The Politics of Punishment

A Comparative Study of Imprisonment and Political Culture

Louise Brangan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Governance d'impresa
• Index: Business

Prisons are everywhere. Yet they are not everywhere alike. How can we explain the differences in cross-national uses of incarceration? The Politics of Punishment explores this question by undertaking a comparative sociological analysis of penal politics and imprisonment in Ireland and Scotland.

Using archives and oral history, this book shows that divergences in the uses of imprisonment result from the distinctive features of a nation's political culture: the different political ideas, cultural values and social anxieties that shape prison policymaking. Political culture thus connects large-scale social phenomena to actual carceral outcomes, illuminating the forces that support and perpetuate cross-national penal differences. The work therefore offers a new framework for the comparative study of penality.

This is also an important work of sociology and history. By closely tracking how and why the politics of punishment evolved and adapted over time, we also yield rich and compelling new accounts of both Irish and Scottish penal cultures from 1970 to the 1990s.

The Politics of Punishment will be essential reading for students and academics interested in the sociology of punishment, comparative penology, criminology, penal policymaking, law and social history.

1 Introduction

The prison is everywhere. Yet it is not everywhere alike. For all its apparent universality, the prison continues to display marked, sometimes staggering, divergences in how it operates from one country to the next. What is permitted as a matter of course in one prison system, such as conjugal visits, modern interiors, literal warehousing or extended segregation, are each seen somewhere else as peculiar, utterly inexplicable, even offensive uses of imprisonment. These differences in prison practice and culture are not only regional; a prison system is liable to evolve and change over time. The present imprisonment arrangements in one place may bear little resemblance to how they were organised only a few decades earlier. Why is this? Why does the prison differ and transform as it does? This book sets out to explore these questions by conducting a comparative, historical and sociological study of adult male imprisonment and political culture in Ireland and Scotland from 1970 until the 1990s. I begin from the contention that prisons are social and political institutions. This requires asking: What are the social conditions that give rise to specific penal measures? What cultural values make certain uses of confinement permissible and appropriate while rendering others unacceptable? How does punishment shape social order, reproduce state power and enforce cultural norms? How does the prison relate to other penal, social and welfare institutions (Garland 1991:119)? To understand how exactly social, political and cultural forces find themselves realised in actual prison practices requires a much greater attention to the policymaking that shapes, remakes and maintains prison systems. In exploring these matters, this book aims to recover and compare the meanings, ideas and sensibilities that made Ireland and Scotland’s distinctive penal cultures possible at the end of the twentieth century.

Comparative penology: Conceptual challenges

Comparative study adds new depth to how we understand penality. The contrasting light of comparative reflection admonishes the tendency to take for granted, revealing prohibitive moral boundaries, oddities of outlook and characteristics of punishment and penal politics that may have previously gone unremarked. Conducting our research questions cross-nationally can help further refine how we theorise the relationships between punishment, culture, politics and social structure. However, we need to address what it is we compare, and why, if we are to advance comparative study in new directions that allow it to live up to its empirical and theoretical potential. As it stands, comparative sociology of punishment continues to be hindered by conceptual ambiguity regarding imprisonment and penal politics.

These conceptual limitations are rooted in the pervasiveness of punitiveness. Contemporary comparative penology developed in the shadow of the punitive turn experienced at the end of twentieth century in the USA and Britain, as well as other nations, evident first in what seemed to be the unravelling of the penal welfare consensus (Feeley and Simon 1992; Garland 2001). Integration practices and individual treatment were displaced in favour of punitive segregation, actuarial techniques, rapidly rising prison populations and the emergence of a more populist and virulent penal politics (Feeley and Simon 1992; Garland 2001; Pratt et al. 2005; Cavadino and Dignan 2006; Wacquant 2009a).ⁱ The travesty and tragedy of mass incarceration was felt to be totally unanticipated as late as 1970, by which time penal welfarism was seen to have succeeded as the settled and widely accepted penal culture (Garland 2001). The rapidity of this transformation, and the vociferousness with which penal welfare approaches seemed to be actively dismantled, drew considerable academic attention. The subsequent rise and spread of mass incarceration came to occupy a central place in contemporary sociology of punishment (Sparks 2001; Robinson 2016).

In this atmosphere, comparative researchers of punishment found energy and purpose. They have been compelled by the ‘importance of understanding the shared pattern of experience in the USA and UK (and by implication, quite likely elsewhere)’ (Newburn and Sparks 2004:11) and the study of those exceptional places that avoided the punitive turn (Brangan 2020). There was thus an urgency to comparative scholarship. Cross-national analysis gave scholars a means to more generally theorise what ignited, supported as well as rebuffed this severe penal trend during these crucial decades in the late twentieth century (Downes 1988; Savelsberg 1994; Whitman 2003; Cavadino and Dignan 2006; Green 2008; Lacey 2008; Pratt and Eriksson 2013).

In order to establish differences in penal harshness, studies have tended to favour breadth. Often looking at clusters of countries (Scandinavian, European or Anglophone, for example), they primarily rely on aggregated imprisonment rates and explanatory grand narratives of national heritage and political economy. This has been an especially fecund means of comparison. It has allowed researchers a platform from which to illuminate patterns of significant cross-national difference in how much a given country relies on incarceration to maintain social order. And the analytical frameworks highlight important connections between penal severity and a nation’s embedded culture or overarching political inclinations.

Yet, this broad approach to punitive comparisons has also left us with gaps in our understanding of, and explanations for, divergent penal cultures. In the comparative literature we see very few examples that highlight both the precise social contingencies and governmental choices which produce contrasts in penal practice. We have even fewer examples which systematically demonstrate the cross-national differences in how people are imprisoned. These empirical omissions are due to comparative criminology’s underlying conceptual limitations. The predominance of punitiveness (and hence abstraction and aggregation) in comparative study has meant that both imprisonment and penal politics remain opaquely and thinly conceptualised.

This book seeks to redress this balance by developing a new agenda for the comparative sociology of punishment. The framework developed and deployed here allows us to undertake fine-grained comparisons of penality. I describe comparative punishment using imprisonment regimes, a concept that compares the various ways in which people are housed, categorised, disciplined and monitored across a prison estate. As such, this compares how people are imprisoned, capturing the systematic differences within as well as between national prison systems. The second point of departure is the approach to penal politics. To explain these comparative carceral patterns we need to reconstruct and trace in sharper detail the comparative differences in prison policymaking. Like others, I agree that national culture, social structure, political ideology and historical antecedents are among the essential stuff that creates convergence and divergences in cross-national punishment. However, even ‘the more sophisticated studies leave us with something of a black box when it comes to demonstrating how penal law and policies are shaped and how penal decisions are made’ (Garland 2013:492). These broad forces and influences will only find themselves realised in the material character of imprisonment regimes when they shape the practical logic, styles of reasoning, values and visions of those actors who are charged with prison policy – what I define here as political culture. Hence, we will be equipped to better elucidate exactly how political, social and cultural patterns translate into actual prison practice by generating an insider perspective of penal policymaking (Barker 2009, Jones and Newburn 2005). The theoretical premise and central lesson here is socio-political: that grasping a meaningful understanding of the political ideas and social meanings that shape the routine decisions about how to imprison will help us explain differences in cross-national imprisonment regimes, as well as deepen our understanding of penality in each comparator nation.

Ireland and Scotland: Anglophone punitive exceptions

Comparative research has worked within some theoretical and methodological restrictions of its purpose. This historical penal comparison is sited in Ireland and Scotland arising from the knowledge that the geography of our penal theories and comparative concerns take place in a surprisingly small number of regions (Aas 2012). Prison rates, political economies and enduring historical legacies might help capture and explain dominant aspects of penality in England and the USA, but these discrete punitive patterns have come to prejudice our general comparative questions (Brangan 2020). Examining and comparing penal culture in familiar times but in less places helps us rethink our comparative priorities.

If we should choose our comparator regions for theoretically relevant reasons, then Ireland and Scotland were decided upon precisely because they are both considered outliers within Anglophone penality. Ireland and Scotland, for different reasons, are seen as anomalies, exceptions to the punitive trend. Both nations experienced rising (Ireland) or comparatively high (Scotland) prison numbers from the 1970s, but by and large their carceral developments during this period do not fit with the prevailing historical narrative. In different ways, both Ireland and Scotland are considered to have avoided and mitigated the social drama and political high stakes of mass incarceration and penal populism that otherwise defined that era in this region. In addition, they are both nations that are often omitted in the wider theoretical literature on penality, rarely included in their own geo-political criminological context, despite their cultural, political and physical proximity to England and USA (e.g. Garland 2001; Pratt and Eriksson 2013; Lappi-Seppälä 2008). Barker’s (2009) revealing and instructive example demonstrates the theoretical insights that can be gained from comparing penality within exceptional and overlooked English-speaking regions. Following this, comparing Ireland and Scotland provides an opportunity to begin the necessary conceptual development to expand the comparative field of vision. Researching in places not considered mass incarcerators nor stalwarts of penal parsimony (but also not considered alike) saves us from the punitive/exceptional distraction.

This study also takes an historical turn. This is because there is an implicit historical dimension to much leading comparative work: how have things come to be so here and not there? Following Loader and Sparks (2004), our contemporary theories would be enriched if we examine ‘the contours and conflicts’ of penal culture ‘in the latter half of the twentieth century in their own terms’ (Loader and Sparks 2004:15; original emphasis). We will be better able to compare and contrast what happened in Irish and Scottish penality, and better equipped to refine our comparative explanations and concepts, ‘when we think seriously about the past’ (ibid.).

The historical approach has other advantages. While there have been exemplary works of scholarship that look at penality in both nations at the end of the twentieth century, it certainly still seems that much more could be written about the histories of both Irish and Scottish penal politics. Thus, Ireland and Scotland are recovered and compared as they are historical outliers, appear comparatively obscure and are most often studied at a distance from the main theoretical conversations (Brangan 2020).ⁱⁱ

Ireland

Ireland has an emerging reputation as an Anglophone penal exception, described now as ‘Hibernian exceptionalism’ (Griffin and O’Donnell 2012; Hamilton 2016; Griffin 2018; Rooney 2020). This is partially because as the crisis of rehabilitation was occurring in the USA and England and Wales in the 1970s, Ireland first adopted the term in legislation in the Prisons Act 1970. It is argued by some that this moment of penal change – the formal adoption of rehabilitation – lacked ideological commitment, apparently marking little more than a discursive shift, giving the appearance of penal welfarism without a subsequent systematic or ideational reorientation (Kilcommins et al. 2004:287; Rogan 2011). What we see is that Irish penal history of the late twentieth century is defined by what it is not. Ireland was, it is argued, curiously ‘immune to broader pressures’ of punitive transformation (Griffin and O’Donnell 2012:613). Instead, Irish penal practice has rarely been ‘supported by reference to a set of clear principles’ (Kilcommins et al. 2004:292–293), academic influence or other professional expertise. Punishment in Ireland was mostly a neglected area of policy – essentially operating in what is widely described as a ‘vacuum’ (Rogan 2011; Griffin and O’Donnell 2012). As a result, in lieu of political principles, the dominant terms employed to describe Irish prison policy history before the 1990s are ‘stagnation’, ‘pragmatic’ and ‘drift’ (O’Donnell 2008; Rogan 2011; Griffin and O’Donnell 2012; Hamilton 2014). Even an apparently punitive penal transformation in the 1990s, where prisoner numbers rose, the prison estate expanded and political discourse was engrossed with talk of dangerous criminals, has been explained as ‘political opportunism’ before a general election, pursued by a particularly vociferous individual opposition politician (O’Donnell and O’Sullivan 2003; Rogan 2011). Thus, it is argued that it was an empowered actor, rather than a change in ideology, structure or culture, who instigated these largely uncoordinated penal changes.

But questions remain. If Irish prisons did not treat or rehabilitate, then in what ways were people imprisoned? What sorts of programmes and regimes were prisoners subject to? What expectations were made of prisoners and prisons? Moreover, no decision is ever merely pragmatic – even the most baldly straightforward choice is a constellation of ‘principled positions often unintelligible to their promoters’ (Freeden 1996:18). What did civil servants think about prisons, what problems were raised and what solutions did they pursue? These are significant questions that remain to be answered and would yield new theoretical insights if subject to a fuller historical recovery.

Scotland

It is believed that Scotland has equally avoided the punitive trends that otherwise de...