Pastoral penality in 1970s Ireland: Addressing the pains of imprisonment

This article aims to deepen and broaden our US- and UK-centric theories and histories of late 20th-century penal transformation. Using oral history interviews with civil servants, archival research and analysis of published documents, this article investigates Ireland’s delayed progressive penal transformation in the 1970s. It challenges the dominant narrative that Irish penal policy was stagnant or merely pragmatic during this period and provides cultural, social and political explanations for Ireland’s changing penal culture. These findings also show the limitations of penal welfarism for sufficiently capturing the character of Ireland’s progressive penal ideas and intentions. The article outlines the concept of pastoral penality as an alternative kind of progressive penal politics. Pastoral penality focuses on the problems of the prison, rather than the problems of the prisoner, who is not viewed as inherently criminal and in need of treatment. Instead they require support in coping with the harms of imprisonment

Exceptional states: The political geography of comparative penology

It is now common in the sociology of punishment to lament that comparative penology has not matured as an area of research. While there have been seminal works in the comparative canon, their conceptual tools tend to be drawn from grand narratives and macro-structural perspectives. Comparative researchers therefore lack concepts that can help capture the complexity of penality within a single nation, limiting the cross-national perspective. Why is this relative lack of comparative refinement still the case? This article investigates this question by looking specifically at penal exceptionalism, a concept central to comparative penology. While punitiveness as a comparative and descriptive category has been critiqued, its converse, penal exceptionalism remains prevalent but undertheorised. Examining exceptionalism reveals that it is not merely the macro-structural approach to comparison that has limited the development of cross-national sociology of punishment, but the Anglocentric assumptions, which are the bedrock of comparative penology. In this essay, I argue that penal exceptionalism versus punitiveness is an Anglocentric formulation. These taken-for-granted assumptions have become so central to the comparative enterprise that they act as a barrier to developing new innovative comparative frameworks and concepts. The article concludes by suggesting some methodological strategies that are intended as a way of helping comparative penology to expand its toolkit and support the ongoing development of more equitable criminological knowledge

Penality at the periphery : deficits, absences, and negation

What might mean to reorientate the field of punishment and society so that we might be able to say it is democratizing, diversifying, and increasingly inclusive? If we wish to expand our knowledge of penal politics in particular, but also develop a more inclusive field of punishment and society, then we need to also examine the impact this ethnocentricity can have on shaping scholarship and debate within the periphery. The article contrasts two alternative readings of Irish penal politics to show how sometimes the concepts from the U.K. and U.S. penality can come to inflect studies of penal politics outside the mainstream. If we are to make an attempt at democratizing our knowledge, then it is as de Sousa Santos wrote, that the first struggle is often against ourselves. The article concludes with a brief critical discussion about who can speak for Southern and peripheralized places; where is even a southernized place; and if we are to democratize and diversify the study of penal politics, what role is there for our existing canon? I conclude that is not where we study, but how we study it

‘There is more than one sort of prison, Captain’:a popular criminology of prisons and penal regimes in Star Wars

In this paper we emphasise how science fiction, as a projection of the possible, can forewarn of dystopic dangers in emergent and future penal regimes. In this popular criminology we explore three archetypes of the prison as they have appeared across the Star Wars franchise: the panoptic prison; the labour camp; and the smart prison. The panoptic prison of the Galactic Republic invokes reflective nostalgia; prompting critical discussion of the deficiencies of the modern prison. Under the Galactic Empire prisons become labour camps, recalling the horrors of the Gulag as violent and cruel manifestations of underpinning ideology. Whilst the fall of the Galactic Empire signalled a return to governance based on democratic values, the representation of the smart prison in the New Republic continues to resonate as a techno-Gulag, reading as an allegory for a deeper crisis of liberal democracy. Analysed as such, prisons in Star Wars exist at the intersection of the past, present and possible futures of penal regimes, and in our current political climate can be a resource for resistance to technological trends and dystopic dangers. Star Wars, we conclude, and science fiction more broadly, is well-positioned to inform a radical re-imagining of future prisons and penal regimes

Against Hibernian exceptionalism

During the early stages of my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, in a moment of flippant chit chat, I suggested to a fellow student that I was toying with the idea of writing my entire dissertation on the comparative sociology of punishment without reference to David Garland. This obviously sounds like the ludicrous or crude act of a provocateur. My friend was reasonably alarmed – not least because writing a thesis situated within the sociology of punishment that didn't acknowledge, let alone mention, David Garland defied the basic logic of a literature review. Embarrassed, I desperately tried to clarify, though not successfully, that I was speaking in jest, but that there was a serious note underlying this statement. I had been wondering how one would write and think about punishment and penal politics in my two comparator states of Ireland and Scotland if David Garland’s theses on penal-welfarism and the culture of control had not become so landmark. How differently would we perceive penality in those places? Such a view was shaped by my own academic upbringing. As far as I am aware, I was among only the second cohort of graduate students to achieve a Masters qualification in criminology in Ireland. This was 2007/08 and Irish criminology was still in its 'infanc'’ (O’Donnell, 2008, p. 124), having only been institutionally formalised as a discipline in 2000 (more on which below). Much like the rest of the Anglophone world, Culture of Control (Garland, 2001) was the text to be into if you were interested in punishment. As Irish criminology was establishing itself it became deeply immersed in this prevailing thesis, imbricated with the key ideas and engaged in the exciting arguments that were occupying the rest of criminology. As a result, the way Irish penal practices were being read was via the main tenets of this text, but producing what seemed like only partial insights and explanations. What I had tried, and unequivocally failed to express to my friend that day was that Ireland and Scotland know the sociology of punishment, even though the sociology of punishment does not know them (to paraphrase Santos, 2014), and worse still, was not fully equipped to comprehend either nation. There seemed to be few theoretical tools to think about, discuss and understand Irish or Scottish penality in their own terms. It was not that this preeminent theory had been presented with an air of universal insight (and that is certainly not my claim), but that it had been adopted and eagerly deployed in places where it seemed only to repeatedly show that they didn't fit. But in a curious move, this not fitting, had somehow become the theory of the contemporary Irish penal history and its legacy, which is now coming to be understood as exceptional

New 'healing' prison in Ireland points to long history of progressive penal reform

Ireland has formally opened the new women's wing of the Limerick prison. This expansion was desperately needed. The former wing was at 164% capacity, with women reportedly sleeping on mattresses on the floor of what were already inadequate conditions of a dilapidated 19th-century building. The new build now offers space for 50 women, an increase in capacity of 78%. It also eschews the dehumanising cliches of the traditional prison environment

States of denial : Magdalene Laundries in twentieth century Ireland

In 1993, a religious order of Catholic nuns, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, decided to sell a plot of land at their High Park convent in Dublin. The site contained a large grave and 133 bodies needed to be exhumed. However, there were only 75 death certificates. Some of the bodies were nameless, and their causes of death unknown. When the exhumation began, the problems continued to mount, as did the body count. It seemed that rather than 133 bodies, there were actually the remains of 155 people in the plot. They were disinterred and cremated, many of their identities remained unknown. Reflecting on this disturbing episode years later, the author Anne Enright wrote that 'The living can be disbelieved, dismissed, but the dead do not lie. We turn in death from witness to evidence' (2015). But evidence of what

Civilizing Imprisonment: The Limits of Scottish Penal Exceptionalism

Focusing on imprisonment in Scotland during the 1980s–1990s, and drawing on extensive archival research, documentary analysis and interviews with seven retired civil servants and prison governors, this article is the first to provide an historical and analytical account of Scottish penal exceptionalism. It is argued that although not being punitive in its penal transformation, Scotland cannot rightly be defined as a historically moderate and humane exception when it comes to its prison system. Instead it is shown how the Scottish power to imprison was modernized and made more civilized, allowing prison's inevitable pains to be denied and submerged

‘There is more than one sort of prison, Captain’ : a popular criminology of prisons and penal regimes in Star Wars

In this paper we emphasise how science fiction, as a projection of the possible, can forewarn of dystopic dangers in emergent and future penal regimes. In this popular criminology we explore three archetypes of the prison as they have appeared across the Star Wars franchise: the panoptic prison; the labour camp; and the smart prison. The panoptic prison of the Galactic Republic invokes reflective nostalgia; prompting critical discussion of the deficiencies of the modern prison. Under the Galactic Empire prisons become labour camps, recalling the horrors of the Gulag as violent and cruel manifestations of underpinning ideology. Whilst the fall of the Galactic Empire signalled a return to governance based on democratic values, the representation of the smart prison in the New Republic continues to resonate as a techno-Gulag, reading as an allegory for a deeper crisis of liberal democracy. Analysed as such, prisons in Star Wars exist at the intersection of the past, present and possible futures of penal regimes, and in our current political climate can be a resource for resistance to technological trends and dystopic dangers. Star Wars, we conclude, and science fiction more broadly, is well-positioned to inform a radical re-imagining of future prisons and penal regimes

Power to imprison: comparing political culture and imprisonment regimes in Ireland and Scotland in the late Twentieth Century

Penal politics and imprisonment in the English-speaking west are often presented as having become increasingly harsh and exclusionary since about 1970. Yet, curiously little attention has been given to Ireland and Scotland, two nations considered as exceptions to these pervasive punitive trends, and this presents some considerable gaps in our understanding of penal politics in this era. This thesis uses sociological and historical research to provide an in-depth comparative analysis of political culture and imprisonment regimes in Ireland and Scotland from 1970 until the 1990s. In so doing, the thesis also explores issues central to the history of punishment and comparative penology, in particular the ‘punitive turn’ in the late twentieth century. Using oral history interviews, archival research and documentary analysis this thesis recovers the history of penal culture in these two jurisdictions and examines how that changed and evolved over the latter part of the twentieth century. It draws upon resources from cultural sociology, governmentality studies and the sociology of punishment to develop the necessary conceptual resources to illuminate and compare penal politics and the varied practices which constitute imprisonment. Imprisonment regimes here are studied as comprising kinds of places, sets of routines and practices. Political culture, meanwhile, is understood as the working cultural symbols, passions, logic of government, political categories, and perceived social origins of crime. While providing grounded and detailed historical accounts of Ireland and Scotland these cases show how generic and global concepts, such as managerialism, rehabilitation, zero tolerance and incarceration intersect with their local social conditions and political relations. This thesis demonstrates that the heterogeneity of imprisonment regimes is a reflection of their political and social context. Therefore, the differences we see in the uses of imprisonment cross-nationally will both reflect and reconstitute their contrasting political cultures