Policing and incarceration Flashcards
Ethnography of police-citizen interactions in Paris, arguing that policing is not about safety but about reinforcing a social-racial hierarchy
‘Moral violence’ of stop and frisk
Fassin (2013)
Case study of Public nuisance laws in the LA. Argues these are a space-making and race-making project.
Space is used to justify territorialised policing which further reshapes property relations (private property becomes police outpost, in a spatial expansion of power)
Discursively creates, targets and criminalised specific people by speculatively delineating the spaces they inhabit as criminal
Violence as a key arm of the state
Graziani et al (2022)
Vanishing points, GTMO. Not a space of exception but one created through legal-spatial wrangling (both inside and outside of the US)
Also shaped by colonial history between US, USSR and Spain.
So Agambien theory useful to understand ‘bare life’ (how subjecthood is withdrawn) but neglects the strategic work (law in excess) that went into marrying two contradictory legal geographies
Gregory (2006)
GTMO has been unsuccessful because it has produced little valuable intelligence and harmed the US international reputation
Brainard (2024)
GTMO is a regime of torture that seeks to silence victims
Blakeley & Price (2024)
More detail on GTMO legal-geographical wrangling and Agambien theory
Homo sacer - those who could not be sacrificed in Roman law because their deaths were worth nothing to the gods. It emerges where sovereign power suspends the law, creating a zone of abandonment.
The body is excluded from politics and is necessarily politicised.
Focusing only on sovereignty, as Agamben has, ignores the international nature of GTMO - the US has asserted jurisdiction outside of its borders and purposefully reduces international law into decisionism
Linked to past work on colonial present and long genealogy of law being used to enforce violence
Gregory (2006)
The prison is not an exceptional phenomenon of law’s breakdown, but an excess of law - since it is used to constitute the GTMO jurisdictional order and create confusion.
The exception is rendered permanent and domesticated
Johns (2013)
Where is the GTMO? Links it to empire - space is haunted by imperial history which explains its ambiguity.
No consistent guarantees of clear rights which will be protected
A shadowy hybrid legal system (2004 Supreme Court decision) ruled that the GTMO is domestic for some purposes and foreign for others. It did not address constitutionality
Kaplan (2005)
A case study of changing discourses at GTMO through its weekly staff newsletter, The Wire.
The space of exception is reproduced not through banality (Arendt) but also through discourses of leisure, personal development and rehabilitation
As support for GTMO waned, The Wire revitalised the programme into a site of recreation, personal struggle and unending deployment
Appeal not needed for prisoners! Doesn’t stop violence from happening but makes it easier to carry out
Is detention normalised/governmentalised through performative legal discourses or is it a rule system determined by law?
Johnson (2023)
Overview of geographical literature on detention, imprisonment and confinement.
They are an assemblage of spatial practices constituted by and constitutive of social relationships.
Institutions materialise ideologies of social control by controlling the movement of certain bodies in space.
These spatial practices of imprisonment further discursively frame people as criminals.
Prisons have a political economy and are embedded in wider networks of neoliberal mass criminalisation.
Still some debate as to whether detention is exceptional or normal technique of state power
Martin & Mitchelson (2009)
Prison as a regulatory institution which produces an unemployable, criminalised class. This is a specific emerging state form coming from a specific relationship between state/law/space
Peck (2003); Theodore & Peck (2008)
Golden Gulag - the waning agricultural economy of California led to an economic fix to deal with a surplus of land, labour, capital and state capacity.
The state had to shift focus from rehabilitation to punishment, using a task force to study gang violence and increase levels of fear to spawn new crime legislation
Gilmore (2007)
Prisons as profit - the prison industrial complex. Private corporations given the power to punish detainees. Since 1980, the American penal system has become a profitable system which necessitates further criminalisation as a source of profit.
He also extends the analysis into news/entertainment media (a key discursive element)
Dyer (2000)
Prisons are a hyperlegal negation of existence (similar to Johns, 2013)
The law is a magical fabulation with the power to make material the stories it tells (like ghosts in a haunted house bringing down its value)
Civil death is when a person lives but is dead to the social world in law - capable of criminal but not civil acts
An abundance of law allows the govt to engage in illegal practices
Dayan (2011)
Research on rural communities and prisons which supposedly create economic opportunity - these regions have actively recruited prisons to stimulate growth
Rural prisons and poverty situated in material/discursive practices of neoliberal restructuring within which individuals must compete
But there is little evidence to support this connection
Bonds (2006)
