systems. We examine privatization's ideological rationale (economic “cost benefits”) and its political strategy of foreign job repatriation. Based on cultural and economic factors, the South is identified as the probable locale for “repatriation.” A case study of Escod Industries reveals the emerging elements of a post‐Fordist penology, involving a fundamental transformation in prison discourse, techniques, and management objectives.     

HOW THE U.S. PRISON BOOM HAS CHANGED THE AGE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PRISON POPULATION

This article provides a demographic exposition of the changes in the U.S prison population during the period of mass incarceration that began in the late twentieth century. By drawing on data from the Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities (1974–2004) for inmates 17–72 years of age (N = 336), we show that the age distribution shifted upward dramatically: Only 16 percent of the state prison population was 40 years old or older in 1974; by 2004, this percentage had doubled to 33 percent with the median age of prisoners rising from 27 to 34 years old. By using an estimable function approach, we find that the change in the age distribution of the prison population is primarily a cohort effect that is driven by the “enhanced” penal careers of the cohorts who hit young adulthood—the prime age of both crime and incarceration—when substance use was at its peak. Period‐specific factors (e.g., proclivity for punishment and incidence of offense) do matter, but they seem to play out more across the life cycles of persons most affected in young adulthood (cohort effects) than across all age groups at one point in time (period effects).