Vanessa Barker

Nordic Exceptionalism Revisited: Explaining the Paradox of a Janus-Faced Penal Regime

Nordic penal regimes are Janus-faced: one side relatively mild and benign; the other intrusive, disciplining and oppressive. This paradox has not been fully grasped or explained by the Nordic Exceptionalism thesis which overstates the degree to which Nordic penal order is based on humaneness and social solidarity, an antidote to mass incarceration. This essay examines the split in the foundation of the Swedish welfare state: it simultaneously promotes individual well-being in the social sphere but enables intrusive deprivations of liberty and in some cases, violates the principles of human rights. The backbone of the welfare state, Folkhemmet, the People’s Home, is at once demos, democratic and egalitarian and ethnos, a people by blood, exclusionary and essentialist. The lack of individual rights and an ethno-cultural conception of citizenship make certain categories of people such as criminal offenders, criminal aliens, drug offenders and perceived ‘others’, particularly foreign nationals, vulnerable to deprivation and exclusion.

Penal power at the border: Realigning state and nation:

Penal power at the border relies on coercive tools such as expulsion, eviction, criminalization, and penalization to respond to mass mobility, which is perceived to be a social threat rather than a political expression of rights. By deploying its primal power, its material and symbolic violence invested in criminal justice, the state taps into unparalleled capacity to impose meaning on others, backed by the moral weight of censure and sanction. The criminalization and penalization of migrants are effective precisely because they bring moral weight to this sorting process, separating the worthy from the wrongdoer. This article develops conceptual tools to understand the structural and communicative capacities of penal power to reconstitute the nation state, to reset the national frame of reference, and reassert the state’s dominion over it.

Introduction to the special issue on the state of the State

The aim of this special issue is to examine the constitutive relationship between the state and penal orders—that is, the uses and structures of criminal law and punishment.1 It investigates how various criminal justice tools—its staff, sanctions, and symbolic resources—help to produce and reproduce particular political entities and how particular political configurations lead to specific penal outcomes. Just as the early modern state depended upon and claimed a monopoly of violence against rule violators to establish its political authority and legitimacy (Garland, 1996; Weber, 1919), 21st-century democratic states continue to use penal power to produce social order. As our contributors show, building on foundational work, policing practices, criminal law, and penal sanctions have been used to shore up political power, define political communities, reflect economic inequalities, and reproduce social, gendered, and racial hierarchies. But they seek to go further, to develop new ways of thinking, mapping, and conceptualizing this mutually constitutive relationship, and to challenge taken for granted concepts of the state and its relationship to punishment. Contributors analyze under-explored sites of penal power, and by doing so recast our understanding of its forms and functions. Over the past few decades, changes in migration, global economic arrangements, and patterns of violence, have posed new challenges for modern states, and new forms of punishment have emerged that are directly tied to state sovereignty, degrees of citizenship, and national identity. These developments have pushed scholars to reconsider extant theories, which often treat state form as exogeneous to penal orders. Many of these new punishment forms and practices—particularly with respect to national borders, immigrants, and marginalized populations—pose challenges to the legitimacy of the state, in particular around principles of equality, citizenship, and territory. Mass migration due to civil conflict and economic devastation, for example, has put pressure on Europe’s most robust welfare states (e.g. Sweden), resulting in the deployment of routine criminal justice processes and procedures to national borders. And violent conflict and criminal activity pose particularly difficult challenges for countries transitioning 724909 TCR0010.1177/1362480617724909IntroductionTheoretical CriminologyIntroduction research-article2017

Book Review: Bruce A. Arrigo and Dragan Milovanovic, Revolution in Penology: Rethinking the Society of Captives, Rowman & Littlefield: Lanham, MD, 2009; 213 pp.: ISBN-13: 9780742563629,

Revolution in Penology is an ambitious, dense, and postmodern analysis of the ‘pains of imprisonment’—the harm inflicted upon criminal offenders through the exclusion and alienation of confinement (see Sykes, 1958; Goffman, 1961). Arrigo and Milovanovic argue that penal harm is inflicted not only upon prisoners but on prison guards, correctional staff, government officials, and the public. The attempt to punish offenders, the effort to extract the moral payback for the harm done to victims and society, in their view, produces more harm in society, limiting freedom and human potential. The entire society is degraded by the violence of imprisonment. What Arrigo and Milovanovic add to this critique is a refined sense of how language, discourse, ways of thinking, and shared expression contribute to the reproduction of penal harm. The very words used to explain and criticize the prison make the prison all the more real and permanent. We are trapped by language: we ‘are our own jailers, sentenced by our sentences, imprisoned by our words’ (p. 11). By developing ‘constitutive penology’, Arrigo and Milovanovic offer a sophisticated theoretical foundation to an emerging anti-penal harm movement critical of the 30 years prison boom and mass incarceration. First, Arrigo and Milovanovic, building on Henry and Milovanovic (1996), develop the idea of ‘constitutive penology’ as an analytical approach to examining the discourses, institutions, philosophies, and practices of punishing. In this perspective, language plays the central role in shaping and defining social relations and making them meaningful. Through repeated interaction and language, human actors make up the structures and institutions that shape social order but they are also constrained by the very same structures (on structuration theory, see Giddens, 1984). Here, crime and punishment are understood to be socially constructed as human actors create the meaning of crime and control and produce the social conditions conducive to crime. Crime and punishment are products of social relations, inseparable from cultural context (p. 5). Second, they then apply the concept of constitutive penology to explore and understand the ‘pains of imprisonment’, showing how language, texts and codes create the prison experience. Specifically, they focus on how language and Theoretical Criminology

70.00, ISBN-10: 0742563626

governance. Many of these essays seem like trimmed down versions of much larger projects that would benefit from the extra space. Anyone looking for extended analysis of one region or a particular theme will not find it in this volume. This should not be considered a limitation but an exciting invitation for criminologists to delve further into these authors’ work, regardless of background in postcolonial topics. One pitfall to this abridged format is the temptation to see a simplified functionalist link between anomic civil society, increasing social disorder and the State’s anemic and/or reactionary responses. Another danger is a potentially imprecise application of theory. A prime example is Acille Mbembe’s sprawling chapter on the effects of war on the postcolony’s relationship to questions of life and death. His occasional macro-sociological use of psychoanalytic concepts requires more direct evidence than his literature review provides. In addition, notwithstanding the editors’ claim that the traditional state is undergoing change in an age of privatization, for the most part, the essays point to how these countries lag in the traditional teleology of state and economic development. Little space is given to the ways they are developing new modes of governance much remarked upon by criminologists with regards to developed countries. For example, how is the formal integration of the private and public spheres manifesting itself in institutions of social control? One possible site for study might be the prison, which continues to play an important and contested role in questions of law and disorder in these countries. It is now a well-established fact that western criminology has myopically missed out on many of the opportunities postcolonial sites provide for research and knowledge. This book offers a remarkable opportunity to delve into the work currently being done. Hopefully it will inspire future work in the field. Ezra Tessler Columbia University, NYC, USA

Book review: The prison and the gallows: The politics of mass incarceration in America, Marie Gottschalk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 451 pp. (including index).

ous. Drawings of the ball and chain and shower bath and photographs of more recent disciplinary tools – the ‘cuffing up’ rope system, iron claw, and tear gas billy – allow readers to envision the state’s changing responses to inmate resistance. Unfortunately, readers familiar with the literature on the history of punishment, corrections, and social control may find this book lacking in a number of important respects. A number of seminal prison histories are not citied in the bibliography. The analysis lacks theoretical depth and sophistication. The author does not apply, test, or even acknowledge the importance of theoretical frameworks and issues related to punishment and social control. Attempts to link the operation of the institution to broader economic, political, social, cultural, and legal contexts are generally superficial – more often, they are left completely unexplored. The book’s conclusion, which is buried at the end of the last chapter, makes no attempt to synthesize the history of the Maryland Penitentiary, extract lessons, and offer policy recommendations. Put simply, this is an uncritical march of progress institutional hagiography that fails to ask important questions about the ‘kind intentions’ of the state. These criticisms are, however, somewhat peripheral. The author’s primary aim is to provide a popular-chronological history of the Maryland Penitentiary for the Maryland Historical Society – not to write a sophisticated social or intellectual history of punishment and social control for an advanced academic audience. Readers interested in learning more about the basic history of the Maryland Penitentiary will, then, find this book informative. Criminal justice, social, and intellectual historians who are interested in exploring more complex theoretical issues regarding the nature of social control may also profit from using this book as a foundation to revisit the history of the Maryland Penitentiary to determine whether it was, indeed, a ‘monument to good intentions’. Al Pisciotta Kutztown University, PA, USA