tema 2 criminal policy professor cléssio PDF

Preview

Summary

tema 2 criminal policy professor cléssio UPF...

Description

TEMA 2 Michel Foucault Michel Foucault (1926-84), French philosopher and sociologist. His books on madness, sexuality and punishment had a profound impact on twentieth-century thought. French philosopher Michel Foucault focused his study on the workings of power and became particularly interested in the processes and legitimacy of government in Western Europe from the 16th to 20th centuries. As a professor at the prestigious Collège de France in Paris between 1970 and 1975, Foucault delivered a series of lectures that became a prominent feature of intellectual life in the city. One of these lectures was later published in the influential journal of Ideology and Consciousness in 1979, under the title ‘’On Governmentality’’In this work, Focault argues that it is impossible to study the formation of power without also looking at the practices - the techniques and rationality - through which people are governed. This rationality is not an absolute that can be reached by pure reason, as most philosophers have suggested, but a changing thing that depends on both time and place. Foucalut’s approach to philosophical analysis focuses on the ‘’genealogy of the subject’’. So rather than relying on the traditional approach to inquiry, where philosophers look for the universal and invariant foundations of knowledge, Focault looks at how a subject is constituted across history, and how this leads to its modern appearance. Foucault's series of lectures on governmentality examined the ways in which the modern idea of an autonomous, individual self developed in concert with the idea of the nation-state.He was particularly interested in seeing how these two concepts co-determined each other’s existence, and changed with the political rationality of the time. For the first time, it seemed possible that the citizens and their rulers could be brought together in a system that was mutually beneficial. The personal interest of the rulers was no longer the sole guiding principle for ruling; with this shift, the idea of ‘’ruling’’ was transformed into ‘’governing’’. Foucault traces the shift from a sovereign notion of power to government notion of power. Governmentality is the effort to shape and guide choices and lifestyles of groups and individuals. Neoliberalism relies on the notion of responsible, rational individuals who are capable of taking responsibility for themselves, their lives, and their environment, particularly through ‘’normalizing technologies’’ - the agreed-upon goals and procedures of society that are so ‘’obvious’’ that they are seen as ‘’normal’’. In the 21st century these include behaviours such as recycling, losing weight, being involved in Neighborhood Watch schemes, or quitting smoking. Focault claims that the ways we think and talk about health, work, family and so on, encourage us to behave in particular ways. People govern themselves and other according to what they believe to be true. For instance, many societies view monogamous, heterosexual marriage as the ‘’correct’’ enviorment for bringing chilidren, and this ‘’thruth’’ is established in many ways, from cultural artifacts to government discourse on family values.

Political policies (criminal policy) may also be used to put weight behind particular ideas, such as the family, through incentives such as tax breaks Michel Foucault - Discipline and Punish Discipline and Punish ( Foucault 1979) looks at the birth of the prison and the processes by which brutal systems of punishment focused on the infliction of pain on the body were gradually replaced by systems directed more toward the souls and minds of offenders. The analysis could be extended to many other areas of life - the sphere of punishment simply happens to be the one Foucault used. However, as he noted, ‘is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prison?’ Up until the 1700s, much punishment was inflicted in public, and involved considerable pain and terror. Executions were relatively common. Torture was used, as were various forms of humiliation. From the public hangings at Newgate to the use of branding, whipping, the stocks and, from a contemporary perspective, other hugely cruel techniques, punishment of criminals in this period was focused upon the body, and was inflicted in such a manner as to involve public spectacle. Brutal and public forms of punishment have been replaced by private and apparently more civilized forms of regulation. Foucault describes this as a shift from a corporal to a carceral system of discipline. Consideration 1: This new form of punishment - what Foucault refers to as ‘discipline’ - based around surveillance, uses a variety of subtle techniques to control and manage the offender in ever more finely graded ways. Rather than occasional bursts of (by today’s standards) quite horrific forms of bodily punishment, the system that replaces it aims to control and regulate at all times. Consideration 2: The second mistake we must avoid concerns the assumption that it was our growing knowledge of the nature of delinquency that led to the creation and elaboration of imprisonment as a means of punishment. The rise of the disciplinary prison rose simultaneously with the emergence of a nre form of knowledge about the criminal. This body of knowledge - part of which eventually came to be known by the term of criminology - involved the study, in great detail, of the criminal and delinquent and underpinned a variety of practices which through the utilization of these new forms of expertise - psychiatry, psychology, criminology, social work and others - disciplined the body and mind of the offender. Focault uses Bentham’s idea of the panopticon as a metaphorical representation of this emergent enveloping disciplinary gaze of what he called the ‘age of panopticism’: ‘The panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see(being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen’. The principles captured in the operation of the panopticon can be found operating in other spheres of social life. Garland and Sparks The transition from Modernity to Late Modernity

Garland and Sparks (2000) summarize the transition from modernity to late modernity in ‘two intertwined transformative dynamics’. The first of these concerns five sets of social economics and cultural changes: 1. Changes in the nature of production and consumption, including the impact of globalization on markets and the new insecurity of employment. 2. Changing nature of families and households, including increasing female employment, rising divorce rates and so on. 3. Changes in social ecology, including to time and space as a result of transport and communications. 4. The social impact of the electronic mass media 5. Democratization in social life (declining deference and diminishing power ratios between men and women, social groups, etc.) The second set of dynamics they identify concerns the changing nature of class relationships and, in the USA in particular, of race relations. The new technologies of communication extend surveillance far beyond the borders of nation states. The UK has more CCTV cameras per head of population than anywhere else in the world. Watch signs have spread widely in the UK and elsewhere since the 1980s. David Garland’s The Culture of Control (2001) David Garland’s The Culture of Control (2001) is considered the most important and influential book in Western criminology in the past decade. At the heart of the book is an analysis of changes in the field of crime control in America and Britain. Both societies have seen some remarkable and, in many respects, parallel changes in the last 30 or so years - parallel but not identical: ‘’my argument will be that the strong similarities that appear in recent policies and practices in these two societies… are evidence of underlying patterns of structural transformation, and that these transformations are being brought about by a process of adaptation to the social conditions that now characterize these (and other) societies. I make no claim: there are important national differences that distinguish the specific trajectory of these policy environments from one another and from those of other societies. Garland identifies 12 incides of the changes that have taken place in connection with the emergence of this new culture of control: 1. The decline of the rehabilitative ideal: For much of the twentieth century the ideal of rehabilitation was a profound influence on responses to crime. The assumption that people could be reformed fell quickly out of fashion from the 1970s onward and as it did so, many of the assumptions that had underpinned criminal justice began to fall away. 2. The re-emergence of punitive sanctions and expressive justice: punishments that were straightforwardly harsh or retributive were perceived as having little place in criminal justice 3. Changes in the emotional tone of crime policy: apparently growing ‘fear of crime’ and generalized insecurity have created a situation in which politicians and others now talk about crime and its control in much more openly emotive terms. Where once many discussions of crime were relatively dispassionate, they have now in part been replaced by a ‘phone-in-programme’ style of debate. 4. The return of the victim: the victim has become a more important figure in contemporary criminal justice. Reference to victims’ rights and needs are regularly made by people justifying new, punitive legislation and laws named after particular victims (Megan’s Law, the Brady Bill)

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

have become more common in America. In many respects the victim is a symbolic figure, standing in for widespread concerns about crime and disorder. Above all, the public must be protected: protecting the public is a central part of all systems of crime control. What is different now, Garland argues, is the urgency and stress on this factor. Using the prison to stop offending occurring (through incapacitation rather than rehabilitation), probation and parole as means of managin rish and sex offender registers and notifications schemes for highlightting future dangers are all indications of the overrriding importance of public protection in contemporary crime control. Politicisation and the new populism: the end of the ‘bipartisan consensus’ has changed the way in which crime is talked about and policy is made. Where once major political parties departed little from each other in their diagnosis of crime and their models of punishment, and much policy-making centrally involved expert opinion, now crime and criminal justice are major areas for political contest, and much of such debate is now heavily populist. Expert opinion is ignored, and crude measures of public opinion are used to justify new measures. The reinvention of the prison: the espousal of the idea that ‘prison works’ represents a major shift away from the view that dominated much of the twentieth century. During this time, dominant approaches sought alternatives to using custody and the proliferation of community sanctions is testimony of this. In America since the 1970s, and Britain since the early 1990s, there has been a profound shift toward viewing expanding prison numbers as a necessary and important part of a successful criminal justice system. The transformation of criminological thought: criminology up until the 1970s was dominated by a variety of approaches which saw criminality as a product of faculty adaptation or social injustice and inequality (deprivation, poor socialization, inadequate treatment of psychological or mental problems. etc). The period since has seen the rise of theories which see inadequate controls as being the core issue. These control theories take many forms, but they differ from earlier ideas in that they contain a less positive view of ‘human nature’, viewing crime as normal and to be expected in the absence of sustainable controls. One consequence of such ideas is that they shift attention away from the criminal (and how they might be treated or rehabilitated) toward the criminal act ( and how it might be prevented). In such a vision, social welfare is not a core issue. The expanding infrastructure of crime prevention and community safety: a huge new crime control establishment covering such matters as Neighbourhood Watch, local crime prevention programmes, Business Improvement Districts had developed alongside criminal justice, but with objectives focused on harm and fear reduction, loss prevention and security rather than inclusionary. Civil society and the commercialization of crime control: a number of processes have increased the emphasis on preventative actions by citizens in the control of crime, and related developments have seen a significant expansion in the private security industry. Policing is something that is now undeniably provided through a mixed economy of public and private bodies, and security has become progressively ‘commodified’ (something that is bought and sold in the marketplace) New management styles and working practices: criminal justice, like many areas of public life, has become progressively subject to a set of pressures which collectively are known as ‘managerialism’. These include increasing financial oversight and control by government and other auditing bodies, the establishment and use of performance indicators and league tables, and the use of cost-effectiveness as primary value in service delivery. A perpetual sense of crisis: criminal justice and penal systems are gripped by a sense of impending crisis, as being ‘unfit for purpose’ and being unable to cope with the pressure placed upon them. One consequence is that professional experience and expertise have become increasingly discredited, as both politicians and the public have lost confidence in them to ensure security and safety....