Abstract
The Politics of Punishment examines how prisons policy develops over time in specific political and cultural contexts; and how scholars should examine and theorise such developments. The book conducts a ‘deep comparison’, in that the author takes two case countries (Ireland and Scotland) and provides a rich and detailed empirical account of how prisons policy, instantiated in what Brangan terms imprisonment regimes, interacts with Irish and Scottish political culture and wider events from 1970 until the late 1990s.
The book begins with a short introduction that makes a strong case for both the overall approach and the selection of Scotland and Ireland as both penal outliers and as cases that escape the “punitive/exceptional dichotomy”.
The second chapter sets out the author’s thinking on comparing penal cultures. The two key pillars of Brangan’s framework are the concepts of imprisonment regimes and political culture. The concept of imprisonment regime is intended to enable analysis of how prison regimes compare across jurisdictions. Brangan sets out six dimensions of imprisonment regimes, arguing that it is important to see them in terms of: (1) beginning at the moment of imprisonment, (2) prison regimes (i.e. different types of prison), (3) circulation (i.e. people move in, out and around the prison system), (4) prisoner classification, (5) rehabilitation and reform, and (6) responses to changing prison numbers. This discussion led me to consider whether the using the concept punishment regimes would add utility, enabling the inclusion of community sanctions, although I can see arguments that it could present an unnecessary watering-down of the original concept.
Turning to political culture, Brangan discusses this concept in terms of cultural sensibilities (about crime and community, about personhood and about place) and in terms of political reasoning (i.e. what kind of rationalities, techniques and subjects are produced within a given political culture). The observation here that use of the term ‘prisoner’ invokes different cultural and social biographies in different contexts is particularly well made. Indeed, a key contribution of the book is Brangan’s persuasive demonstration that grounded comparative case studies help us understand the complex nature of penal politics.
The chapter concludes with a short section on methods. Here Brangan sets out some important thinking for the discipline, particularly in terms of engaging with policy documents. I felt, though, that this subsection could have been longer, with more explanation of how the interviews were conducted and how Brangan engaged with the archive material. Also, I would have been interested in some more discussion of what differences in recollection there might be between the policy elites interviewed here and those serving prison sentences across the time period in question. Given the innovative nature of the project, such discussions would also be useful for others likely to be inspired to follow in Brangan’s methodological footprints.
Turning now to the empirical chapters, the book includes three chapters on Ireland and then Scotland. The chapter on 1970s Ireland, entitled Pastoral Penality, provides an excellent analysis of how both ‘ordinary’ and ‘subversive’ (i.e. those whose imprisonment was connected to the Troubles north of the border) prisoners were managed via a rather benign, communitarian approach. The chapter also provides important empirical detail on the role of the Catholic Church and the repression/punishment of many people (primarily women) outside the prison. The impact of the then-escalating conflict in Northern Ireland is also well explained and analysed. It might though have been interesting, given the author’s astute observations about how political culture is implicated in our understanding of prisons and prisoners, to have included a little more discussion about the birth of the Irish state and the symbolic power of Kilmainham Gaol. Nonetheless, the chapter provides a fascinating insight into Irish penal politics and the broader political culture at the time.
The second chapter on Ireland, covering the 1980s, sets out how this pastoral penality begins to erode over the course of the decade. Rising crime and rising concern about crime are shown to create a sense of chaos within Irish prisons, with steps like ‘shedding’ (a kind of pragmatic day-to-day rolling amnesty intended to manage overflowing prisons) and doubling-up being taken to try to keep a lid on the chaos. The chapter discusses how shedding came to be seen by those outside the top of the system as creating risk of further crime via the concept of a ‘revolving door’ between release and imprisonment. Brangan describes well how, whilst practices of pastoral penality persisted inside Irish prisons, its hegemony was greatly disturbed within the political culture of the time.
The third Irish chapter describes how developments within prisons policy and practice became more oppressive and controlling whilst life in general in Ireland was experiencing the inverse, with the decrease of exclusive forms of social control as the influence of the Catholic Church dissipated. The chapter’s analysis of Veronica Guerin’s murder and the effects it had on political debate and electioneering, public opinion, prison budgets and penality in general is excellent. The publication of a new, more punitive policy document at a time when social inequality and social exclusion were on the rise is also well-discussed.
Turning then to Scotland, the first chapter on the 1970s identifies an important paradox, whereby Scottish social welfare values in society at large stood in stark contrast to an exclusionary imprisonment regime with ‘deep end’ segregation that imposed ‘extreme deprivation and mortification’ (p. 117). Brangan puts this down in part to a political culture of paternal liberalism which constructed prison as the ‘end of the line’ for those too difficult to manage elsewhere. The second of the Scottish chapters describes how policy changes (particularly the restriction of parole) and widespread rioting and unrest across the prison estate created a ‘cycle of hostility and retaliation’ (p. 133). This in turn led to a crisis of legitimacy for the prison system itself and, eventually, in how penal power was used and abused in Scotland. The third chapter on Scotland describes how this period of turmoil was followed by a period of major transformation. Brangan’s approach here enables her to make a delineation between humanising and civilising reforms (something she argues would be challenging were one to be trapped in a punitive/progressive dichotomy). The chapter sets out how attempts to civilise rather than humanise, whilst making appreciable improvements to the imprisonment regime, created problems with rhetorical rather than practical progressiveness. The analysis here on ‘civilising imprisonment’ is particularly strong, bringing in Crewe’s thinking on false autonomy and tightness of imprisonment to good effect.
The conclusion to the book brings Brangan’s analysis together in a cogent and logical manner. The discussion of gender and the different cultural positions of women (‘deviant’) and men (‘fundamentally decent’) under pastoral penality in Ireland is important, demonstrating the benefits of taking a broad approach to political culture. Brangan’s concluding remarks sum up the book’s central argument well: “the political and the cultural are suffused into all aspects of incarceration: the prisons, their regimes, tools of control and technical character; as well as the thinking, organisational mechanisms and bureaucratic practices that inform policymaking.” (p. 170).
The book’s key strengths are its innovative approach to comparing imprisonment via historical case studies, and the convincing way in which the author implements this approach through sophisticated analysis and discussion of archival and interview data. This book will, I am sure, have broad appeal, in that it provides much theoretical and empirical food for thought to those interested in prisons, in policymaking and politics, in comparison, and in grounded, historical approaches to how punishment evolves in particular cultural contexts.
