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As mass incarceration and supervision decline in the U.S., subtler forms of "invisible punishment" continue to affect individuals with a history of legal system involvement. Increasingly, the state recedes from direct involvement in invisible punishment, instead devolving responsibility—and potentially controlling at a distance—community-based organizations. In the process, punishment in the community is shaped by both the state and various segments of civil society. The present ethnography examines how staffers at a community-based reentry organization are subject to and resistant to state influence, and how this resistance generates new forms of invisible punishment. While state influence directs staffers to provide services focused on altering clients' internal dispositions, staffers resist state influence by encouraging members to be their own advocates against the penal system. This agonistic process of resistance generates a hybridized form of invisible punishment, commingling the organizational goals and routines of penal state authorities with those of reentry staffers who see advocating against structures of punishment as a core mission. The final, hybridized form of this mode of penalty requires the client not only to look inward to effect dispositional changes, but also to look outward to be an active agent advocating against the exclusionary penal structures affecting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written in the form of a dialogue with Brussels sociologist Dieter Vandebroeck, this article retraces the social and intellectual trajectory of Loïc Wacquant as stepping stone to reviewing and discussing the major concepts coined and theoretical propositions elaborated in the course of his research on comparative urban marginality, racial domination, the ghetto, the penal state, neoliberalism, and carnality. This provides an opportunity to specify the relationships between ethnography, history and theory; the dialectic of domination and resistance; the role of public (dis)honor in social life; the uses of Bourdieu's bureaucratic field; and the social and academic conditions of incubation, diffusion, and death of scholarly myths such as the "underclass." The article closes on a call to clearly distinguish the rhetorical, metaphorical, and analytical usages of concepts and reaffirms the need for epistemic reflexivity as sine qua non for the articulation of robust scientific problematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to analyze the experiences of migrants deprived of liberty within the Santa Catarina prison system and to examine the work of social workers in this context. Grounded in a critical-dialectical perspective, the research seeks to uncover reality's underlying determinations and contradictions, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Gramsci, Wacquant and Iamamoto. This qualitative, exploratory study began with a bibliographic and documentary review, followed by field research involving interviews with incarcerated migrants. The findings reveal the heightened vulnerability of migrants, whose fundamental rights are further restricted, due to challenges in communication, limited access to public policies, and social isolation. The study underscores the importance of anchoring social workers' efforts in the ethical-political framework of Social Work. It emphasizes the need for professionals to develop collaborative strategies with various professionals and organizations to promote actions aimed at defending human rights and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of one of the research chapters of a doctoral thesis and was constructed through bibliographical research. The object of the article is the relationship between the socio-metabolic control of capital and penal selectivity and the aim is to present some reflections on the penal state and its effects on the materialization and expansion of deprivation of liberty. Among the results of these reflections, the presentation of conjunctural factors and political strategies for socio-metabolic control of capital that are sustained in the penal state stands out. Some elements of the COVID-19 health crisis and its expressions in the precarious conditions of prisons are also presented, which are part of the ideological dynamics of capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Penal populism has repeatedly been described as influencing penal policies, with harsh penal practices presented as evidence of its influence. However, little attention has yet been paid to its role in the development of penal policies in post-authoritarian countries, which generally have large prison populations. Some minimal research has suggested that Central European countries were driven by penal nationalism following the 1989 revolutions. I examine this claim for the Czech Republic, using Garland (2013) 's framework of the five dimensions of a penal state. My analysis of political manifestoes shows that Czech politicians did not employ "law and order" rhetoric. The country's penal reforms were led by lenient penal elites. Nevertheless, a lack of analysis, coordination and sufficient funding resulted in a failure to properly identify or tackle the causes of the country's high imprisonment rate. Even though it gradually became more difficult to impose prison sentences, insufficient attention was paid to the length of the sentences Czech prisoners were serving. The large Czech prison population thus seems to be the result of state actors' negligence, but not of penal populism nor of penal nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This production aims to guide a discussion about the penal state in Brazil, recovering, historically, its roots, contradictions and forms of action. The method used for the radical apprehension of reality is the historical-dialectical materialist method. The form of action that we call the penal state is therefore configured as part and necessary expression of the domination and submission of dependent capitalism both with regard to the overexploitation of the working class, as well as in the coercion and defense-negation of rights. It is concluded that the perspective of the penal state should not be reduced to the penal-prison spectrum, thus repeatedly erasing the violence that sustains the form of state action in dependent capitalism. Therefore, the Social Service has an ethical responsibility - as a position, not an ethics in the abstract to guide the discussion on the penal state, otherwise it will only be guiding the refractions of the social question, in the same way as the state acts. The radical critique, which goes to the root, must necessarily guide the criminal state in all its subterfuges and ways of appearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent literature on the importance of local grounded comparison and the ‘fracturing’ of the penal state, this article argues that within-case comparison of the adult and youth justice systems can shed important light on the stark differences that persist in how and why we punish. Using the case of Irish youth justice to illustrate the utility of fracturing the penal state horizontally, as well as vertically, we argue that this provides a helpful lens for making sense of the drivers of penal policy, especially the historical particularities of any penal phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research documents widespread deficiencies in the quality and completeness of official criminal records in the United States. In an era when the social reach of criminal records has expanded to an unprecedented degree, these deficiencies carry serious consequences for criminal record subjects. The present study develops the concept of punitive ambiguity to characterize the burdens of incomplete criminal records and examines how they vary at the state level, providing evidence that punitive ambiguity is racially patterned. Using data from the biennial Surveys of State Criminal History Information Systems, multivariate analyses find that states where African Americans make up larger shares of felony record populations report rap sheet dispositions at significantly lower levels, pairing low criminal record data quality with extensive legally-mandated background screening. The results carry implications for understanding the racialized burdens of a criminal record, as well as broader processes in the development of the American penal state that combine harsh formal punishments with chronic administrative neglect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims at presenting an analysis on the main impacts of the process of criminalizing poverty on the lives of Brazilian children and adolescents, grounding this process in the penal state constitution and in the neoliberal ideology, intending to clarify the limits and challenges faced by the implementation of a child and youth protection policy in Brazil. Thereby, a historical and contemporary bibliographical analysis was carried out to serve as a basis for this paper and to become acquainted with the study object. Besides, a document analysis was employed to identify statistics and data that exemplify the issue examined through a set of official documents. This study recognized a controversial background for the implementation of the accomplishments from Brazil’s Constitution of 1988 and from the Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA), that is, for the child and youth integral protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Religación: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades is the property of Religacion: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent years, there has been a growing debate on how, and whether, during the past three decades, a neoliberal penal State, with close ties to the new economic order, has emerged in the United States and in other nations of the Global North. This article seeks to analyse, based on the criticisms that the neoliberal penal State theory has been subject to, whether, and to what extent, such a take on neoliberalism and the penal State may contribute to attaining a plausible explanation of Latin American crime control fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing culture as a lens through which to examine the Irish criminal justice system, this paper reflects on recent developments within key criminal justice agencies with a view to where we may be headed in the near future. Four traits common to criminal justice in Ireland, perhaps paralleling cultural patterns in Irish society more broadly, are identified: the use of discretion; a disjuncture between policy and practice; the primacy of agency; and humanitarianism. Given the unprecedented level of scrutiny brought to bear on the key agencies of our criminal justice system in the past five to seven years, and a growing body of research in a post-colonial vein, the paper argues that we have become increasingly self-aware as a criminal justice system, as well as more reflexive as regards our relationship with other states. Indeed, recent critical scrutiny of organisational cultures in our police and prison services and the Department of Justice has perhaps resulted in a new receptiveness to change and to European influences. Despite this pressure towards convergence, we should not forget that local actors are always responsible for implementation of criminal justice 'on the ground', thus bringing national cultural traits back into focus. Paradoxically, one of the effects of these pressures towards convergence may be to force a deeper understanding of Irish criminal justice culture and the 'recovery', as Brangan (2019) has argued, of its core assumptions, values and fundamentals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances research on 'neoliberal legality' to focus on the role of courts in response to neoliberal crime prevention approaches. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's analysis of embeddedness in market capitalism, along with criminological research on the penal state, we analyse three case studies reflecting central crime prevention approaches of the neoliberal era in the United States. We find that neoliberal legality is more complex than simply legitimating or resisting neoliberal policies. We highlight how courts did both at once—they moderated the harshest edges of neoliberal policies through alternative symbolic frames, yet in so doing also legitimated the core of neoliberal crime prevention efforts. We argue that neoliberal legality operates through this dual process, in which the basic thrust of neoliberalism is legitimated by also having policies moderated, recast and embedded within other social and juridical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past years, we have witnessed the rise of a moral panic in turn of the Social Insertion Benefit (SIB). Clever speeches are articulated, the ink runs in newspapers and the conceptions in turn of the Social Insertion Benefit and its beneficiaries are multiplied, characterizing them as “lax” and “fraudulent”, giving rise to a growing political penalty, based on the institutional practice of workfare. It is with the discourses surrounding the SIB as case study that we focus our object of analysis, showing the process of social construction and its implications in terms of symbolic domination, which are central to the transformation of the welfare state into a Penal State.

Capitalism in northern societies is entering an age of advanced precarity. On the one hand, postindustrial societies are confronted by growing surplus populations for whom there exist few positive functions in the market. These new ‘dangerous classes’ are increasingly subject to surveillance, discipline, and exclusion as the policing and penal instruments of the state are called upon to detect and contain risk. On the other hand, capitalism’s ‘insiders’ are increasingly consigned to a precarious life of hyperflexible labor and generalized insecurity. Confronted with a growing mass of ‘social detritus’, augmented by advances in automation and catalyzed by accelerating flows of capital, states in the Global North will increasingly be forced to mobilize the disciplinary instruments of policing and punishment to contain the swelling ranks of problem populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, some Western countries have begun to shift away from punitive criminal justice rhetoric, re-embracing the language of rehabilitation and the goal of penal moderation. Risk logics—which undergirded the rise of mass incarceration in the United States—are now being repurposed to call for decarceration. Yet while risk played a key role in the transformation from modern to post-modern punishment, its development and contemporary significance remains poorly understood. This article explores the discourses and practices of risk from the 1970s through to 2014 in one US state (Michigan). The analyses focus on probation, the primary alternative to prison. The results show that risk discourses and practices emerged in the 1970s as a mode of resistance to the prison boom and have been adapted in each subsequent decade to address state governing crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to contribute to ongoing efforts to strengthen gender regimes theory by proposing a new sub domain within the institutional domain of violence that brings in the penal state – any part of formal politico-administrative structures that arrests and incarcerates women. Based on interdisciplinary research on gender, crime and punishment that shows the importance of understanding the penal state for women's rights and gender equality, the operational definition of the penality sub domain is proposed and developed in a case study of prison reform and gender equality policy in Spain. The concept development case study not only helps to define and empirically identify the seven dimensions of the new sub domain. It also provides the opportunity to make a larger theoretical reflection of what penality issues mean for the application of gender regimes theory more broadly speaking and future comparative studies of gender equality, prisons and gender regimes. • There is a lack of theorizing on the role of gender in institutions and practices of incarceration. • Gender regimes theory would significantly benefit from the inclusion of the penal power of the State. • The penal state includes the set of institutions, practices and rationales that deploy punishment. • The penal state should be brought into all feminist analysis of gender policy of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ao longo do século XX as referências legais tornaram-se a grande esperança de ver o mundo mudar, transformando as relações formais e cotidianas em tribunais de execução legal. As análises de Michel Foucault sobre as estratégias biopolíticas contribuem para entender a judicialização da vida no contexto do liberalismo, tendo a lei como mecanismo de regulação das relações sociais e afirmando a lógica penal, própria ao Estado de Direito. No Brasil, com o processo de democratização pós-ditadura militar de 1964, criam-se os conselhos tutelares para desjudicializar as práticas de garantia de direitos, convertendo-se a escola um dos seus campos privilegiados de intervenção. Entretanto, assistimos à intensificação da lógica penal instrumentalizada pela vigilância e pelo julgamento sistemático e coletivo, bem como pela demanda por punição. Todos nos tornamos juízes, acreditamos na pena. Colocar em análise a potência da lógica penal é uma forma de problematizar a judicialização no fazer cotidiano.Throughout the twentieth century legal references have become a great hope of seeing the world change, transforming formal and daily relations in penal execution courts. Michel Foucault's analysis on the biopolitical strategies contribute to understanding the judicialization of life in the context of neoliberalism, having the law as a regulatory mechanism of social relations, affirming the penal logic, proper of the States' Rights. In Brazil, with the democratization process post-1964 military dictatorship, tutelary councils are created to dejudicialize the practices of rights' guarantee, becoming the school one of its privileged intervention field. Nevertheless, we follow the intensification of the punitive logic instrumentalized by the systematic and collective vigilance and judgment, as well as by the demand for punishment. We all become judges, since we believe in punishment. Put into analysis the potency of penal logic is a way of problematizing the judicialization in every-day work.

This article presents an exploratory study on the possible hypertrophy of the state power, as regarded by Löic Wacqüant as “Penal State”, with the residents of the Rio suburbs. Uses as study case the experiences of train commuters submitted to the “disciplinary rules” of the SuperVia Company, concessionary of that service in the city of Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil. I believe that the “criminalization of conducts” and the “incrimination of actors” is the common trace which unifies the project of hypertrophy of the punitive power exerted by SuperVia on train commuters. In conclusion, researchers must be careful when looking into foreign theories and applying to our local social environments.

This article explores the worship of La Santa Muerte through a geo-mapping of street altars in Mexico City followed by an ethnographic analysis of the devotees' relationships with the saint. I find that this saint has gained momentum among the fast-growing prison population over the last two decades. In contrast to studies that emphasise the desertification of mass incarceration elsewhere, this study finds that La Santa Muerte connects families across the social abyss of imprisonment. I suggest that the family-like relationships that devotees maintain with this saint are crucial to understanding her success. Rather than a one-dimensional sacred defender of criminals and police she is adopted by prisoners, prison officers, police and their families as a capricious ‘family member’, embracing the same ambivalence as the forces she helps to navigate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Providing higher education to offenders in custody has become an increasingly complex business in the age of digital learning. Most Australian prisoners still have no direct access to the internet and relatively unreliable access to information technology. As incarceration is now a business, prisons, like universities, are increasingly subject to economistic pressures and priorities. Historically Britain's penal colony, (post)modern Australia is following the United States toward a post-Welfare Penal state. Without specialised support and materials, incarcerated students may pay the price of converging neoliberal reforms. This paper aims to raise awareness among Australian academics of the challenges faced by incarcerated students in changing socio-political and economic climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homelessness is seen among the most visible forms of urban marginality in post-soviet countries. As changes in the labour and housing markets led to a growing number of the homeless in Ukrainian cities, social policy moved towards moral evaluation of the homeless individual as “deserving” or “undeserving” which is unlikely to resolve the problem of homelessness at a structural level. On the contrary, affordable housing and access to decent work as universal rights guaranteed to all should be among the priorities of state policy and non-governmental institutions alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review essay highlights three tensions in Wacquant's trilogy on welfare reform, the rise of the penal state and the reconfiguration of ethno-racial boundaries: between functionalist and historical types of arguments, between universal and country-specific modes of analysis, and between necessity and contingency. I advocate for a historical, comparative mode of analysis that focuses on divergences as much as convergence in the ways that inequality has been restructured over the past decades around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reflects on the international reception of my book Prisons of Poverty as revelator of penal developments in advanced societies over the past decade. I show that the global firestorm of law and order inspired by the United States that the book detected in 1999 has continued to rage far and wide. Indeed, it has extended from First- to Second-World countries and has altered punishment politics and policies around the globe in ways that no one foresaw and would have thought possible two decades ago. I extend the analysis of the role of think tanks (especially the Manhattan Institute) in the diffusion of US-style crime-fighting notions and nostrums in Latin America as one element of the international circulation of pro-market policy packages fostering the punitive management of poverty. I elaborate and revise the original model of the link between neoliberalism and punitive penality, leading to the analysis of state-crafting in the age of social insecurity developed in my book Punishing the Poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies Loïc Wacquant’s work on penal statecraft to analyze the growing punitiveness of urban politics in contemporary Mexico City. It demonstrates that the intersection of the urbanization of neoliberalism and the democratization of local politics contributed to the emergence of a punitive regime of governing urban marginality in the city. This indicates the consolidation of a punitive urban democracy in which despite the formal legal empowerment of the city’s residents during the last two decades, those at the urban margins face a reverse process of punitive exclusion that takes the form of a criminalization of poverty. In taking a closer look at the situation within the local penal apparatus, the paper furthermore shows that these exclusionary tendencies are reinforced by informal institutional practices inside the local law enforcement bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of punishment has developed a rich understanding of the social and historical forces that have transformed American penality during the last 40 years. But whereas these social forces are not unique to the United States, their penal impact there has been disproportionately large, relative to comparable nations. To address this issue, I suggest that future research should attend more closely to the structure and operation of the penal state. I begin by distinguishing penality (the penal field) from the penal state (the governing institutions that direct and control the penal field). I then present a preliminary conceptualization of 'the penal state' and discuss the relationship between the penal state and the American state more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Caderno CRH is the property of Universidade Federal da Bahia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The recent work of Loïc Wacquant identified the emergence of the penal state as a core feature of the global expansion of neoliberalism and the neoliberal government urban marginality. Drawing on Wacquant’s theoretical and conceptual reflections, this article analyses the emergence of a Latin American form of penal statecraft. By taking an in-depth look at the increasing criminalization of urban marginality in contemporary Latin America as well as the related developments in the local prison system, the single most important institutional expression of the Latin American penal state, important commonalities and differences between the penal statecraft experiments throughout Latin America and the countries of the ‘developed world’ are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Sociologia e Política is the property of Revista de Sociologia e Politica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The strategy adopted by the neoliberal state to maintain social order and safeguard private property in a context of economic deregulation and social precariousness has destroyed the welfare state and aggravated poverty, depriving the masses of any form of social protection while subjecting them to repression. The reinforcement of the repressive state apparatus is associated with the social instability provoked by the lack of social policies, the degradation of living conditions for the great majority of the population, and the amplification of income and property inequalities both in the so-called capitalist periphery and in the richest industrialized countries. The penalization of misery is revealed as a new expression of class domination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The carceral boom in post-Civil Rights America results not from profit-seeking but from state-crafting. Accordingly, we must slay the chimera of the 'Prison Industrial Complex' and forsake its derived tale of the 'Prisoner Reentry Industry.' This murky economic metaphor is doubly misleading: first, most released convicts experience not reentry but ongoing circulation between the prison and their dispossessed neighborhoods; second, the institutions entrusted with supervising them are not market operators but elements of the bureaucratic field as characterized by Pierre Bourdieu. Post-custodial supervision is a ceremonial component of 'prisonfare,' which complements 'workfare' through organizational isomorphism, and partakes of the neoliberal reengineering of the state. Reentry outfits are not an antidote to but an extension of punitive containment as government technique for managing problem categories and territories in the dualizing city. To capture the glaring economic irrationality and bureaucratic absurdities of the oversight of felons behind as well as beyond bars, our theoretical inspiration should come not from the radical critique of capitalism but from the neo-Durkheimian sociology of organization and the neo-Weberian theory of the state as a classifying and stratifying agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines inmate “crucifixion protests” in Ecuador's largest prison during 2003–04. It shows how the preventively incarcerated—of whom there are thousands—managed to effectively denounce their extralegal confinement by embodying the violence of the Christian crucifixion story. This form of protest, I argue, simultaneously clarified and obscured the multiple layers of sovereign power that pressed down on urban crime suspects, who found themselves persecuted and forsaken both outside and within the space of the prison. Police enacting zero-tolerance policies in urban neighborhoods are thus a key part of the penal state, as are the politically threatened family members of the indicted, the sensationalized local media, distrustful neighbors, prison guards, and incarcerated mafia. The essay shows how the politico-theological performance of self-crucifixion responded to these internested forms of sovereign violence, and were briefly effective. The inmates’ cross intervention hence provides a window into the way sovereignty works in the Ecuadorean penal state, drawing out how incarceration trends and new urban security measures interlink, and produce an array of victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Kriminologisches Journal is the property of Julius Beltz GmbH & Co. KG Beltz Juventa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)