Changing bodies, ambivalent subjectivities and women's punishment

This article seeks to explore the punishment–body relation by looking at women’s experience of imprisonment and their embodied identities. It traces the situational construction of bodies and subjectivities, and maps changes in women’s self-perceptions and body-image in and out of prison. Through examples from a qualitative study I conducted with women who experienced punishment in England, I show that while punishment targets the prisoner’s body and often succeeds in inscribing and stigmatizing it with painful experiences and scarred identities, the prisoner maintains a sense of subjectivity and self in custody through her body. She relies on it to make sense of her lived experiences, to survive punishment and often to resist its lasting effects, and uses it to reconstruct and manage an ambivalent, embodied identity. From this perspective, I propose that the prisoner body is understood as both the object and as the subject of modern punishment

Punishment, justice and emotions

This essay discusses the relation among emotions, punishment, and justice. It reviews theoretical scholarship on the role of punishment in society and sociological research on emotions, including the “emotive turn” in criminal justice and scholarship on the painful experience of incarceration. It argues that although punishment has been justified as a rational response to the problem of crime, there are emotional dimensions to its practice and function that go beyond crime. The authors suggest that the phenomenon of punishment is inherently affective, and propose that scholars of criminal justice should pursue a more rigorous study of how emotions, subjectivity, and self-identities contribute to the existence and framework of punishment in late-modern societies, in order to properly examine its role and limitations

Why punishment pleases : punitive feelings in a world of hostile solidarity

The argument advanced in this paper is that the motivation to punish relies on punishment producing a kind of solidarity that allows individuals to pursue emotional release together with a sense of belonging, without having to question or address why it is that they felt alienated and insecure in the first place. This raises the possibility that the reason why we believe punishment to be useful, and why we are motivated to punish, is because we derive pleasure from the utility of punishment. Simply stated, punishment pleases. It then analyses the relationship between punishment and solidarity to investigate why and how punishment pleases. We argue that the pleasure of punishment is directly linked to the specific kind of solidarity that punishment produces, which we call hostile solidarity. The paper explores the links between punishment and identity in order to examine the allure of hostile solidarity and then draws implications from this perspective and sets out an agenda for future research

The emotional aims of punishment

This paper offers a critical engagement with the question: what does punishment aim to achieve? Through a dialogue with sociological, psychological and criminological literature on the links between punishment, criminal justice and emotions, the paper argues that the main role of punishment in society is emotional. That is, it is desired and driven by a set of feelings, anxieties and insecurities. We discuss how this affective nature of punishment carries significant implications for scholarship on punishment; namely we show (1) that the primary subjects of punishment are the punisher and those in whose name they punish, rather than the punished; (2) that the aim of punishment is predominantly ideological, rather than deontological or consequentialist; and (3) that punishment has a symbiotic relationship with violence, so that one feeds into the other. The latter part of the paper explores these implications, and then concludes by proposing that a criminal justice system that sincerely aims to guard society against violence must be one geared at making punishment increasingly unnecessary

Punitiveness beyond criminal justice : punishable and punitive subjects in an era of prevention, anti-migration and austerity

This article advances a holistic conceptualization of punitiveness that acknowledges its complexity and contemporary social and political pervasiveness. We argue that punitiveness is best understood as a phenomenological complex operating at a personal, symbolic, political and structural level, which borrows from, but extrapolates the confines of criminal justice institutions. The article examines limitations in articulations of punitiveness in criminological scholarship, and then draws on three contemporary case studies to investigate how the political deployment of anxieties and hostilities around the ‘crises’ of prevention, anti-migration and austerity reveal and reproduce punitive logics. It then outlines an original conceptual framework to argue that punitiveness ultimately revolves around the construction of, and dynamics between, punitive and punishable subjects

Decolonizing the criminal question

In the last years there has been a growing effort from different theoretical perspectives to interrogate critically the impact of colonialism in the past and present of institutions and practices of crime control, both at the central and peripheral contexts, as well as in the production of knowledge in the criminological field. In this feature piece we examine this debate. We offer a critical account of key themes and problems that emerge from the intimate relationship between colonialism and punishment that directly challenge the persistent neglect of these dimensions in mainstream criminological scholarship. We aim to foreground the relevance of this relationship to contemporary enquiries. We highlight that decolonization did not dismantle the colonial roots of the cultural, social and political mechanisms informing contemporary punishment. They are still very much part of criminal justice practice and are thus also central to criminological knowledge productions