A Companion to State Power, Liberties and Rights

Morley, Sharon, Turner, Jo, Sharon Morley, Jo Turner, Karen Corteen, Paul Taylor

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781447325826
• eBook ISBN: 9781447325840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Interest in the study of state power, civil liberties, human rights, and state sponsored crime is growing and there is a need for a book which brings these topics together. This book, part of the Companions series, provides succinct yet robust definitions and explanations of core concepts and themes in relation to state power, liberties and human rights. The entries are bound by their inter-relatedness and relevance to the study of crime and harm and the volume draws upon established and emerging commentaries from other social and political disciplines.

Laid out in a user-friendly A-Z format, it includes entries from expert contributors with clear direction to related entries and further reading. The contributors critically engage with the topics in an accessible yet challenging way, ensuring that the definitions go beyond a simple explanation of the word or theme.

It will be suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students on a variety of courses such as Criminology, Criminal Justice, International Relations, Politics, Social Policy, Policing Studies, and Law as well as other researchers in these areas.

S

SEMI-PENAL INSTITUTIONS

At the commencement of the 19th century, the chief objective of the semi-penal institution was to provide a temporary shelter for the rescue and reformation of wayward women (Rafter, 1985). Once firmly established within port cities in the UK such as Liverpool and London, however, the semi-penal institution morphed into a disciplinary vehicle designed to identify ‘deviant’ working-class women for total surveillance. This was performed in an attempt to control women’s habits of prostitution and their unruly unfeminine behaviour via the use of ‘wholesome’, paternal, Christian discipline and feminising penal regimes. Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, working-class women were viewed as ideal candidates for incarceration within an interlocking network of semi-penal institutions comprising refuges, penitentiaries, reformatories, homes of help and asylums for the committal of crimes against Victorian moral codes. The semi-penal institution, as described by Barton (2005, p 17), was the ‘third arena of social control, which [sat] between the “formal” discipline of the prison and the “informal” regulation of the domestic sphere’, sometimes being depicted as the ‘community’. Barton (2005, p 19) further elucidated that:

For countless women over the past 200 years, being reformed or punished in the community did not refer to a form of supervision within the home or neighbourhood, but rather, it meant being incarcerated in an institution of some form.

The semi-penal premise referred to the ‘paradoxical description’ of the institutions. They were not fully incarcerative in the sense of the prison, lacking the ‘visible symbols of exclusionary punishment such as high walls and locked cells’, but employed a homely and domesticated, yet punitive, environment (Barton and Cooper, 2013, p 140).

Ignatieff (1978) theorised that the 19th-century establishment of the semi-penal institution was linked to a larger strategy of political, social and legal reform to re-establish order on a new foundation and to expand technologies of power, knowledge, discipline and social control. Within the social history of the punishment of women, reformist anxieties concerning the abilities of females to cope within a prison, combined with normative conceptions of ideal femininity and womanhood, created less punitive, yet more totalising, disciplinary regimes centred upon normalising fallen women to appropriate standards of feminine behaviour. This all-encompassing approach gave rise to the birth of the semi-penal institution. The Victorian network of semi-penal institutions represented the archetypal method of dealing with a problem population by providing an alternative to traditional imprisonment via the use of differential treatment. This strategy, however, failed to consider mitigating circumstances that may have impacted upon working-class women’s lives, such as destitution, unemployment, ill health and poverty. State and non-governmental organisations concurrently attempted to halt women’s perceived threat to the existing social order.

Although under the umbrella term ‘semi-penal’, each semi-penal institution offered a distinct method of reformation to reclaim the lives of fallen women. For example, the overarching aim of Liverpool Female Penitentiary (1809–1921), located on 67 Falkner Street, was to rehabilitate and reform prostitutes via Christian teachings and discipline. Barton (2005, p 9) argues that regardless of their main endeavour to regulate and ‘normalise’ criminal women, all semi-penal institutions ‘employed a combination of both formal and informal mechanisms of social control’. The punitive element of these instruments of control legitimated the moral treatment and reconditioning of females via regimes of feminisation, domesticity, infantilisation and religious instruction. The semi-penal institution provided an environment whereby a woman’s mind, body and soul could be morally restored to serve its original purpose as wife and mother. A ‘therapeutic discourse’ underpinned the progressive programmes and provided a strict daily routine where women’s behaviour and domestic outputs were scrutinised (Sim, 1994, p 115). Panoptic reforming techniques of surveillance were undertaken by both a head matron and sub-matrons, who were deemed crucial to the success or failure of an institution. The notion of the ‘respectable and honest working-class woman fitted in well with middle-class ideals of “working-class femininity” (diligent, maternal and domesticated)’ and provided an idealistic, moral goal towards which female prisoners could work throughout their period of confinement (Barton, 2005, p 76). The semi-penal institution, to the unknowing outsider, was a halfway house – a motherly place of refuge reserved for women abandoned by society. In reality, it employed more totalising rules, regulations and strict moral and religious discipline than prison regimes utilised to punish male criminals. Female prisoners in the semi-penal institution were reduced to child-like creatures, normalised to middle-class ideals of respectable womanhood and religiously indoctrinated on a daily basis. Women, however, were still able to exercise agency and frequently resisted and contested the penal regimes.

KIRSTY GREENWOOD

See also: Social Control; State Punishment; Surveillance

Readings

Barton, A. (2005) Fragile moralities and dangerous sexualities: Two centuries of semi penal institutionalisation for women. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing.

Barton, A. and Cooper, V. (2013) ‘Hostels and community justice for women: the “semi-penal” paradox’, in M. Malloch and G. McIvor (eds) Women, punishment and social justice: Human rights and penal practices. London: Routledge, pp 136–51.

Ignatieff, M. (1978) A just measure of pain. New York, NY: Pantheon.

Rafter, N. (1985) Partial justice: Women, prison and social control. New Jersey, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Sim, J. (1994) ‘Men in prison’, in T. Newburn and E. Stanko (eds) Men, masculinities and crime: Just boys doing business?, London: Routledge, pp 100–17.

SOCIAL CONTROL

Social control is crucial in the understanding of any social life, and illuminates upon ways in which individual behaviours are regulated and patterned to form a normative social system. Early discussions of social control have appeared in the writings of Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and social/political philosophers like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Èmile Durkheim, Max Weber and Michel Foucault.

In broad terms, social control is the mechanisms and processes through which society maintains social order, unity and peace. These mechanisms are used to enforce and regulate ‘standard’ behaviour in society and include, but are not limited to, shame, ridicule, sarcasm, persuasion and criticism (also classified as soft controls), and force, coercion, segregation and banishment (also classified as hard controls).

Social control is exercised via various modes, which can be individual or institutional, formal or informal, and internal or external. Social control can be exercised by family, friends and tribes, as well as by organisations such as the state, religious bodies, schools and the workplace. The goal of social control is to create discipline mechanisms for ensuring conformity to established rules and norms. In an ‘ideal’ situation, social norms are internalised by individuals who are ‘socialised to accept the norms in which they live as right and good’ (Ferrante, 2015, p 148). When that socialisation fails, means such as ‘censorship, surveillance, and sanctions are used to convey and enforce norms’ (Ferrante, 2015, p 148). Power relationships then mould the minds of individuals within particular cultural contexts so that they follow the ‘rules’ of that society even when outside of the gaze of those with the power to punish for transgressions (Foucault, 1977).

Social control can be divided into macro-forces and micro-forces. Scholars interested in the study of macro-forces focus on the formal control mechanisms, such as the law, policies, police, prisons and punishment, employed to maintain order (Sim, 2009). They tend to examine questions related to the role that the state, societal ‘elite’ and political and media institutions have in establishing the norms and rules that govern people, as well as in the creation of ways in which control can be assured. Scholars who focus on the micro-controls examine peer influence and socialisation, and the ways in which they facilitate or inhibit human actions.

Since Foucault, the understanding of social control has increasingly become focused on regulating the behaviour of individuals or groups who are seen as criminal, deviant and vexatious. What is identified as criminal or deviant changes over time and varies across cultures. Similarly, the mechanisms employed to achieve controls, such as punishment, deterrence and prevention, vary in severity and scope. Such mechanisms were also historically adjusted to the needs of the broader society, for example, they changed with the process of industrialisation (Foucault, 1977). Nevertheless, the underlying objective is to enforce control over behaviour considered deviant in some sense by this wider society at a particular moment in time.

From the 1980s onwards, the understanding of social control in eliminating ‘deviant’ behaviours was based on the work of two leading theorists (albeit from two different perspectives): Thomas Mathiesen and Stan Cohen. Mathiesen (1983) focused on the control of entire groups and categories of people through surveillance and technologies such as closed-circuit television (CCTV) and computer-assisted intelligence. The use of group control measures turns discipline from open to hidden, out of individual range of vision, and makes it omnipresent. According to Cohen (1985), social control is an organised response to crime, delinquency and allied forms of deviant and socially problematic behaviour, which are actually conceived of as such in the reactive sense (after the act has taken place and actor identified) or in the proactive sense (to prevent the act from happening in the first place). In his view, control strategies are individualistic in nature and discipline lawbreakers or norm-breakers one by one rather than impact the behaviour of groups. Nevertheless, both agreed that instead of shrinking, social control measures continue to expand and strengthen, and spread into each and every corner of society.

MONISH BHATIA and AGNIESZKA MARTYNOWICZ

See also: Semi-Penal Institutions; State Punishment; Surveillance

Readings

Cohen, S. (1985) Visions of social control: Crime, punishment and classification. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Ferrante, J. (2015) Sociology: A global perspective (9th edn). Stamford: Cengage Learning.

Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and punish. London: Penguin Books.

Mathiesen, T (1983) ‘The future of control systems – the case of Norway’, in D. Garland and P. Young (eds) The power to punish. London: Heinemann, pp 130–45.

Sim, J. (2009) Punishment and prisons: Power and the carceral state. London: Sage.

SOCIAL HARM

Some scholars – notably, in and around what is known as ‘critical criminology’ – have argued that a disciplinary approach organised around a concept of ‘social harm’ may be more theoretically coherent and more politically progressive than a discipline organised around the state-defined notion of crime. An early statement of this approach, drawing on sporadic, but longer-term, work in and around criminology, can be found in Hillyard et al (2004). Therein, a social harm approach was considered in theoretical and methodological terms, and applied to a broad range of areas of social life, from migration and murder, to violence and victimisation.

Several clusters of rationales were set out to establish a social harm approach, as distinct from criminology. Crime, it is argued, has no ontological reality, but is a category that has to be constructed through law’s complex (and often incoherent) reasonings, and reconstructed through the practices of institutions and agencies of the criminal justice system (Hillyard et al, 2004). Moreover, such constructions of crime simultaneously encompass many petty events and exclude many serious harms. Further, the category of ‘crime’ gives legitimacy to the expansion of crime control – that is, it supports the extension of processes that, on any stated rationale for them, do not work, but consistently inflict pain – indeed, generate social harm. Overall, ‘crime’ serves to maintain power relations and criminology, through its perpetuating of the myth of crime, fuels all of these processes.

Importantly, it was further argued that criminology, since its very inception, has enjoyed an intimate relationship with the powerful. This relationship is determined largely by its failure to analyse adequately the notion of crime – and the disciplinary agendas set by this – which has been handed down by the state, and around which the criminal justice system has been organised. For some involved in this project, a social harm approach was designed as a corrective to the limitations of criminology; for others, it was an explicit attempt to develop a new discipline, quite separate from criminology, namely, ‘zemiology’, with its etymological roots in ‘xemia’, the Greek word for harm.

Since the publication of Hillyard et al’s (2004) edited collection, numerous attempts to engage with the approach set out therein have emerged. One stream of work has sought to develop and operationalise a harm framework in the context of addressing harms caused by criminal justice systems and practices (Greenfield and Paoli, 2013). Others have attempted to develop distinct ontological approaches to defining harm, such as Yar’s (2012) framing of social harm within theories of recognition, or to develop a general theory of harm via analyses of narrative accounts of a diverse range of harming and being harmed (Presser, 2013). Other responses have been to dismiss social harm claims as over-introspection, as being clear about what is opposed rather than what is proposed, or as redundant since these add nothing to what critical criminologists already do.

Recently, and notably, Pemberton (2015) has sought to refine the definition of social harm. Pemberton (2015, p 9) defines harms ‘as specific events or instances where “human flourishing” is demonstrably compromised’, a definition very much rooted within Doyal and Gough’s (1991) needs framework. This, in turn, generates a proposal that these harms can be categorised as ‘physical/mental health harms; autonomy harms; relational harms’ (Pemberton, 2015, p 9). In terms of the ‘social’, ‘socially mediated’ harms are viewed as ‘preventable harm’ insofar as they are either ‘foreseeable’ events or the result of ‘alterable’ social conditions (Pemberton, 2015, pp 9–10). This leads Pemberton to argue th...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• X
• Z
• Appendix: International campaign groups and sources of interest