Gavin Slade

Architecture and attachment: Carceral collectivism and the problem of prison reform in Russia and Georgia

This article looks at the trajectory of prison reform in post-Soviet Georgia and Russia. It attempts to understand recent developments through an analysis of the resilient legacies of the culture of punishment born out of the Soviet period. To do this, the article fleshes out the concept of carceral collectivism, which refers to the practices and beliefs that made up prison life in Soviet and now post-Soviet countries. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 revealed a penal culture in notable need of reform. Less obvious, in retrospect, was how over the course of a century this predominantly ‘collectivist’ culture of punishment was instantiated in routine penal practices that stand in opposition to western penalities. The article shows how the social and physical structuring of collectivism and penal self-governance have remained resilient in the post-Soviet period despite diverging attempts at reform in Russia and Georgia. The article argues that persistent architectural forms and cultural attachment to collectivism constitute this resilience. Finally, the article asks how studies of collectivist punishment in the post-Soviet region might inform emerging debates about the reform and restructuring of individualizing, cell-based prisons in western jurisdictions.

In search of recognition: Gender and staff–detainee relations in a British immigration removal centre:

In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status subordination in the IRC played out across a range of emotional responses, mediated and framed by gender. While these responses emerged in everyday interactions, the frustrations of life in an IRC, we argue, speak to much wider struggles over the status of immigrants in the UK, the confused and contested purpose of IRCs and the widening of detention as a strategy of migration control; in short, to matters of living under conditions of mass mobility.

Georgia's war on crime: creating security in a post-revolutionary context

Since the Rose Revolution of 2003, the Georgian Government has made criminal justice reform a cornerstone of its political agenda. A big part of this was the fight against organised crime. This article looks at the use of anti-mafia policies and police reform to create domestic security in the post-revolutionary period. This article provides an account of collusion between the state and organised crime actors known as thieves-in-law prior to the revolution and levels of victimisation and insecurity amongst ordinary Georgians in this context. This article then details the anti-mafia policy and the criminological situation in Georgia since the Rose Revolution. It argues that Georgia has witnessed a huge crime decline and increases in security. In conclusion, this article suggests that the Georgian Government now ‘governs through crime’ and that this model might emerge in other countries of the post-Soviet region.

Crime and criminal justice after communism: Why study the post-Soviet region?:

This special issue focuses on crime and criminal justice in the former Soviet Union (FSU), a world region we believe should be better known to criminologists. Together with all our fellow authors, we hope to convey to readers the fascination of the postSoviet region and the thought-provoking criminological questions that it prompts. We also aim to stimulate debate about what criminologists elsewhere in the world can learn from the FSU, and to consider how criminology in the region itself might develop. In this introduction, we present three distinct theoretical contributions that research on postSoviet crime and criminal justice can make to the global scholarly community. First, we discuss the theoretical utility to criminologists of the post-Soviet transition. Transitions to democracy and the market, whether in South America, Africa, or the former communist bloc, are notable for rapid increases in crime. Yet, we suggest that the transition paradigm now holds diminishing value, after two decades of post-Soviet development in which post-Soviet states have diverged substantially in both incidence of crime and responses to it. Second, as a corollary, we argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent development of its successor states provide a natural experiment that helps us understand divergence in crime and criminal justice policy. The FSU provides rich opportunities for both intra-regional and inter-regional comparison. It thus has much to offer to the rapidly developing subfield of comparative criminology.

Zero-tolerance schooling: education policy, crime, and democracy in post-Soviet Georgia

This paper explores the consequences of the massive investment in criminal justice in Georgia following the Rose Revolution of 2003. We argue that this resulted in “governing through crime” – the outflow of criminal justice practices and logics into other unrelated policy spheres. We demonstrate this by looking at responses to the issue of safety in schools. We show that up to 2007, despite a moral panic surrounding school violence, policy-makers were able to resist knee-jerk punitive reactions in favor of evidence-based, preventive approaches in the relatively transparent atmosphere of Mikheil Saakashvilis first term. By 2008, however, schools increasingly began to become the objects of central government intervention and education policy became harsher and more punitive. In 2010, Police Academy-trained School Resource Officers were introduced into all schools throughout Georgia, with troubling consequences for both teachers and students. The paper shows that this move was primarily the result of the more interventionist, executive-driven, and opaque policy-making process in Saakashvilis second term, which left unchallenged the circulation of personnel, expertise, and policy from the hypertrophied criminal justice institutions into the education sphere.

Popular Punitiveness? Punishment and Attitudes to Law in Post-Soviet Georgia

Abstract Georgia is the only country in the post-Soviet region where incarceration rates significantly grew in the 2000s. Then in 2013, the prison population was halved through a mass amnesty. Did this punitiveness and its sudden relaxation after 2012 impact attitudes to the law? We find that these attitudes remained negative regardless of levels of punitiveness. Furthermore, the outcomes of sentencing may be less important than procedures leading to sentencing. Procedural justice during both punitiveness and liberalisation was not assured. This may explain the persistence of negative attitudes to law. The Georgian case shows that politically-driven punitive turns or mass amnesties are unlikely to solve the problem of legal nihilism in the region.

Informality as illegality in Georgia’s anti-mafia campaign

ABSTRACT The paper examines the anti-mafia laws in Georgia and links the decline of informality under Saakashvili with the use of punitive measures in a concerted effort to establish legal centrism over and above other extra-legal normative orders. The paper discusses the specific informal practice of the obshchak, or mutual aid fund, and how this evolved to become linked to organized crime, making it an object of criminalization. Finally, the paper argues that punitiveness, framed in terms of fighting the mafia, was a key element in tackling informality. However, far from banishing informality, pressure in the criminal justice system led to systemic punitive informal practices within the state.

In comparative perspective: the effects of incarceration abroad on penal subjectivity among prisoners in Lithuania

This article looks at how global flows of people and policies affect penal subjectivity among prisoners in Lithuania. Those who had previously been incarcerated abroad perceive their punishment in Lithuania’s reforming penal system in comparative terms. We find that international prison experience may either diminish or increase the sense of the severity of the current punishment. Respondents often felt more comfortable in a familiar culture of punishment in Lithuania that emphasizes autonomy and communality. Moreover, internationalized prisoners perceive prison reform emulating West European models as a threat to this culture and are able to articulate comparative critiques of this reform and contest its effects.

Remembering and Forgetting the Gulag: Prison Tourism Across the Post-Soviet Region

In the middle of the Kazakh steppe gleaming skyscrapers punctuate the horizon. Entirely new buildings combine to produce a bizarre cityscape that seems to borrow from New York, Dubai, and Tsarist, as well as Stalinist, Moscow. This is Astana, the new capital city of Kazakhstan, built in less than 20 years, in a blistering spurt of construction. Forty minutes’ drive out into the steppe away from the new city center brings you to a small town called Malinovka. It seems a typical Soviet settlement. Six-storey blocks of flats from the 1960s and 1970s line the roads replete with Soviet murals celebrating space travel. At odds with its environment, a bizarre cone-shaped tower emerges from behind some bushes next to the highway. It is distinctly un-Soviet. Getting closer, a small marble bunker emerges into view, then an empty car park and a mocked up watchtower, a uniformed mannequin atop it, barbed wire around it.

Mafias, Criminology of

The article gives an overview of academic writing on mafias. It provides a definition for this often sensationalized phenomenon which focuses on the governance functions mafias perform and their similarities to states. It contrasts mafias with other forms of organized crime. The article goes on to discuss how and why mafias emerge and exist in certain places in the world at certain times, what mafias do, how they organize, how they expand, and how finally they decline.