Ambiguous publicities: Cultivating doubt at the intersection of competing genres of risk evaluation in Catalan Prisons

Policymakers in Canada and across Europe have largely embraced the creation of post-disciplinary systems of punishment. In the autonomous region of Catalonia, Spain, this meant expanding connections between prisons and communities, expanding the publics a prison serves. At the same time, in part driven by austerity policies, incarceration in Spain and Catalonia has become more punitive and bureaucratic. Actuarial risk assessments introduced in Catalan prisons in 2009 are an example of this type of reform—designed to facilitate the release of low-risk inmates earlier and to control mobility. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Catalan prisons from 2012 to 2014, I show how both actuarial and clinical risk evaluation involved therapists’ anticipation of future aggressive acts on the part of inmates. Analyzing risk assessment as a practice and as an ideological frame, I argue that the short-term focus of risk assessments reinforced existing forms of interpreting inmates’ actions that therapists attempted to hold at bay. Risk as an ideological frame in the context of austerity contributes to a form of publicity that can further isolate inmates rather than facilitating the construction of community inside and outside of a rehabilitative prison

Institutional Redesign Proposals for the Preparation of Criminal Policy by the Government. The Focus on Ex Ante Evaluations

As many other countries, Spain is also experiencing a punitive turn in Criminal Justice Policy in the last 15 years, which is taking social narratives about crime and disorder as well as actual punishment to a parallel dimension that is quite often away from reality. While some strategies try to fight back from values and ideology or empirical studies to prove what works as well as the real effects of certain policies, my approach uses very different tools to tackle the issue: First, I´ll defend the suitability of Evaluation knowledge, from a Public Policy Analysis perspective, for the improvement of Criminal Justice Policy. Such perspective conceives Evaluation as much more than just a research tool and provides, in my opinion, a holistic approach that needs to be better connected with Spanish Criminal Justice Policy making in order to have a greater impact on it. Second, to ease such connection, I´ll propose a set of adjustments in the structure and tasks of institutions involved in Criminal Justice Policy creation. It is my view that for Evaluation to be considered a relevant tool in Spanish Criminal Justice Policy there should be some institutional changes I will try to explain in detail.Financiado por el proyecto: "La medición de la exclusión social generada por la política criminal de los países occidentales desarrollados, DER2015-64846-P. Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech