Re-Thinking the Political Economy of Punishment

Perspectives on Post-Fordism and Penal Politics

Alessandro De Giorgi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754626107
• eBook ISBN: 9781351903554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Social Sciences

The political economy of punishment suggests that the evolution of punitive systems should be connected to the transformations of capitalist economies: in this respect, each 'mode of production' knows its peculiar 'modes of punishment'. However, global processes of transformation have revolutionized industrial capitalism since the early 1970s, thus configuring a post-Fordist system of production. In this book, the author investigates the emergence of a new flexible labour force in contemporary Western societies. Current penal politics can be seen as part of a broader project to control this labour force, with far-reaching effects on the role of the prison and punitive strategies in general.

Chapter 1

The Political Economy of Penality and the Sociology of Punishment – Past and Present

Introduction

Toward the end of the 1960s, the criminological field saw the emergence of some critical perspectives which in fact revolutionised the theoretical coordinates of this discipline. At its origins, ‘criminology’ was the study of the problem of crime, more than the study of the problem of punishment. That is to say, criminology considered punishments, criminal policies and strategies of social control only under the point of view of their impact on crime. For a long time criminology has been a savoir whose object was the production of effective strategies for the government of deviance and criminality. Thus, it is easy to understand why the study of social and individual causes of crime played such an important role within the priorities of criminological research.

A result of what Michel Foucault defined as the ‘inquisitorial society’, criminology emerged as a knowledge inseparable from the technologies of power built around the field of deviance. Its history is part of the process of ‘governamentalisation’ of the State which took place between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In that period, the science of government (and police science) became more specialised, giving birth to different forms of knowledge about the population: social statistics, urban studies, social psychiatry and criminology itself.¹ The ‘inquisitorial’ attitude of criminology produced a set of new discourses around the homo criminalis, the recidivist, the criminogenic environment and the dangerous class.²

Before the 1960s, criminological research did not question the rigid epistemological structure of its own origins: the influence of positivism was perhaps still so strong to make it virtually impossible for different perspectives to emerge. Nor had criminology ever dealt with an analysis of social reactions to deviance, separating these (at least methodologically) from their object (i.e. deviants). It was only with the development of the labelling approach that social reactions to crime emerged within criminology as a separate field of inquiry. In the political context of the 1960s, with their radical critique of repressive power in its diverse expressions (the family, the church and total institutions), some space was opened for a sociological perspective in criminology. The growing awareness of the failure of the prison stimulated critical criminologists to question the role of this institution and to try to uncover the reasons for its persistence in the present.

Labelling theorists had already started a revision of criminological knowledge, but confined their research within the boundaries of a micro-sociological perspective. They were ‘empowering’ the deviant against the structures of power, but without developing a deeper analysis of the social power to label. On the one hand, the deviant world described by labelling theorists seemed incapable of any resistance except at an individual level. On the other hand, power was never analysed beyond those face-to-face interactions taking place in the microcosm of total institutions. These aspects of American liberal sociology were in fact the targets of Alvin Gouldner’s famous critiques:

The attitude of these zookeepers of deviance is to create a comfortable and human Indian Reservation, a protected social space, within which these colourful specimens may be exhibited, unmolested and unchanged. The very empirical sensitivity to fine detail, characterising this school, is both born of and limited by the connoisseur’s fascination with the rare object: its empirical richness is inspired by a collector’s aesthetic.³

These critiques pointed to the importance of a materialistic analysis of social control. According to Gouldner, the main difference between liberal and radical sociology lies in the willingness to focus critical attention on the labellers (power institutions) as well as on the labelled (their victims):

… I think that radical sociologists differ from liberals in that, while they take the standpoint of the underdog, they apply it to the study of overdogs. Radical sociologists want to study ‘power elites’, or the masters of men; liberal sociologists focus their efforts upon underdogs and victims and their immediate bureaucratic caretakers.⁴

This political and intellectual position announced the irruption of Marxism in the sociology of deviance that would take place between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.⁵ In this context a new critical direction emerged in criminology, investigating on the one hand the historical trajectory through which the prison came to replace older forms of punishment and, on the other hand, the reasons for its persistence in the present, given its apparent failure. The aim became that of looking beyond the rhetorical legitimation of imprisonment, to unveil its latent functions. We see in this period the development of two main directions of analysis: the first is an ensemble of historically oriented works about the role of punitive systems in the consolidation and reproduction of a capitalist economy. These works deconstructed the mainstream histories of punishment. Until that period this history had been represented as a continuous process towards more humane punishments: it was now rethought as a sequence of strategies whose main object was the imposition of class subordination.

The second direction of research focused on the present functions of social control and the prison: here the analysis concentrated itself on the impact of social control on contemporary capitalism and especially on the capitalist labour market. What these different perspectives had in common was the idea that punitive institutions could only be analysed under the point of view of the relations of production: a critical sociology of punishment had to uncover the role played by penality in the reproduction of these relations.

In the following pages I will offer a reconstruction of this ‘materialist criminology’, both in its historical and contemporary directions. First, it is necessary to introduce some theoretical assumptions of the political economy of punishment: this is why I start with an analysis of Rusche and Kirchheimer’s works. Then, I review some recent works on the history of punishment and the prison in particular. This section is followed by an analysis of some contemporary perspectives within the political economy of punishment: that is, those works which investigated the relation between the economy and punishment in contemporary society. In the last section I will submit some critiques to this perspective, anticipating some arguments that will be developed in subsequent chapters. I suggest in particular that the contemporary materialist perspective appears inadequate to capture the deep transformations of the economy in contemporary societies: namely, the transition from a ‘Fordist’ to a ‘post-Fordist’ model of production and its implications for social control.

Penality and the Critique of Political Economy

The main assumption of the political economy of punishment is that it is possible to understand the evolution in the forms of punishment only if one separates them from the functions that have been historically assigned to them. Penality plays a role that is different from the control of criminality and from social defence: this role can be explained only if we put the evolution of social control strategies in the context of the economic dynamics of society and the corresponding contradictions. Both the historical emergence of peculiar punitive practices and their persistence in contemporary society should be connected to the relations of production and to the organisation of labour. The theoretical landscape in which the political economy of punishment can be situated is historical materialism as Marx presented it in the famous ‘Preface’ of 1859:

In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which definite forms of consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life.⁶

Thus, penality is part of those juridical, political and social institutions (the law, the state, the family, etc.) whose function is to preserve the hegemonic class relations. In order to describe the transformations of these institutions, it is necessary to link the ideological form of class power to the material power which dominates in the sphere of production:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class that is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force … The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.⁷

The control of criminality, as an explicit legitimation of penal institutions, is a pure ideological representation through which the ruling class maintains the basis of its dominance. Punitive institutions are just one among the many expressions of the ideological power imposed on the subordinate classes. Through a symbolic legitimation of the existing social order, these institutions contribute to obscure the contradictions of capitalist society. In a class society criminal law is an expression of class power, not of a ‘general interest’:

The would-be theories of criminal law that derive the principles of penal policy from the interests of society as a whole are conscious or unconscious distortions of reality. Society as a whole does not exist, except in the fantasy of the jurists. In reality we are faced only with classes, with contradictory, conflicting interests. Every historically given system of penal policy bears the imprint of the class interests of that class which instigated it.⁸

This is not to suggest that there is an automatic relation between structure and superstructure, as if the former produced the latter by necessity. For a long time, ‘determinism’ and ‘economic reductionism’ have been criticised both within Marxist theory in general and within the political economy of punishment in particular.⁹ The complexity of the relations between the material structure of society and its punitive institutions was recognised by Georg Rusche. In 1933, in his first definition of the theory which would later be the core of Punishment and Social Structure, Rusche described this complexity:

The dependency of crime and crime control on economic and historical conditions does not, however, provide a total explanation. These forces do not alone determine the object of our investigation and by themselves are limited and incomplete in several ways.¹⁰

According to Rusche, the historical and materialist analysis of punitive systems was absent from the criminological literature of the time:

These studies lack a foundation in the basic principles of sociological knowledge. They are neither connected to economic theory, nor are they historicall...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• 1 The Political Economy of Penality and the Sociology of Punishment – Past and Present
• 2 Post-Fordism and the Emergence of the Multitude
• 3 The Government of Surplus – Preliminary Incursions in the Field of Post-Fordist Social Control
• 4 Mass Confinement and Actuarial Penology
• 5 The Criminalisation of International Migrations: Towards an Actuarial Model of Control?
• Bibliography
• Index