Victor L. Shammas

The pains of freedom: Assessing the ambiguity of Scandinavian penal exceptionalism on Norway’s Prison Island

Where is the pain in exceptional prisons? A new generation of prisons produces unusual ‘pains of imprisonment’ which scholars of punishment are only beginning to catalog. This article brings the reader inside the social milieu of Norway’s ‘Prison Island’, a large, minimum security (‘open’) prison. Here inmates live in self-organized cottages and enjoy relatively unrestricted freedom of movement. But even under exceptional conditions of Scandinavian incarceration, new vectors and modes of punishment arise that produce ‘pains of freedom’, a notion drawing on Crewe’s historicizing examination of Sykes’ concept. Serving as an addition to conventional sociological conceptualizations of prison pains, the ‘pains of freedom’ can be classified into five sub-categories: (1) confusion; (2) anxiety and boundlessness; (3) ambiguity; (4) relative deprivation; and (5) individual responsibility. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with 15 inmates, it is shown that freedom is occasionally experienced as ambiguous, bittersweet or tainted. These new pains may be indicative of what is in stock for clients of future penal regimes in other societies.

Habitus, capital, and conflict: Bringing Bourdieusian field theory to criminology:

Bourdieu’s key conceptual tools, including the forms of capital and habitus, have recently come to be deployed with greater frequency in criminological research. Less attention has been paid to the concept of the field, which plays a crucial role in Bourdieu’s vision of how the social world operates. We develop the concept of the “street field” as a tool for scholars of crime and deviance. The concept serves as a guide for research and an instrument of vigilance, drawing attention to the agonistic nature of social relations and the role of domination, the importance of contextual factors in shaping the objects we study, the skillfulness of agents, and the transformative effects of remaining within semi-enclosed domains of social action over extended periods of time.

The Arab Body

The Arab body has long been a focal point of literary, political, technological, and military interventions. The state of otherness attributed to the embodied nature of Arab identity has made it a key locus of social domination as well as, more positively, a springboard for fresh takes on social domination far beyond the particular social suffering of a single social category. By engaging in a close reading of Kerouacs On the Road in tandem with an autoexperiential account of sociopolitical developments targeting Arab corporeality in the post-9/11 era, this article demonstrates the contradictions and potentialities of social suffering. To be a bearer of an Arab body is to be the on the receiving end of a whole host of societal suspicions, social anxieties, modes of surveillance, military incursions, and, more generally, deployments of negative symbolic power. But this state of domination turned corporeal also makes for a potential site of freedom, a vector for new solidarities with other groups and categories turned alien and other. What is it to have an Arab body? “When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York” (p. 117, Kerouac, On the Road). It’s all right there, in Kerouac’s novel, everything of relevance has already been said...The Arab’s body is violence, an unapologetic celebration of hot-headed exuberance, intemperate and irrational outburst of pure passion: as the Norwegians say, sint som en tyrk, “angry like a Turk.” The brown-bodied Orientals, all of the same sort, homogeneous bodies, Deleuze’s smooth spaces against the striating maneuvers of Western statecraft...I passed through customs at God knows which one of those miserable US East Coast airports – what was it Joe Biden said? “If I took you blindfolded and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you must think ‘I must be in some third-world country’” – you must think – all those brown bodies, crowded and sweating over impossible suitcases, huddled masses, wretched refuse of a teeming shore... Arriving in America, through the airport, a chaotic mass of automated passport scanners stretched out across the polished airport arrivals hall, how many billions went into them that should have saved the homeless from sleeping under overpasses – self-administered discipline, then, proclaiming the ascendancy of the administered self, even the penalization of the self, no longer a panopticon but a synopticon, even an autosynopticon, a self-seeing-all – those automated checkout counters at Safeway must have saved the corporation billions, and when I go grocery shopping, every item bipped is a unit of labor performed for the corporation and its shareholders...At JFK Airport I stood before the machine, scanned my own passport, all those biometric and digital fingerprints sucked up by the machine and fed into the vast surveillance-assemblage, what Lanier (2014) calls “Siren Servers,” probably into the Utah Data Center, which mindlessly absorbs “all forms of communication,” it has been said, and all this on a beautiful piece of Western land: have you seen the play of light and shadow on ochre hills overlooking these idiotspies in the Utah desert? The cruel machine that guzzles up the earth, when we should all be out hiking under God’s sky and find contentment... “Siren Servers are usually gigantic facilities, located in obscure places where they have their own power plants and some special hookup to nature, like a remote river that allows them to cool a fantastic amount of waste heat” (Lanier 2014: xv). But Lanier’s technocentricity doesn’t allow him to see that all this fantastic data computation is too effective, it captures too much stuff: the siren song of Lanier’s Siren Servers is the illusion that they actually work; but they can only end in one “giant confusion,” as Žižek (2014) says, a confusion that whirls and whorls around the likes of me, and the million innocents, always with the Arab body on its mindless mind... (Paranoiac moment, another reminiscence: boarding an Air France flight in Paris bound for New York, find myself taken aside at the gate, an additional inspection, but why me? Always this hysterical, insistent self-questioning: why, why me, what have I done? Must’ve been something I did, the sinking dread that makes guilty men of innocents. Otherwise the Gaze, “lidless and wreathed in flame,” wouldn’t have thrown its unflinching glare upon your body...which is just where they want you, they’ve got you cornered now, my boy...And yet isn’t the hysteric’s discourse the path to liberation? In Gérard Wajcman’s (1982/2017) pithy formula: “The hysteric ushers the articulation of knowledge.” And we should all be much more hysterical, to break from our somnolent, torpid march through history. (Another reminiscence: a Pakistani friend took his girlfriend from Europe to New York to visit the opera, wealthy types, undoubtedly, he said the whole airport experience left him shaken, he told me this whispering, years later, thousands of miles away, in a dimly lit bar back in Old Europe, still quivering at the memory of humiliation, and his realization of her sudden realization of the insurmountable difference between them, differance all the way down, also, the guilt of being weak, for are we not men? Why should we shudder at uniforms and a few innocent questions? Thin-skinned? Where’s your potent masculinity and strength gone? But then again, who can truly stand up against the terrible symbolic might of the state? For the state is “the realization of god on earth,” says Bourdieu [2000: 245].) I throw a quick glance at a piece of printed paper left carelessly for all to see on the table where one of the stewards, an apologetic Oriental in Air France uniform stands ready to rifle through our things while all those comfortable passengers sit observing this morality play, something to break the monotony of waiting, Dance Negro! Dance! We’re here for their entertainment now, the Theatre of Security (“For theater on a grand scale,” says one commentator in the New York Times, “you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration...The T.S.A.’s profession of outrage is nothing but ‘security theater’” [Stross 20006] – a profession of outrage, and now I’ll profess my own outrage, if I may) – damn you, France, for all your hollow talk of egalité, my soul rages suddenly at this obsequious type, a house Arab working in the master’s house. The sheet of paper has my name on it, and six or seven others besides – but by what ghoulish algorithm? With what variables and factors? Checked and crossreferenced by what criteria?) (And is the Other always consigned to a schizoid discourse? To realize their experiences in linear language must always feel like a betrayal of the authentic experience. The problem of representation is all-consuming, condemned to speak in weird ways and thereby always fail to be properly understood—dismissed and ignored. This skewed meaning is always looked at askance. I have no patience for those well-behaved littérateurs who try to make it at Princeton (Said), in the pages of The Atlantic (Coates)—their thoughts too polite, rarely intruding upon roiling virtuality, which always goes deeper, farther, and is more tangled up than the limitations of social-scientific or analytic-philosophical writing will permit: there’s too little of Escher, the Moebius strip, toruses, impossible topological donuts in them.) Back at JFK: there a cheap little webcam snapped a photo of me, finally the booth spat out a receipt with my name and passport details and picture on it; also, a big, fat “X” across my face, my photograph with an “X” on it, which meant: go talk to a US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officer, and every time I go to America it’s the same, randomly selected for additional screening purposes, etc., and I’ve stopped going to America now because America makes me paranoid. No clearer expression of the state’s discipline than that “X” across your face (I think it was even in red, though I can’t say for certain: they made certain they took it away from me when the interrogation, or interview, was over, and can’t the absence of an object be as clear an admission of guilt as its presence, negative evidence?) The Arab body is above all else a paranoiac body. Item: a Welsh (and Muslim) math teacher traveling to the US with a group of schoolchildren: “I gave one of the American officials there my passport. My first name is Mohammed. It felt as if straight away she looked up and said: ‘You’ve been randomly selected for a security check’” (Morris 2017). Impersonal bureaucracy becomes intensely personal when confronting the world through the Arab body: the sweat in shoes, the metallic tang of anxious armpits. “I was polite and followed all the instructions. She took me into this room. There were five or six other officials.” Sinister secret police officers, security officials, faceless bureacrats, governmental inspectors ready to conduct conduct...“They made me take my jacket off...They made me stand on a stool. They rubbed me all the way down.” Inspection as an erotic game, sexual domination, the frisson of the inspector’s voyeurism, sadism and glee, imperceptible little shivers of delight from the master’s hand – “They even pulled my trousers down to check my boxers...” – inquisitive latex-gloved fingers poking and prodding, probing. “Eventually they let me go through.” Arabicity is not a condition reserved for those ethnoracially or ancestrally hailing from the Arab world but is a condition that spils out from its proper vessel. Anyone can partake of Arabicity, or Arab-ness. Spinoza, the parvenu Sephardic Jew, a wanderer from Iberia to continental Europ

Burying Mont Pèlerin: Milton Friedman and neoliberal vanguardism

“As you know, I have for years been concerned about the fact that the Mont Pèlerin Society has become a large social gathering rather than the kind of intense intellectual community it once was,” Milton Friedman wrote in 1987 to his friend and comrade-in-arms, Arthur Seldon, founder of the Institute for Economic Affairs, a British pro-market think tank. By the second half of the 1980s, the neoliberal trans-Atlantic alliance between Reagan and Thatcher was on a firm footing. The views and proposals of the Mont Pèlerin Society, once marginal and ridiculed in a world domineered byKeynesianism,were now in alignmentwith the prevailing spirit of the age (Burgin, 2012, pp. 206–207). Thismoment of unexpected success seemed to afford Friedman, one of the Societys founding members and leading luminaries, the opportunity to muse on past trials: “In 1972, I was in favor of having a big twenty-fifth anniversary celebration and closing the Society down,” Friedman wrote, “in the view that it would be better for a new society to emerge which would have fresh vigor andwould be staffed by a new group of people.” Serving as the Societys president between 1970 and 1972, Friedman had come to the belief that theMont Pèlerin Society had been sapped of its original vigor and resolve. It had turned, according to Friedman (1987), into little more than a traveling circus, a gathering of “tourists” and “fellow travelers” in efforts to promulgate the neoliberal creed. It had ceased to function as the sparring grounds for world-class thinkers. With typical folksy candor, Friedman continued, “Unfortunately, I was unable persuade my fellow directors of that view, but in retrospect I still believe it was a darn good idea.” Seldon replied that he remembered Friedmans positionwell and recalled being “shocked at the notion that the effort to muster market economists of the world might end prematurely.” With hindsight, however, Seldon (1987) had to agree that Friedmanwas probably right and that he could “now see your argument.” Not for the first time Friedman had propounded a viewpoint once derided by his peers and only later to be embraced by others. Many scholars believe the Society has played a noteworthy role to play in the formation of neoliberal ideas and implementation of neoliberal policies. Mirowski and Plehwe, who assembled an international team of esteemed scholars to assess the Societys impact, turned the significance and centrality of the Society into an axiom for their research colloquium: theirs was a study of “what we believe has been the central thought collective that has conscientiously developed the neoliberal identity for more than sixty years now” (Plehwe, 2009, p. 4). Elsewhere, Mirowski (2014, p. 29) has claimed that the Society was “at one time in its history the premier site of the construction of neoliberalism,” rebranding it as one of the preeminent sites in what he terms the “Neoliberal Thought Collective,” a network of

Superfluity and insecurity: Disciplining surplus populations in the Global North

Capitalism in northern societies is entering an age of advanced precarity. On the one hand, postindustrial societies are confronted by growing surplus populations for whom there exist few positive functions in the market. These new ‘dangerous classes’ are increasingly subject to surveillance, discipline, and exclusion as the policing and penal instruments of the state are called upon to detect and contain risk. On the other hand, capitalism’s ‘insiders’ are increasingly consigned to a precarious life of hyperflexible labor and generalized insecurity. Confronted with a growing mass of ‘social detritus’, augmented by advances in automation and catalyzed by accelerating flows of capital, states in the Global North will increasingly be forced to mobilize the disciplinary instruments of policing and punishment to contain the swelling ranks of problem populations.

Prisons of Labor: Social Democracy and the Triple Transformation of the Politics of Punishment in Norway, 1900–2014

This chapter charts the structural transformation of the Norwegian welfare state and attendant shifts in the modality of punishment over the course of the 20th century and beyond. Between 1900 and 2014, the Norwegian welfare state embodied three distinctive forms: first, a residualist, minimally decommodifying regime of Bismarckian welfare politics; second, a comprehensive, universalist regime of social democracy that was broadly redistributive and decommodifying along Fordist-Keynesian lines; third, a hybridized semi-neoliberal regime that maintained important elements of social democracy while implementing marketized logics of state governance, relying increasingly on private providers to deliver core state services and witnessing accelerating socioeconomic disparities.

Who’s afraid of penal populism? Technocracy and ‘the people’ in the sociology of punishment

Abstract Contemporary sociologists of punishment have criticized the rising incidence of incarceration and punitiveness across the Western world in recent decades. The concepts of populist punitiveness and penal populism have played a central role in their critiques of the burgeoning penal state. These concepts are frequently sustained by a doctrine of penal elitism, which delegates a limited right to politicians and ‘the people’ to shape institutions of punishment, favoring in their place the dominance of bureaucratic and professional elites. I argue that the technocratic inclinations of penal elitism are misguided on empirical, theoretical, and normative grounds. A commitment to democratic politics should make us wary of sidelining the public and their elected representatives in the politics of punishment. A brief discussion of Norway’s legal proceedings against Nazi collaborators in the mid-1940s and the introduction sentencing guidelines commissions in Minnesota in the 1980s shows – pace penal elitism – that professional elites may variously raise the banner of rehabilitationism or retributivism. While penal elitism may yield a few victorious battles against punitiveness, it will not win the war.