#17848 - Prisons - Criminology

Prisons and Imprisonment

Prison Populations

Lacey, Soskice and Hope et al (2017): “Understanding the Determinants of Penal Policy: Crime, Culture and Comparative Political Economy” Annual Review of Criminology

Four main explanatory paradigms that are the key determinants of penal policy:

1. Crime

2. Cultural dynamics

3. Economic structures and interests

4. Institutional differences in the organisation of different political systems and economies

Crime

Counterintuitive idea that crime does not constitute an important determinant of penal policy has assumed prominent position in criminology over the past fifteen years

• Influential scholars arguing that penal policy is driven primarily by political considerations (Scheingold 2010, Western, 2006, etc)

• Supported by studies, e.g. comparing imprisonment rates to homicide rates, which shows imprisonment rates continuing to rise long after the marked decline in violent crime in most advanced democracies from the 1990s on

  • Birkel & Dern 2012, Imprisonment and homicide trends in the US, UK, Germany and Norway 1950 – 2010

But superficial reading of these figures is misleading:

1. Significant time lag between decline in crime and decline in imprisonment: release rates do not correlate to admissions rates, and particularly in system with long sentences, decline in the rate of people sentenced will take a considerable time to show up in imprisonment rate (Pfaff 2012)

   1. Relevant measure should not be imprisonment rate, but rate of change in that rate

2. Factor of race:

   1. Reiner 2007: in relation to England and Wales, correlation between crime, and public perceptions of crime, and punishment is complex

   2. Crime is not the only factor that shapes penal policy via political concern

   3. Best evidence and analysis currently available support the view that crime rates, public levels of concern about crime, and politician’s perceptions of these factors are important determinants of penal policy (Garland 2001, 2017)

Economic Forces

Rusche & Kirchheimer’s Punishment and Social Structure 1968:

• Punishment plays a structural role in regulating labour

  • Capitalist economy: punishment operates not only to underpin the regime of private property rights but also to discipline a reserve army of labour – to govern social marginality

  • So expect to see punishment rise during times of unemployment and lower rates of punishment in times and places marked by high rates of employment

• Punishment has a clear ideological function in legitimising the capitalist system, construing conduct often produced by the injustices of capitalism as moral wrongs deserving of censure and sanctions

Drawback: monocausal nature of the theory; likely that economic factors are not the only factor involved.

Institutional Structure of the Political Economy

• Structural economic conditions within the context of changing technology regimes set key parameters for policy-makers and prompt conditions for crime and for the development of cultural attitudes and attachments

  • Seen in the immense social and economic transformation of advanced societies in the past half century – transition to information era

• Lacy (2008, 2010, 2012): argued that the structure of electoral competition in winner-take-all systems like England Wales and the US tends under certain conditions to produce “law-and-order arms race” between the two parties

• Liberal economies like US and UK are more likely to create surplus of labour, with less economic intervention and investment

How do market economies influence criminal justice?

• Structure of the political system affects the capacity to build coalitions capable of providing support for long-term investment in institutions, such as the welfare state, the education system and criminal justice intervention

• Shape of the political system affects the ways in which perceived anxiety about crime or insecurity register in the electoral process

  • In first-past-the-post systems like the UK, it is a typically adversarial and individualistic political culture

In liberal market economies with majoritarian electoral systems, the unmediated responsiveness of politics to popular opinion in the adversarial context of a two-party system makes it harder for governments to resist a ratcheting up of penal severity wherever key voters become concerned about crime

Conclusions

• Comparative political economy model, with its close attention to institutional particularities and their concrete shaping of incentives, provides the most promising framework in terms of bringing these insights together

• Comparative political model can help to explain

  • The production of crime patterns and responses to them

  • The way in which cultural factors are filtered and countered or reinforced in particular settings

  • The ways in common economic shocks are refracted differently and produce varying incentives to actors and groups in differently configured political systems

Cavadino and Dignan, “Penal Policy and Political Economy”, 2006

Globalisation has not led to global homogenisation of penal policy and practices

• Study of penal systems in 12 contemporary capitalist countries (US, England, Australia, NZ, SA, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Japan)

• Authors demonstrate that political economies of such countries can be broadly categorised as:

• This categorisation is strongly related to the punitiveness of the penal culture and the rates of imprisonment found in each country

• Crucial factor for this association may be the degree to which societies with different types of political economy are “inclusive” rather than “exclusive” towards deviant individuals

Private prisons: in their interest to have high prison population, provides business of incarceration

Market business between private companies

Building of prison will bring employment opportunities to the local area

Recall to prison – compliance with community orders, indeterminate sentences dependent on parole board for release, increase in such sentences – resourcing of the system means that parole board is understaffed and overworked – more risk-averse society

Corporatist management of information – societies where media inflates single high profile event, vs societies where such issues are more bureaucratic and administrative (e.g. Germany) – lobbying multiple issues together rather than hyper-focus

Wacquant, L. (2001) ‘The penalisation of poverty and the rise of neo-liberalism’

Overall: the generalised increase of carceral populations in advanced societies is due to the growing use of the penal system as an instrument for managing social insecurity and containing the social disorders created at the bottom of the class structure by neo-liberal policies of economic deregulation and social welfare entrenchment

• Europe, however, has not followed US approach of mass imprisonment, but rather entails the conjoint intensification of both social and penal treatments of poverty and the activation of the policing functions of welfare services leading to a form of “social panoptism”

• This leads to creation of a new regime: “liberal-paternalist”

  • Liberal at the top towards business and the privileged classes, at the level of the causes of rising social inequality

  • Paternal and punitive at the bottom, towards those destabilised by the conjoint restructuring of employment and withering away of welfare state protection or their reconversion into instrument of surveillance of the poor

Power, Order and Compliance

Crewe, Liebling, “Reconfiguring Penal Power” 2017

Penal power and the weight of imprisonment:

Argued that the concept of the “weight” of imprisonment has been under-theorised within penological research (below)

Penal power in transition

• Earlier phase of private sector competition was partly motivated by ambition to accelerate progressive culture change in public sector prisons – now superseded by requirement to reduce costs

• Prisons have moved from high-resource to low-resource institutions

  • Public sector prisons increasingly resemble their private sector counterparts

Outcomes of Penal Power:

Orientation of time:

• When officers work hard to enable the day to pass by peacefully, provides foundation for prisoners to “work on themselves” – focus on future

• If officers are passive, muddling through the day and merely containing prisoners, institution loses any sense of being oriented beyond the present

Good vs right relationship

Lawfulness:

• Private/public divide?

• Prison system is not responsible for the prisoner being there – prisoners may also feel resentment because of wider CJS and judicial decision-making

• Legitimacy linked to order

Sparks, Bottoms, 1995, “Legitimacy and Order in Prisons”

• LJ Woolf (1991) inquiry into disorders in English prison system in April 1990 – placed specific reform proposals within the general conceptual framework

• Authors submit that Woolf is outlining something akin to theory of legitimacy

  • There are variable conditions which render it more or less likely that prisoners will accept, however conditionally, the authority of their custodians

• Woolf was correct in his implicit stress on the need for prisons to seek legitimation from prisoners, and on the importance of humane regimes and procedural justice in the process of doing so

• Prisons impose higher levels of situational control than are usually present elsewhere

• Considerations of fairness and respect are not just normatively desirable, they are central to the achievement and reproduction of social order itself – not achieved by either prison studies

Final points:

• Combination of an inherent legitimacy...