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.     

CRACKS IN THE PENAL HARM MOVEMENT: EVIDENCE FROM THE FIELD*

Research Summary For more than three decades, the penal harm movement, which involves “get tough” ideology and policies, has held sway over U.S. corrections. Scholars have justifiably detailed and decried this movement, but in so doing, they have also inadvertently contributed to the view that a punitive worldview is hegemonic. In contrast, we detail four major “cracks” in the penal harm movement's dominance: the persistence of rehabilitative public attitudes, the emergence of second thoughts about the wisdom of harsh sanctions, the implementation of progressive programs, and the increasing legitimacy of the principles of effective intervention for guiding correctional practices. Policy Implications Taken together, these “cracks” comprise evidence that ideological space and political will exist to fight the penal harm movement and to map out a more efficacious and progressive response to crime. Because of the persistence of social welfare sentiments and growing challenges to the legitimacy of “get tough” policies, the potential to continue, if not expand, this countermovement is present. Taking advantage of this opportunity, however, will require forfeiting the belief that there is no escape from a punitive future and undertaking systematic efforts to devise correctional strategies that are based on solid science, improve offenders' lives, and protect public safety.     

Crimes of the State: The Persecution and Protection of Refugees

When refugees arrive at the borders and on the shores of the Global North they are increasingly criminalised and subject to a range of law and order type rhetoric and practices. This paper outlines an alternative criminological engagement with the condition of refugeehood that shifts the focus from the refugee to the practices of the state. First, it splices definitions of state crime with the highly legalistic refugee definition to offer alternative conceptualisations of persecution in the determination of who is accorded the legal status of refugee. Second, it applies state crime frameworks to the increasingly restrictive and punitive refugee policies of countries in the Global North. It concludes by locating theorisations of state crime within the broader project of reconceptualising notions of sovereignty.Sharon Pickering BA(Melb), MA(Soton), PhD(Melb) lectures in Criminal Justice and Criminology at Monash University Australia. She has worked with refugees and written on forced migration issues for the past five years including her recent book Refugees and State Crime (2005 Institute of Criminology Monograph Series/Federation Press).     

Maneuvering with Crime. An Empirical Reconstruction of “Populist” Stances on Youth Crime in German Parliamentary Debates

Recent years have seen a wide discussion of populism in penal policy, which is internationally regarded as a strong drive for establishing punitive tendencies. Generally, “penal populism” is characterized by an extensive consensus across the most influential political parties, a punitive orientation, and the dismissal of scientific or professional expertise. Recent penal policy therefore appears to be a relatively unified practice strongly oriented toward punitive measures that primarily address the public and its perceived need for protection. Because analyses of Anglophone countries are predominant in this discussion, we contrast them with a reconstruction of debates on youth crime in German parliaments from 1970 to 2012. They exhibit a wide variety of populist articulations. Although they imply a strong punitive bias, they also encompass a very heterogeneous rhetoric of penal policy. In conclusion, we argue that penal populism can (and should) be described as a tactical practice, i.e., as political maneuvering employed to negotiate the prospects of punitive and other styles of politics.     

Scaling Up or Scaling Back? The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Leveraging Federal Interventions for Abolition

Antiprison activists have often turned the federal court system to reduce the violence of the carceral state. However, such reform attempts have too often had the unintended consequence of fortifying the penal system. In this article, I interrogate one such intervention—a federal court order that encompassed the Louisiana Department of Corrections from 1975 to 1998. I argue that while the lawsuit was declared a success in reforming Angola, the federal court’s intervention buttressed and legitimated the growth of the Louisiana penal system. This paradox was produced through the limits of liberal reform ideology that failed to recognize the structural violence of incarceration. Rather, the federal courts located violence with prisoners instead of the punitive power of the state and racial capitalism. This framework not only led to an increase in punitive practices within Angola, it came to underpin penal expansion as the primary solution to cyclical overcrowding.     

The Long Reach of the Carceral State: The Politics of Crime, Mass Imprisonment, and Penal Reform in the United States and Abroad

This essay reviews five books as they relate to the causes and political consequences of mass imprisonment in the United States and the comparative politics of penal policy: Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007); Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen's Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (2006); Jonathan Simon's Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007); Michael Tonry, ed. , Crime, Punishment, and Politics in a Comparative Perspective (2007); and Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America (2006).
The essay first examines the enormous and growing political repercussions of having a vast penal system embedded in a democratic polity, including the political and electoral consequences of felon disenfranchisement; increasing political, social, and economic inequality for people marked by the penal system; and the phenomenon of "governing through crime." It also analyzes emerging strategies of resistance to US penal policies and mass incarceration, why some countries are more vulnerable to hard-line penal policies than others, and what it will take to reverse the US prison boom.     

Rehabilitation in the Punitive Era: The Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality in U.S. Prison Programs

Scholars of mass incarceration point to the 1970s as a pivotal turning point in U.S. penal history, marked by a shift toward more punitive policies and a consensus that “nothing works” in rehabilitating inmates. However, while there has been extensive research on changes in policy makers' rhetoric, sentencing policy, and incarceration rates, scholars know very little about changes in the actual practices of punishment and prisoner rehabilitation. Using nationally representative data for U.S. state prisons, this article demonstrates that there were no major changes in investments in specialized facilities, funding for inmate services–related staff, or program participation rates throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s. Not until the 1990s, more than a decade after the start of the punitive era, did patterns of inmate services change, as investments in programming switched from academic to reentry‐related programs. These findings suggest that there is a large gap between rhetoric and reality in the case of inmate services and that since the 1990s, inmate “rehabilitation” has increasingly become equated with reentry‐related life skills programs.     

Comparing deep-end confinement in England & Wales and Norway

Extreme forms of custody represent the boundary points of state power. The configuration of the most restrictive corners of prison systems, and what goes on within them, is highly instructive in exposing the objectives, limits, and implications of state coercion at its most severe. Based on data collected in England & Wales and Norway, this article has two main aims. The first is to explore the degree to which “deep-end” confinement differs between jurisdictions with different penal philosophies. The second is to understand how the most extreme form of confinement in each jurisdiction differs from the more typical carceral experiences within each system and its overall penal ethos. Empirically, then, the article seeks to shine light into the deepest dominions of both prison systems, illuminating the experiential texture of extreme forms of imprisonment. It concludes by asking what can be inferred about Nordic exceptionalism, and about deep-end confinement more generally, by analyzing these domains.     

How fear of crime affects punitive attitudes

This article investigates different types of fear of crime as predictors for punitive attitudes. Using data from a Germany-wide representative survey (n = 1272) it examines the reliability and validity of survey instruments through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to explain variations in the level of respondents’ punitive attitudes. The results show that different emotional and cognitive responses to crime have a distinctive effect on the formation of punitive attitudes. These effects vary significantly depending on socio-demographic factors and assumed purposes of punishment. A crucial observation of the study is that men’s fear of crime works in a different way in the formation of punitive attitudes than women’s fear of crime. The perceived locus of control for the crime threat is a possible explanation for this difference.     

The role of symbolic politics in exceptional crime policy debate: a study of the 2014 Swedish general election

Symbolic politics are often considered to be closely linked to an alarmist rhetoric, as well as to punitive crime policy initiatives. This article explores the symbolic dimension of the Swedish crime policy debate. Since Sweden is frequently depicted as an antithesis to punitive Anglophone societies, exploring symbolic politics in this setting might expand our understanding of what symbolic statements may consist of. The article analyses the electoral campaign preceding the Swedish general election of 2014, with the aim of identifying which symbolic statements occupy a central position in the debate through the use of a qualitative content analysis. This analysis reveals an ambiguous political rhetoric, comprising morally and emotionally charged condemnatory statements about getting tough on crime, as well as reformist and restrained references to expert knowledge and long-term solutions. On the one hand, these reformist statements strengthen the image of Swedish crime policy as being based on ideals such as rationality and humanity. On the other, they also serve to legitimize and obscure penal expansion.     

The historical criminal statistics of Finland 1842–2015 – a systematic comparison to Sweden

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the article is to provide an overview to the trends in crime and crime control in Finland and Sweden during the past 150 years, systematically comparing the two countries. The secondary objective of the study is to introduce a Nordic data collection project aiming to compile coherent comparative criminal justice time series from the early nineteenth century to the present, and to present the first collection of data, the Finnish justice statistics 1842–2015. The study examines the long-term development of homicide, assault, rape, defamation, prison population, and penal severity. Historical statistics provide opportunities to examine the crime trends and the society’s responses to them keeping in mind that the statistics do not necessarily reflect changes in total criminality. As such, the study does not provide conclusive explanations on the development of crime and punishment but rather opens new questions to be answered in future research.     

Symbolic Racism and Whites’ Attitudes Towards Punitive and Preventive Crime Policies

This study analyzes the determinants of Whites' support for punitive and preventive crime policies. It focuses on the predictive power of beliefs about race as described by symbolic racism theory. A dataset with 849 White respondents from three waves of the Los Angeles County Social Survey was used. In order to assess the weight of racial factors in crime policy attitudes, the effects of a range of race-neutral attitude determinants were controlled for, namely individual and structural crime attributions, perceived seriousness of crime, crime victimization, conservatism and news exposure. Results show a strong effect of symbolic racism on both types of crime policies, and in particular on punitive policies. High levels of symbolic racism are associated with support for tough, punitive crime policies and with opposition to preventive policies. Sub-dimensions of symbolic racism qualified these relationships, by showing that internal symbolic racism (assessing perceived individual deficiencies of Blacks) was most strongly predictive of punitiveness, whereas external symbolic racism (denial of institutional discrimination) predicted opposition to structural remedies. On the whole, despite the effects of race-neutral factors, the impact of symbolic racism on policy attitudes was substantial. Thus, White public opinion on both punitive and preventive crime policies is at least partially driven by racial prejudice.     

Law,the State,and the Dialectics of State Crime

Drawing on material from a study of civil society and state crime in six countries, this article reflects on two themes from Chambliss’s work: the debate between state-centred and more pluralistic views of law, and the “dialectical” approach to the analysis of state crime. It argues for a more pluralistic approach to law than Chambliss and Seidman adopted in Law Order and Power, along with a broader approach to the definition of state crime as a form of deviant behaviour. Case studies from the civil society research illustrate how the strategies adopted by organizations challenging state practices can be understood in terms of an interplay between different forms of law. With some qualifications, we support Chambliss’s dialectical approach, and attempt to clarify just what the term “dialectical” means. Finally we bring together the two strands of the argument to propose an approach to state crime founded on “dialectical legal pluralism”.     

A Comparison of Punishment Systems in Denmark and the United States

The Danish prison system is recognized worldwide as a model incorporating the most progressive principles of punishment. This article is the result of the author's research in Denmark undertaken to clarify the foundations of Danish penal philosophies. Findings suggest that penal practices are the outcome of a complex interaction of social and criminological theories. Formulated in an atmosphere that minimizes the emotionalism and politicization of crime, Danish crime control policies represent a pragmatic and reasoned approach to dealing with criminal offenders. Prison conditions reflect the social and political attitudes regarding the causes of crime and the treatment of marginal citizens.     

Queer Necropolitics and the Expanding Carceral State: Interrogating Sexual Investments in Punishment

This article examines the changing relationship between sexual politics and the carceral state. While sexual and gender nonconforming people have been historically punished for transgressing social norms, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in Europe and North America have begun to invest in the state punishment of others. Whether supporting hate crime legislation, calling for more police in gentrifying neighborhoods, or participating in police recruitment campaigns, organisations that formerly fought against criminalisation trends now actively support expanding forms of state violence and punishment. Focussing on examples from the British and US context—and drawing from the concept of ‘queer necropolitics’—this article considers how the carceral state has shifted from a key target of queer protest to celebrated guardian of sexual citizenship. Arguing that this process constitutes more than just another story of queer assimilation and co-optation, the article suggests this shift reflects a deeper reconfiguration of sexual politics, where citizenship norms and practices are increasingly infused with a chillingly punitive and deathly logic.     

Volatile Sovereignty: Governing Crime through the Community in Khayelitsha

This paper asks what crime prevention looks like for residents in informal settlements in Khayelitsha, a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town. It engages with the idea of vigilantism and hybrid policing formations, analyzing the overlaps and intersections between legal community‐based crime prevention initiatives, and local ‘punitive practices’. The focus is not on the intensely violent spectacle of ‘mob justice’, where suspects are killed, but on the more ubiquitous, hybrid formations that also fall on the vigilantism continuum. These include coercive practices such as banishment, corporal punishment, retrieval of stolen goods by local policing formations and, trials conducted by street committees. The core argument I make is that, at times, particularly in poor areas where the state is absent and encourages citizens to take responsibility for their own crime prevention, the boundary between legality and coercive illegality collapses in on itself. Thus, the notion of voluntarism, that is so important to official discourse on crime, is particularly problematic when applied in poor communities with high rates of unemployment and high crime rates. As such, the state's encouraging of citizens to take responsibility for their own safety, alongside a punitive state discourse on crime and criminality, creates the space for illegal vigilante style actions to emerge in the shadow of legal crime prevention initiatives.     

Where is Latisha’s Law? Black Invisibility in the Social Construction of Victimhood

Laws named after specific crime victims have become increasingly common. These laws are part of a broader effort to downgrade the status and rehabilitative needs of offenders and to hear the voices and trumpet the legitimate concerns of victims—often as a means of justifying punitive crime control policies. Beyond the substantive merit of individual statutes, collectively these named laws provide a clear image of which victims warrant protection and memorialization: Victims who are vulnerable in some way, who are pursued by predatory criminals into their otherwise safe domains, and—above all—who are White. In this regard, an analysis of 51 named laws from 1990 to 2016 reveals that the vast majority of them (86.3%) honor White victims. In asking the question, “Where is Latisha’s Law?,” we seek to illuminate the virtual invisibility of African American victims and the implicit social construction of which lives matter more in American society.     

State Politics and the Right to Counsel: A Comparative Analysis

One of the most significant recent developments in the study of crime and justice is the emergence of theoretical explanations for the dramatic changes in criminal justice policy over the past few decades. These theoretical accounts address not only highly visible developments, such as the meteoric rise in incarceration rates, but also less-conspicuous shifts in due process and civil liberties, and they do so by attributing more-repressive policies to the emergence of a political culture that has substantially redefined crime and justice. This article focuses on an important due process issue, the legal representation of indigent defendants in criminal courts. We describe the state of indigent defense policy, particularly structure and funding, across the states in 2002, and analyze variation on two dimensions where states may exercise discretion: the extent to which states assume responsibility for funding services (rather than relying on local governments), and the generosity with which these programs are funded overall. We test hypotheses that link funding for services with the ideology of state political leadership, public values about tolerance and race relations, and states' public welfare policy climates. We find little support for the prediction that a welfare climate shapes more progressive indigent defense policies. However, the results suggest that the racial threat hypothesis helps account for spending on indigent defense, and that Republican control of the statehouse results in the perpetuation of local responsibility for program funding. Normative literature on indigent defense suggests that the patterns we observe may have important consequences for the quality of indigent defense services across states. Further, the findings reported here suggest that the politics of the punitive turn, as it has played out across the states, may be responsible not only for shifts in crime control policy, but for due process policy as well.