The Practise of Pastoral Power : The Swedish Prison Chaplains in the 19th Century

This article analyses the images of the criminal that Swedish prison chaplains developed during the 19th century. Following Michel Foucault, such images and relations are conceptualized as pastoral power. In the 19th century prison chaplains occupied a very important position within prisons, due partly to their status as clergymen, but also to their increasing influence on debates about crime and punishment. This article argues that in many respects prison chaplains came to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the criminal and the complexities of criminality, compared to many early psychiatrists and criminal anthropologists. This understanding was primarily the result of knowledge-gathering which took place within the penitentiaries. In the mid-nineteenth century prison chaplains generally depicted crime as morally determined and as caused by the lack of knowledge and insights into the truths of Christianity. However, during the last quarter of the century, references to social and structural factors were increasingly included in broader and more heterogeneous explanations for crime. However, if non-moral factors played such a central role as the prison chaplains gradually came to assign to them, then their own authority as experts on crime as well as the status of religion within the prison system was undermined.Cet article s’intéresse à la représentation du criminel élaborée par les aumôniers des prisons suédoises au cours du XIXe siècle. En suivant Michel Foucault, on peut caractériser ces représentations et ces relations comme un pouvoir pastoral. Au XIXe siècle, les aumôniers jouèrent un rôle très important dans les prisons, en partie en raison de leur statut clérical, mais aussi du fait de leur influence croissante dans les débats relatifs à la délinquance et aux châtiments. L’auteur estime que de plusieurs points de vue, les aumôniers pénitentiaires élaborèrent une conception plus subtile du délinquant et des complexités de la criminalité que celle de beaucoup des premiers psychiatres ou spécialistes d’anthropologie criminelle. Cette compréhension découlait principalement des connaissances acquises par eux au sein des établissements pénitentiaires. Au milieu du XIXe siècle, les aumôniers assignaient en général une cause morale à la délinquance, due au défaut de connaissance et de pénétration des vérités du christianisme. Toutefois, vers le dernier quart du siècle, les références aux facteurs sociaux et structurels prirent une place croissante au sein d’explications de la délinquance devenues plus générales et plus hétérogènes. Mais en accordant à des facteurs extérieurs à la morale un rôle de plus en plus central, les aumôniers finirent par compromettre leur propre autorité en tant qu’experts de la délinquance ainsi que le statut même de la religion dans le système carcéral

»The walls ought to be demolished from the inside«: KRUM and the failure of the prison struggle in Sweden in the 1960s and 70s

Abstract SwedishArtikeln behandlar fångkampen i de svenska fängelserna vid 1960-talets slut och 1970-talets början. Framför allt diskuteras den roll Riksförbundet för Kriminalvårdens humanisering (KRUM) spelade. Delvis i motsättning till den tidigare forskningens uppfattningen att fångarnas relativa nederlag kan förklaras av en kombination av en svag förhandlingsposition, otillräcklig förhandlingskompetens, motpartens överlägsna resurser och taktiska skicklighet och vikande stöd från media, argumenterar artikeln för att nederlaget också måste förstås i relation till brister i fångarnas strategi och till otillräckligheten i den maktmodell, med betoning framför allt på abstrakta rättigheter, som fanns inom KRUM. På den sistnämnda punkten kolliderade KRUM:s liberalt dominerade modell tydligt med den syn på fången som vuxit fram inom den svenska kriminalvården under decennierna efter andra världskriget.Abstract EnglishThe article deals with a struggle for inmates’ rights in Swedish prisons at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. The focus is on the role played by the Swedish National Association for the Humanization of Prisons (KRUM). Previous research has argued that the inmates ultimately lost their struggle due to a combination of their weaker bargaining position, their lack of negotiation skills, their counterpart’s superior tactical skill and resources, and declining support for their cause in the media. The current article contends that the defeat must also be understood in relation to deficiencies in the prisoners’ strategy and to the inadequacy of the power model, with its emphasis on abstract rights, which existed within KRUM. On the latter point, KRUM’s liberal-dominated model clearly clashed with the view of the prisoner that has emerged within the Swedish Correctional Service since World War II

All-sky search for gravitational-wave bursts in the second joint LIGO-Virgo run

We present results from a search for gravitational-wave bursts in the data collected by the LIGO and Virgo detectors between July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010: data are analyzed when at least two of the three LIGO-Virgo detectors are in coincident operation, with a total observation time of 207 days. The analysis searches for transients of duration < 1 s over the frequency band 64-5000 Hz, without other assumptions on the signal waveform, polarization, direction or occurrence time. All identified events are consistent with the expected accidental background. We set frequentist upper limits on the rate of gravitational-wave bursts by combining this search with the previous LIGO-Virgo search on the data collected between November 2005 and October 2007. The upper limit on the rate of strong gravitational-wave bursts at the Earth is 1.3 events per year at 90% confidence. We also present upper limits on source rate density per year and Mpc^3 for sample populations of standard-candle sources. As in the previous joint run, typical sensitivities of the search in terms of the root-sum-squared strain amplitude for these waveforms lie in the range 5 10^-22 Hz^-1/2 to 1 10^-20 Hz^-1/2. The combination of the two joint runs entails the most sensitive all-sky search for generic gravitational-wave bursts and synthesizes the results achieved by the initial generation of interferometric detectors.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures: data for plots and archived public version at https://dcc.ligo.org/cgi-bin/DocDB/ShowDocument?docid=70814&version=19, see also the public announcement at http://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-S6BurstAllSky

En välbyggd maskin, en mardröm för själen : det svenska fängelsesystemet under 1800-talet

The general aim of the thesis is to study 19th century Swedish prisons from the point of view of the surrounding discourse and also as a social system. The prison phenomenon grew out of the meeting between prisons as a discourse-produced norm system and the social practice consisting of the reality as experienced by the prisoners and the prison staff. The growth and development of the Swedish prison system was to a certain point part of an international trend. However, it should be emphasized, this development took different roads and produced different outcomes in the different countries depending on socio-economic, political and cultural contexts. During the second half of the 19th century Sweden built a uniform and regionaly based penitentiary system. This large build up was accompanied by a number of legal changes which gave as a result that by 1900 over 90 per cent of all Swedish prisoners spent their whole prison term in solitary confinement. Together with the introduction and gradual expansion of new disciplinary techniques and modes of control this led to an ordered and regularized milieu with high security against escapes and outbursts of violence. This process also applied to the prison staff, especially the guards. By the turn of century the guards appered as an increasingly well-disciplined and loyal corps where clear features of a specific prison guard culture can be discerned. The emergence of the prison also entailed the creation of "the prisoner", both as an abstract category and as a subordinated subject as well as a new problematization of the relations between criminality, punishment and society. In this last process a special role was given to the prison chaplains' and other prison administrators' observations, accounts, reports and judgements. Ever since the middle of the 19th century, prisons have formed the centre in the punishment systems of most countries. Its unsurpassed strength in comparison with other penalty institutions should be viewed in relation to the fact that it has been possible to claim its superiority from a number of different interests and starting-points. Depending on the preferences of those who make the judgement, prisons may be regarded and may function as retaliation, deterrence, incapacitation or rehabilitation