Punishment in Europe

A Critical Anatomy of Penal Systems

Vincenzo Ruggiero, Mick Ryan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137028211
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Criminologie

This collection, from a range of leading international scholars, looks at penal practice in a variety of different European countries. Noting particularities as well as similarities, such as the overuse of imprisonment and the use of harsher sanctions against the poor, this book questions how we justify and deliver punishment in Europe.

1

Introduction

Mick Ryan

In this short introduction we outline three ways of looking at penal systems, the purpose of which is to locate our own perspective, and to better illustrate the brief that we have invited our contributors to follow.

The common sense approach

Let us begin with some basic ideas about punishment which are usually taken for granted by members of the public, our first year law students and many criminal justice professionals.

In most societies there are rules, and it is anticipated that those who break these rules, who come up against the criminal law, will be identified, charged and then taken before the courts. If found guilty by the criminal courts, offenders will then be sentenced to a punishment in proportion to the harm or injury they are judged to have caused. The punishment (and the tariff) ordered by the criminal courts will have been codified by politicians in Parliament, either in the form of a comprehensive penal code, or as a cumulative series of separate criminal justice statutes.

We take it that this way of thinking about punishment is fairly routine, as is the understanding that in most western societies the penal apparatus in place for delivering these punishments extends from deep end capital punishment or imprisonment, to supervision in the community, or a fine for less serious offences.

To suggest that thinking about punishment in this way is taken for granted, or is fairly routine, is not to suggest that there are no areas of difference or disagreement. That would be clearly wrong.

For example, people disagree about what the rules are and what behaviour should be designated criminal. And, even where they do agree about these things, they frequently quarrel over what punishments are appropriate for those who break the rules. These quarrels sometimes arise because of differences of opinion over what the penal apparatus in any society can be expected to deliver: punishment or reform of the offender, or both. Such disagreements, within the banal sociological observation that all societies have rules which people expect to be enforced through the application of sanctions or punishments, should therefore hardly surprise us. In mature democracies they constitute the legitimate politics of punishment.

Nor should we be surprised to learn that such disagreements have different outcomes in different societies, something that many thoughtful members of the public are aware of in our increasingly inter-connected world. So, many German, Italian and French people will be aware that the rules governing the public purchase and use of certain so-called ‘recreational’ drugs in the Netherlands differ from their own national practices; while the use of imprisonment in the USA as a whole, and in California in particular, is far greater than in most European countries.

To emphasise different penal practices or structures within and across continents is hardly, therefore, a provocative insight. So, we are back again in the world of the sociologically banal.

A comparative approach

However, there are those who suggest that we should go beyond what is superficially obvious and pay more attention to analysing penal systems in order to understand why some are more punitive than others.

Michael Cavadino and James Dignan (2006), for example, claim that the severity of different penal systems, as measured by rates of imprisonment, is related to the type of political economy in which they operate.¹ This is a bold claim. It is one thing cheerfully to argue, as we have done, that there are rules and those who break those rules are likely to be punished; it is quite another to claim that the relative severity of the punishment they are likely to receive is somehow related to the organisation of the wider political economy.

Briefly, Cavadino and Dignan present a typology drawn from several sources (e.g. Esping-Anderson 1990; Lash and Urry 1987) that divides modern capitalist societies into four broad categories: neo-liberal, free market capitalist states (e.g. America and the UK); conservative, corporatist states (e.g. France and Germany); social democratic, corporatist states (e.g. Sweden); and then finally oriental corporatist states such as Japan. It is claimed that countries within each of these categories are in most cases closely matched in terms of their imprisonment rates with neo-liberal states having the highest rates, conservative corporatist states the next highest, and so on, in descending order. Liberal states are characterised as favouring low welfare expenditure and exclusive penal policies, while social democratic states are more likely to implement more inclusive penal policies and spend generously on welfare.²

Liberal states are further defined by their reliance on informal mechanisms of social control and support, such as the family, which acts as a break on their prison sanctions.

It is very important to register that these categories can be contested, as can the allocation of countries to this or that category. These definitions and boundaries are thus far from certain. But this should not surprise us unduly, most heuristic devices can be challenged in this way. And such exercises are rarely without a teleological bias. The time frame is also relatively short to sustain a general theory. Nor, as Cavadino and Dignan freely admit, are imprisonment rates necessarily the most reliable guide to the overall severity of any penal system (Pease 1994).

These are highly significant qualifications, nonetheless, as are the consequences of raising, albeit somewhat casually, the question of whether or not punishment is a single ‘entity’ (Cavadino and Dignan 2006), a question which immediately raises for us, albeit at a tangent, a whole raft of other philosophical problems (Ruggiero 2010). Finally, Cavadino and Dignan’s pioneering work is arguably stronger in establishing correlations than identifying causal links, a point well made by Nicola Lacey (2007) who, although highly appreciative of their work, as we are, prefers instead the greater explanatory power offered by the typologies of western economies put forward by Hall and Soskice (2003).

However, in our view what is really significant for our present purpose is that, when it comes to making sense of penal policy in any specific country, the wider material framework – corporatist, liberal market or whatever – interfaces with a whole range of other ideological, historical and administrative inputs that will likely produce very individual results, even within one category. Hence the different rates of imprisonment between America and several key European countries, including the UK. In other words, the shape and direction of a national penal system is significantly influenced by the wider political economy, but is far from being determined by it. Cavadino and Dignan characterise this complex, not to say messy, interaction in the following way:

The precise nature of the relationship between politics and economics, ideological and material factors, and the interplay between them, is likely to vary within different kinds of societies. A society’s penal ideology and culture will be greatly shaped by (and to some extent will also shape) the more general ideology and culture of the society, as well as by its material conditions. Finally, penal practices will be influenced by both general and penal ideology and the culture and the material realm in which they operate, and will also have some reciprocal effect on these forces and factors. (Cavadino and Dignan 2006: 12–3)

In their search for ways of reducing the overall level of the UK’s prison population, Mills and Roberts appear to endorse this interpretation, recently observing that:

For [Cavadino and Dignan], therefore, the use of imprisonment is embedded in wider political economy, economic, social structural, cultural and ideological factors are all part of this. They argue that these factors can best be interpreted as a complex whole for any one nation rather than being reduced to straightforward fixed variables that can be applied universally. (Mills and Roberts 2012: 15–6)

This conclusion, one which in our view relies heavily on the lesson we all learnt many years ago from David Garland (1985), mercifully takes us well beyond relying on single variables to explain levels of imprisonment, the state of the labour market, for example, which can be applied across the board. (Rusche and Kirhchemier 1939).

However, at the same time it does make the task that Mills and Roberts³ have set themselves, of discovering ways of reducing the prison population, that much more difficult because, while connection has been made by Cavadino and Dignan between wide social and economic circumstances and imprisonment:

it is not clear from these accounts that a more specific set of interventions can be identified that could be straightforwardly adopted by those seeking to significantly reduce imprisonment. (Roberts and Mills: 17)

So there can be no ‘cherry picking’, no simple cross-national transplants to ease the delivery of pain. Indeed, such accounts are said to raise as many problems as they solve (Mills and Roberts: 17). This position is largely consistent with the one taken by Nicola Lacey who has suggested that, while policy transfers cannot be ruled out, these are always problematic and ‘contingent on the dynamics of the local environment’ (Lacey 2007: 31). Of course, even if policy transfers do not accrue, we can at least agree that comparative work is likely to contribute towards a better general understanding of how penal cultures are formed, differ and operate (Lacey 2007). But this is a relatively modest gain when set against what is often the implied promise of comparative penology, namely, that it will provide us with the knowledge to secure progressive penal practice.

Penal systems in their national contexts

In the context of our present investigation of 12 European penal systems, this encounter with comparative penology, while providing useful suggestions about the relationship between welfare expenditure and levels of imprisonment (Beckett and Western 2001, Downes and Hansen 2006), has nonetheless reinforced our view: that in order to prepare the ground for effective strategic interventions, penal systems need to be first and foremost interrogated in their own terms; that we should focus more on national particularities rather than across the board commonalities, even though we are likely to find that countries at similar stages of economic development will share some trends in common (see below).

We acknowledge that this preference for emphasising the particular is perhaps reinforced by having lived and worked in the UK, where levels of welfare expenditure, for example, are mediated through the lens of a highly distinctive, not to say unique, penal culture which has been routinely mobilised at strategic moments (e.g. Hall 1978; Downes 1988) by ruling elites to discipline those at the margins who challenge ‘the rule of law’. The harsh political and judicial response to the English city riots of 2011 is just the most recent example (The Guardian, 4 July 2012 Analysis).

But the UK is not alone in displaying its own particularities.

So we have encouraged our authors to interpret in a critical spirit the dynamics of individual national penal systems, without paying overdue attention to any anxiety that their accounts might be massaged to fit into a pre-ordained descriptive (or comparative) box – whether it be classified neo-liberal, corporatist or adjusted to account for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Regression to the Mean: Punishment in the Netherlands
• 3 Punishment in Sweden: A Changing Penal Landscape
• 4 Punishment as Politics: The Penal System in England and Wales
• 5 The Irish Penal System: Pragmatism, Neglect and the Effects of Austerity
• 6 The French Criminal Justice System
• 7 Contradictions in German Penal Practices: The Long Goodbye from the Rehabilitation Principle
• 8 The Russian Penal System
• 9 Poland: The Political Legacy and Penal Practice
• 10 Soft and Harsh Penalties in Bulgaria
• 11 Italy: Between Amnesties and Emergencies
• 12 The Spanish Penal and Penitentiary System: From the Re-Socialising Objective to the Internal Governance of Prison
• 13 Greece: Prisons Are Bad but Necessary (and Expanding), Policies Are Necessary but Bad (and Declining)
• 14 Conclusion
• Index