Imaginary Penalities

Pat Carlen

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843923763
• eBook ISBN: 9781134016105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is concerned to explore the idea of imaginary penalities and to understand why the management of criminal justice and criminal justice systems has so often reached crisis point. Its underlying theme is that when political strategies of punitive populism are combined with managerialist techniques of social auditing, a new all-encompassing form of governance has emerged- powerless to deliver what it promises but with a momentum of its own and increasingly removed from proper democratic accountability.A highly distinguished international group of contributors explores this set of themes in a variety of different contexts taken from the UK, N. America, Europe and Australia. It will be essential reading for anybody seeking to understand some of the root causes of increasing prison populations, social harms such as recidivism and domestic violence and the increasingly important role of criminal justice within systems of governance.

Chapter 1
Imaginary penalities and risk-crazed governance

Pat Carlen

Introduction

This essay develops the concept, identifies and analyses the phenomenon, and then discusses the challenge of, imaginary penalities.¹ The term imaginary penality is, in this chapter, used to denote penal policies and practices where agents charged with either the authorisation, development and/or implementation of a system of punishment address themselves to its principles and persist in manufacturing an elaborate system of costly institutional practices ‘as if’ all objectives are realisable. At the same time, however, they also recognise that, although their audited actions may be presented as evidence of the effectiveness of the project, when they act they must also address themselves to an other, oppositional but operational, penality with a material reality always and already subversive and, logically, destructive, of the objectives of the official penology. The term risk-crazed governance refers to a governmental mode which both cherishes and employs a pervasive social risk-consciousness as a tool of control, with the result that the demand for risk-protection becomes inelastic and far outstrips the capacity of governments to meet the demand (compare with Garland 1996).

The essay’s main argument is that whereas previous eras saw the development of substantive and symbolic penalities which could be confronted and modified through internal empirical testing or external critique of their relevance as responses to lawbreaking, today, in risk-crazed states of governance, some elements of substantive penalities (for example, rehabilitation programmes) and some elements of symbolic penalities (for example, ‘toughness’ rhetoric) have combined in the imaginary penalities of an ever-encroaching and totalising criminal governance.²

The burden of the argument depends upon an analysis of the effect that the political strategy of punitive populism combined with that of the managerialist technique of social auditing has had on workers (especially professionals) in the criminal processing system. The research experience which initially provoked the analysis occurred in Australia; the empirical focus is primarily on the UK. It is hoped that this ‘small canvas’ and regional approach will complement some of the insights provided by recent ‘large canvas’ and global theorising which, useful though it has been in tracing out a palimpsest of social trends, has not, in my opinion, been quite so helpful in identifying local points of political intervention and discursive struggle.

Narrative

In October 2005 I did some research in an Australian prison, Optima.³ It was a new institution designed to run re-integrative programmes for female offenders. The facilities were excellent and the staff were enthusiastic and non-punitive in style and philosophy.⁴ But, from the beginning, I was struck by their insistence that the prison’s well-publicised rehabilitative goals had no chance of realisation. In fact, what was most striking about Optima in October 2005, nine months after it had opened with a fanfare about its therapeutic ethos and re-integrative objectives, was that not one of the staff interviewed would say that the re-integrative objectives were being met, and none could see any possibility of them being met in the future. They gave four main reasons for their pessimism: that whereas the prison and programmes had been designed for sentenced prisoners, the rapidly increasing prison population at Optima was primarily made up of remand prisoners; that the majority of programmes had not been accredited (that is, given an official seal of approval for use in the prison); that all the staff and many of the prisoners knew that back-up programmes outside the prison were very few and far between, and in some geographical areas, non-existent; that many of the staff thought that, even if there had been any post-prison support programmes, such programmes would have been unlikely to appeal to prisoners who (variously) were going out to continuing drugs usage, no safe and secure accommodation and abusive men; or who simply assumed from their previous experience that, in the conditions to which they were returning, crime was most probably the best solution to their problems (compare with Halsey 2006b). Not surprisingly, therefore, because of the many barriers to achievement of the prison’s objectives (barriers, incidentally, which lay quite beyond the control of the staff) and, also, because of the logical and practical difficulties of attempting to assess (for monitoring purposes) what contribution Optima had made to any post-prison lifestyle changes by its ex-inmates, staff revealed that they had informally modified the institution’s foundational rehabilitative/re-integrative objectives, and had justified the modifications according to four main arguments:

• we cannot track how women perform after leaving prison; we can only ease their re-entry into the community;
• we cannot monitor how women perform after leaving prison; but we can monitor changes in the behaviour of the women while they are in prison;
• we cannot get information about the achievement of programme objectives (outputs), but we can monitor both how the programmes are run (inputs) and consumer [i.e. prisoner] satisfaction;
• we should move away from aiming for recidivism reduction and aim instead for intermediate goals, such as increasing the length of time a woman stays out of prison, or equipping her to be better able to live in the community without getting into criminal trouble.

All of which was very understandable in the impossible situation of the imaginary prisoners, imaginary programmes and imaginary community which the staff had had imposed on them from without. Yet, although the staff in interview were quite certain that operational modifications to Optima’s objectives had been made and, moreover, argued vehemently that such modifications were justified, they were also adamant that they would not be making these amendments known to the judges and magistrates who would, therefore, continue to think that Optima’s objectives were the re-integrative ones advertised by the Corrections Department at the opening of the prison. For, although prison personnel could only maintain their own realist position and respond to the imaginary penality in coherent fashion by replacing the prison’s impossible-of-realisation formal objectives with more realisable objectives rooted in their professional knowledge of the factors (for example, safe housing and drugs abstinence) most likely to be strategic in shaping lawabiding post-prison careers, at the same time, that very process of institutional goal replacement destroyed the prime justification (re-integration) for many of the more minor offenders being in Optima at all, thereby also undermining the officially proclaimed rationale for the existence of the prison, its staff, and, indeed, by extension, much of the carceral system.

Comment

That’s the story. ‘And so what?’ you may be thinking. It is well known that there is nothing new about the existence of an observable contradiction between policy objectives and policy achievements (as a prison officer said, ‘that’s life’); there is nothing new about a prison’s rehabilitative goals being undermined by lack of social and medical provision for released prisoners (as another prison officer said, ‘that’s always happened’); and there is nothing new about organisational goal adaptation in the face of material obstacles to achievement of the original goals (as the prison governor commented, ‘that’s professional discretion operating as it’s meant to operate’). None of that was new to me. What, however, did surprise me was the knowing and collusive response of the penal personnel. By ‘knowing’ and ‘collusive’ I mean that not only did the interviewees admit to the inappropriateness of the prison programmes, they also implied that ‘everyone knew’, and that nobody could/would do anything about it. As the rest of this chapter attempts to make clear, I was gradually to come to the conclusion that their knowingness was born of a partial knowledge of the ‘imaginary’ nature of the penalities within which their professional consciousness was being reconfigured. Meanwhile, however, this was a different type of criminology or penality to any I had come up against before. For whereas the exposé criminology of previous eras repeatedly demonstrates how penal practitioners routinely claim to be doing one thing when they are observably doing something entirely different, nowadays exposé criminology has become somewhat redundant as, instead of either embracing or denying external critique, contemporary penal practitioners themselves point out that they obviously cannot do what governments claim they should be doing (that is, successfully addressing social welfare and medical deficits by penal methods) but [shrug] that they have to act as if they are. And it was in obedience to that ‘as if’ philosophy that the staff at Optima Prison were spending a considerable amount of time and money designing programmes for ‘accreditation’ when they already knew that the population for which the programmes were being designed was no longer in the frame; and also making ‘evaluation’ plans to measure levels of a ‘reintegration’ which they already knew was certainly not happening, and which, they claimed, was unlikely to happen in the future. In short, the staff at Optima continued to act ‘as if’ they were working in a therapunitive prison designed for reintegration via programming and appropriate back-up outside the prison when everyone involved, from basic grade prison officers up to Corrections Headquarters administrators knew that the prison’s whole concept of reintegration was ‘imaginary’ insofar as it was posited upon imaginary prisoners (they were short-term remand rather than sentenced), imaginary programmes (they were not running), and imaginary ‘back-up’ in the ‘community’ (neither ‘back-up’ nor ‘community’ existed). But it was an imaginary penality that was having real effects in that it was incurring financial and social costs, influencing sentencing and providing a rationale for the existence and perpetuation of short-term imprisonment and more prisons. Thus, whereas exposé criminology took its name from the primary task of exposing the gap between rhetoric and reality, the concept of imaginary penalities presupposes that the rhetoric has become the reality.

And I suspect that this ‘as if’ penality may have become endemic to criminal processing and penal policies wherever governments partly contrive, and partly attempt to meet, popular demands for punitive sentencing at the same time as trying both to justify the increases in imprisonment with promises of in-prison programmes directed at recidivism reduction, and to control the outcomes of such programmes by denying all discretion of interpretation and action to prisons’ staff, criminal processing workers and researchers. This is not to say that professionals cease to use their discretion. As we saw with the modification of Optima’s reintegrative objectives, professionals have to use discretion in order to manage imaginary penalities, maintain professional identity and keep their jobs. For all public information purposes, however, criminal processing professionals working to managerialist audits are forced to converse within the limits imposed by governments determined to win electoral success by manufacturing (via self-fulfilling audits of imaginary successes in meeting impossible objectives) paper representations of the risk-crazed levels of control, discipline, deterrence and audit which can popularly be presented as having the capacity to reduce crime (see, for instance, Fitzgibbon (2007) on risk assessment in probation). It is under such conditions, also, that: sentencers feel justified in sending more and more low-level recidivist offenders either to prison (and for longer) or on to impossibly demanding non-custodial programmes; there is a transfer of resources from the community to the prison; the overcrowded prisons cannot cope with inmate populations totally inappropriate for the programmes on offer (or vice versa); once released from prison (ex)prisoners are returned to the same, or worse social circumstances than they were in before; and any change that the in-prison programmes might have effected is negated by the insuperable difficulties inherent in the prisoners’ histories of poverty and abuse and present ex-prisoner status. Concomitantly, some criminal processing and penal personnel partly see through the ‘imaginary penality’ and, in attempting to reduce its contradictions, meet audit demands, and keep their jobs and professional self-respect, replace the official imaginary penality with an imaginary penality of their own and then, because the official story that ‘prison works’ is thereby vindicated, prison populations rise even faster. Yet, although this imaginary turn in penal practice may be a new (or repeat) reconfiguration of some older penalities, it is not exceptional. In autumn 2005 Optima was a local site of just one instance of what may be an internationally prevalent facet of contemporary risk-crazed governance: imaginary penalities. In the rest of this essay, I want to look at the characteristics of imaginary penalities and also at the risk-crazed conditions which have given rise to them in the UK.

Imaginary penalities

The concept of imaginary penalities as used in this chapter has a very specific meaning and refers neither to ‘imagination’, nor to an occupational psychology of intent, mendacity or hypocrisy. Instead, it tries to identify a specific structure of institutional worker-consciousness wherein:

• agents charged with the authorisation, development and/or implementation of a system of punishment address themselves to its principles and persist in manufacturing an elaborate system of costly institutional practices ‘as if’ all objectives are realisable;
• at the same time as presenting their reflexively audited actions as evidence of the effectiveness of the project;
• at the same time, also, as being aware that, when they act, they must also address themselves to an Other, oppositional but operational, penality with a material reality always and already subversive and, logically, destructive, of the objectives of the official penology.

Thus, although Althusser (1971) employed the concept of the ‘imaginary’ to describe a mode of knowing which he described as ‘unscientific and non-theoretical’, the concept is being used here to denote an ideological form of knowing (not knowledge) which is forced to suppress some forms of knowledge (the Other) in order to make sense of the anomic contradictions between the demands of governance and the social conditions in which those demands can be met (compare with Merton on anomie 1968/1949). However, this Other can never be totally suppressed because it is always and already implicated in the social conditions which have given rise to the demand for governance in the first place. By way of illustration, let us go back to the story of Optima.

The main question troubling me when I was interviewing at Optima was: how could prison personnel tell me that all their reintegrative efforts within the prison were, on the prison’s own criteria, a waste of time when, at the same time, they were also telling me that they were working their socks off to compile a confetti of paperwork claiming just the opposite? Certainly their overt pessimism about the likely outcomes of this ‘as if’ operationalism was not that of constructivist psychology, based on Vaihinger’s philosophical tenet that by trying out different realities we may indeed help to realise them (Vaihinger 1924/1911). The staff had no doubt that because of the rehabilitation deficit outside the prison there was no chance of the institution’s rehabilitative objectives being met. Yet, their pessimism could not be explained by any lack of ideological commitment to the institutional objectives either; the administrators interviewed had all been involved with Optima’s policy blueprints, and the discipline and therapeutic staff had been specially chosen for their commitment to Optima’s rehabilitative ideal. So, the explanation that I eventually crafted was that the organisational consciousness of the staff had been constituted within the space between the material structural conditions constitutive of the rehabilitation deficit and the organisational cultures of audit and appraisal which demanded that the rehabilitation deficit be both recognised and denied. In other words: given all the organisatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the contributors
• Imagine
• 1 Imaginary penalities and risk-crazed governance
• 2 Imaginable insecurities: imagination, routinisation and the government of uncertainty post 9/11
• 3 The first casualty: evidence and governance in a war against crime
• 4 Inventing community safety
• 5 Telling sentencing stories
• 6 The 'seemingness' of the 'seamless management' of offenders
• 7 Pain and punishment: the real and the imaginary penal institutions
• 8 Imaginary reform: changing the postcolonial prison
• 9 The imaginary constitution of wage labourers
• 10 Re-imagining gendered penalities: the myth of gender responsivity
• 11 Risking desistance: respect and responsibility in custodial and post-release contexts
• 12 'The best seven years I could'a done': the reconstruction of imprisonment as rehabilitation
• 13 Re-imagining justice: principles of justice for divided societies in a globalised world
• References
• Index