Racial penal governance in Australia and moments of appearance: disrupting disappearance and visibilizing women on the inside

ABSTRACT

The paper considers the lives of women that are invisibilized by the racial penal governing mechanisms of the settler state. It demonstrates how a racial penal governance is configured historically by its interlockings with multiple and hierarchical systems of oppression that intervene differently in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and women, convict women, racialized diaspora and marginalized white women. The paper engages with four ‘moments of appearances’ that interrupt and speak back to racial penal governance. Mirzoeff’s The appearance of Black Lives Matter (2017, https://namepublications.org/item/2017/the-appearance-of-black-lives-matter/) theorization of decolonial spaces of appearance is integrated to the analysis of historical and recent moments of appearance visibilized in the testimonials of Thomas Brune, the Aboriginal youth Co-editor of the Flinders Island Chronicle in 1837 in the Wybalenna prison Camp and of Zoe, Alison and Pamela who have lived experience of prisons. These are embodied moments that make lives in prisons appear and matter.     

The pains of immigrant imprisonment

The immigrant detention system in the United States is civil, rather than criminal, and therefore nonpunitive. However, in practice, detained immigrants lacking many basic constitutional protections find themselves in facilities that are often indistinguishable from prisons and jails. In this paper, we explore the crisis of immigrant imprisonment at the affective level, focusing on the painful experiences of immigrant detainees, while also emphasizing its systemic and racialized nature. Specifically, we place a review of a growing body of research that draws connections between immigrant detention and mass imprisonment alongside the findings from numerous reports issued by human rights organizations on the conditions of confinement within immigrant detention facilities. Using a “pains of imprisonment” framework, we highlight four particularly prominent “pains”: containment, exploitation, coercion, and legal violence. We suggest the infliction of such pain, especially when contextualized within a broader history of Latina/o oppression, demonstrates that immigration prisons are in fact punitive, “lawless spaces” where penal oppression is exercised. We conclude with a call for sociologists to become more attentive to this crisis, and to appreciate the similarities between immigration detention and other forms of racialized social control—namely, mass incarceration.     

Norbert Elias and the civilized prison

This paper employs an Eliasian perspective to provide an historical overview to the contemporary crisis in British prisons. It argues that some of the roots of this crisis lie within the very attempts to bring prison development in line with the cultural values of modern society.     

Le métier de conseiller d’insertion et de probation : dans les coulisses de l’État pénal ?

This study of the changing profession of “counselors of integration and probation” (conseillers d’insertion et de probation, Cip) proposes a sociology of occupational groups that takes into account both statutory and moral considerations. Turning social services in prisons into a “penitentiary service of integration and probation” has involved professionalization, “juridicization” (with a shift from social work to the field of law) as well as a switch from a “compassionate” toward a “repressive” pole of interventions. Based on a survey conducted in prison, this study of work situations and conflicts helps us formulate the problems of ruptures and continuities in relation to both these employees’ individual trajectories and the institutional framework of their actions. This case study of Cip, an occupational group seen herein as a litmus test of what the penal institution does to persons under a court order, enables us to imagine an ethnography of the “state in acts”.     

Elderly prisoners: a growing and forgotten group within correctional systems vulnerable to elder abuse

There are over 2.1 million people incarcerated in the nation's jails and prisons. Additionally, close to 600,000 prisoners are released annually into communities across the country. Many prisoners and those released from prisons are elderly. The purpose of this article is to examine the systemic abuse and neglect experienced by elderly prisoners while they are incarcerated and when they are released from prison. Most correctional systems have inadequate resources, processes, and personnel to manage the elderly population inside and outside of prisons. In addition to providing a definition of "elderly prisoner," two specific problems-prison health care and prisoner re-entry-are examined in the article. The article concludes with recommendations for both policy and research on how best we can further understand and address the multiple needs and concerns faced by elderly prisoners.     

Life in a Forgotten Scottish Gulag: Punishment and Social Regulation in HM Peterhead Convict Prison

This paper contributes to filling a lacuna in our knowledge of penal history in Scotland by examining the voices of convicts through records of prisoners experiencing Penal Servitude during the period 1897–1942. The sources utilized are the archived files of thirty‐two male convict prisoners in Scotland's Convict Prison at Peterhead. These files give insights about life in this remote prison as conveyed through records of punishment, prisoners' requests, and prisoners' letters. Prison Rules about convict correspondence highlight penal letters as a distinctive genre of communication: political and personal boundaries were enforced on all exchanges. The convict prison, like nineteenth‐century British labour colonies, imposed workhouse conditions at the extreme; it was a place of exclusion, dominated by religious and social sentiment and suppositions about criminal psychology and containment. The extent of the curtailment of convicts' liberty and the aim of re‐socialization is refracted in penal practices fostering convict dependency. The ethos of Scotland's convict colony was immersed in military traditions of training, subservience to authority and generalized gloom.     

Capitalism,Unfree Labor and Colonial Doxa: The Master and Servant Act from Britain to Hong Kong, 1823–1932

The Master and Servant Act was a law that allowed the use of penal sanction against workers for breach of contract in nineteenth century Britain. For scholars who believe that wage laborers under capitalism are free from “extra‐economic” coercion, this law was an anomaly. One explanation suggests technological backwardness during the early stages of capitalism as the cause. In this paper I will challenge this account and offer an alternative explanation. As the British Empire expanded, the same law was enacted in many British colonies. If it was the process of capitalist production that rendered the Master and Servant Act necessary, this explanation should also apply to the British colonies. By focusing on Hong Kong, I show that this was not the case. Instead, I show that the use of judiciary coercion could be explained by Bourdieu's notions of doxa, habitus and field.     

Elderly Prisoners: A Growing and Forgotten Group Within Correctional Systems Vulnerable to Elder Abuse

ABSTRACT

There are over 2.1 million people incarcerated in the nation's jails and prisons. Additionally, close to 600,000 prisoners are released annually into communities across the country. Many prisoners and those released from prisons are elderly. The purpose of this article is to examine the systemic abuse and neglect experienced by elderly prisoners while they are incarcerated and when they are released from prison. Most correctional systems have inadequate resources, processes, and personnel to manage the elderly population inside and outside of prisons. In addition to providing a definition of “elderly prisoner,” two specific problems–prison health care and prisoner re-entry–are examined in the article. The article concludes with recommendations for both policy and research on how best we can further understand and address the multiple needs and concerns faced by elderly prisoners.     

Making Coolies, (Un)making Workers: “Globalizing” Labour in the Late‐19th and Early‐20th Centuries

This paper explores the social relationships of wage labour formed or stabilized in British merchant shipping in the course of “off‐shoring” employment in the late‐19^th century. It argues that Asian wage‐workers were mobilized for employment on British merchant vessels as “coolies”, i.e. nominally free but mediated labouring subjects who could only be stabilized through legal, penal, social, debt, or other forms of coercion. Once introduced “coolie” relations were not confined to Indian crews. They also affected wage labour relations more generally in British shipping. While occurring against the backdrop of anti‐colonial struggles, the seafaring coolie's transformation into maritime worker was closely mediated by employers and the colonial state and produced hybrid outcomes. The creation of the modern seafaring “coolie” and the nature and context of his transformation into a “worker” thus shed interesting light on wage labour relations in the modern and contemporary global economy.     

The Prison and the Anti‐Colonialist in British Malaya

This article argues for the need to view imprisonment as a transformational experience for anti‐colonialists in British Malaya and beyond. Colonial prisons were fertile grounds that led to the shaping and restructuring of anti‐colonial sentiments. They were also spaces where new forms of collective action, compromises and adaptations emerged. As will be shown, anti‐colonialists' subjectivities and positions shifted from initial feelings of fear and submissiveness upon incarceration to the articulation of collective resistance and the manifestation of attempts to subvert and destabilize the colonial structures that bore down upon them. Such circumstances led to the alteration of the everyday practices not only of the colonized, but also of those in positions of authority.     

Of pelicans and prisoners: avian–human interactions in the Soviet Gulag

The Soviet penal system, commonly referred to by its Stalin-era acronym, Gulag, exposed millions to conditions of imprisonment from 1917 to 1991. Penal institutions were located throughout the Soviet Union, but were concentrated especially in remote and sparsely populated areas such as the Far North, Siberia, and the Kazakh steppe. They were typically camps instead of prisons, with inmates sleeping in communal barracks and performing labour at outdoor work sites. This arrangement brought inmates and their jailers in close contact with the natural world. The richly varied avifauna of the Soviet Union made a particular impression on residents of the Gulag. Administrators employed birds as part of their re-education programs, using them to inculcate in the inmates scientific literacy, but the interactions between inmates and birds were more diverse. Some inmates fed them while others ate them. Some found in birds powerful symbols of springtime, freedom, and home, while others saw them as harbingers of death. Birds were also used by gang members in the Gulag as status symbols tattooed onto their own bodies and the bodies of their victims. Ultimately, birds helped Gulag inmates negotiate and make sense of a world that often seemed devoid of meaning.     

Ramen Politics: Informal Money and Logics of Resistance in the Contemporary American Prison

This article explores an unexpected yet pervasive arena in which changes to security may alter lived experiences of and responses to punishment. Namely, amidst changes in the quality of care behind U.S. prison walls and resultant prisoner insecurities in the face of neoliberal penology, the nation’s prisoners have adapted informal prison markets to address unmet needs and pursue autonomy. Where cigarettes once reigned as the de facto token of exchange in the underground economy, the contemporary American prison is now home to a new form of informal money: cheap, reliable food items like ramen noodles. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork within a U.S. men’s state prison and 82 in-depth interviews with prisoners and institutional staff, this paper explores this change in the form of informal prison money and what it reveals about the nation’s prisons and prisoners. It contends that prison money reflects changing logics of prisoner resistance in particular political-economic and penal contexts. As prison administrative practices, institutional conditions, and legal environments change with time, prisoners adapt expressions of autonomy accordingly. While cigarettes symbolized withdrawal from the rigors of prison life and individualized treatment—the dominant logic of resistance of the prior era—the new ramen currency reflects a growing emphasis on prison “foodways” in opposition to cost-shifting and deteriorating services behind bars.     

Commitment to care: managed care and child incarceration

Downsizing and managed care in the 1990s followed the psychiatric hospital scandals and closures of the 1980s. Many families are now unable to provide care for their troubled children. Childhood emotional or behavioral disorders have rapidly spread beyond the confines of the home into a community that has adopted a "zero tolerance" for crime. Intolerance for childhood criminal behavior has resulted in an explosion of children's prisons where, in the name of rehabilitation, many are finally receiving psychological help. This article discusses the decreased treatment of childhood psychiatric disorders and the increased admissions to children's prison facilities.     

Is the locus of class development of the transnational capitalist class situated within nation‐states or in the emergent transnational space?

The rise of the modern corporation has disrupted the class structures of nation‐states because, in the era of globalization, such reorganization now occurs across borders. Yet, has globalization been deep enough to facilitate the emergence of a transnational capitalist class (TCC) in which both class formation and consolidation processes are located in the transnational space itself? I contribute to our understanding of the TCC by contrasting the personal characteristics, life histories and capital endowments of members of the British corporate elite with and without transnational board appointments. The existence of the honours system in the UK allows us to compare individuals objectively in terms of their symbolic capital and to link this trait to embeddedness in the TCC. By studying 448 directors from the 100 largest firms in the UK in 2011, I find evidence of a TCC with a class consolidation process that is located within transnational space, but whose class formation dynamics are still tethered to national processes of elite production and reproduction.     

Blogging while Black,British and female: a critical study on discursive activism

This study explores Black British women's motivations for divulging racial and ethnic identity in the blogosphere (sometimes referred to as blogging while Black) and their use of blogs for discursive activism. It builds on previous research that gives voice to Black womens marginalized experiences through powerful counter narratives. The blogosphere is often perceived as a racially neutral space where shared interests across geographical and temporal boundaries limit the significance of racial and ethnic identity. However, the constructed narratives of Black British women in this study highlight their experiences of subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination perpetuated through dominant discourses in the mainstream media. The findings demonstrate how they use blogs as a medium for discursive activism to challenge stereotypical raced and gendered representation in the mainstream media. Much of the research on the blogosphere in Britain reflects its use by the White majority population. This study therefore extends understanding of the blogosphere and highlights alternative modes of political communication.     

Contested theories of prison labor practice

In recent years, prison strikes and controversies have brought public attention to the systemic problems with prison labor in the United States. Such labor often exploits people who are imprisoned to do work that is vital to society—including firefighting, farming, or manufacturing consumer goods—with wages that can be less than a dollar per hour in highly coercive working conditions. Although there is call to end prison labor today, theories of prison labor have historically been contested, even among activists and progressive reformers. Accordingly, this review offers a short sociological history of labor in correctional environments, highlights contemporary controversies, and argues for a more fine-grained approach to the relationships among labor, prisons, and reentry. It traces the field of reformers and scholars that have made arguments for punitive, rehabilitative, restorative, and transformative approaches to work. The contested theories of prison labor across time and space suggest that a better understanding is needed of what makes labor exploitative and what forms of labor have the potential to transform the root causes of crime, within and beyond prison walls. Overall, this review has implications for those who study prison and reentry programs, relationships between crime and community, and the political economy of incarceration.     

Rational Choice theory and prison chaplaincy: the chaplain's dilemma

Critical responses to the application of Rational Choice theories to the study of religious phenomena tend to be polarized between outright denial that the theories have any relevance to religion and equally outspoken claims that the theories are the only hope for progress in the sociology of religion. This article aims to avoid both of these extreme positions by raising a question, instead, about one of Rational Choice's central propositions about religion. This proposition holds that levels of religious vitality vary positively with the degree to which agencies of the state are prevented from regulating religious activity. The findings of recent research into prison chaplaincy in the UK and the USA will be used to test this claim. The main argument will be that the existence of an established church has facilitated a higher level of religious activity, especially for minority faiths, in prisons in England and Wales than is possible in American prisons. This difference in religious vitality is explained in terms of the Church of England's privileged position as a 'broker' between the state and minority faith communities. There is greater equality of opportunity for religious activity in American prisons, but the level of the activity is necessarily lower. In neither country is there anything truly resembling a 'free' market for religion in prisons, but the established Church of England is able to use its quasi-monopoly powers to broker advantageous conditions for minority faith communities. This brokerage function may be advantageous to all religious organizations in the highly regulated 'economy' of prisons.     

Communities within communities: Changing ‘residential’ areas at Cultus Lake,British Columbia

Research focusing upon rural Canada continues to highlight the complex outcomes arising from rural-urban interactions within particular geographic settings. In the ‘city's countryside’, amenity landscapes located near the urban fringe are developed as the domain of vacation- and recreation-seeking urban residents. Yet, these recreation amenity sites are also set within an existing rural landscape. The land uses and social patterns found within this setting represent an outcome of the interactions between these competing landscapes. This paper examines residential change within the rural-recreational areas around Cultus Lake, British Columbia. Comparison of the local population to those living permanently within the cottaging areas is made across selected socio-economic characteristics and household activity patterns. These comparisons are extended to the group level by examining social and spatial constructions of local community ‘institutions’. Together, these comparisons suggest a ‘shared but separate’ geographic space.     

Investing in people: The role of social networks in the diffusion of a large-scale fraud

This paper draws from social network analysis and diffusion theory to study the case of a mortgage fraud that spread undetected for five years in British Columbia, Canada. The fraud is studied from the point of view of 559 victims who unknowingly invested in the Ponzi scheme which defrauded 2285 investors for a total of $ 240 million dollars. Results show diffusion played a role in the success of the Eron fraud even though the fraud ended before it reached the final stages of a classic diffusion process. A closer look at the social structure of the Eron network revealed the elements that made the fraud successful: (1) change agents, particularly Eron principals and Eron employees invested their personal time and effort recruiting investors; (2) independent brokers actively spread the fraud to their clients; and (3) opinion leaders, investors themselves, unknowingly spread the fraud through their social networks by recruiting their friends and family to invest in Eron.