Abstract
Mark Hamm would like to write a new chapter in the genealogy of terrorism. His ambition is to forge a link between thinking in criminology and the imminent threat of terrorism in Western prisons. He seeks a new mode of subjection to counter prisoner’s use of ‘criminal cunning, collective resistance, and nihilism to incite terrorism against Western targets’. Hamm’s ‘alternative criminology’ enlists mainstream social science in the service of fighting the war on terror (WOT). He couples this ‘biopolitical’ project with a ‘progressive’ critical intention to reform penology and the prison.
The thesis that runs through the book is the idea that prisons have the power to de-radicalize potential terrorists by producing subjective effects. The prison experience is good if it produces a Gandhi or Mandela; it is bad if it produces a Hitler or al-Zawahiri! Hamm’s ultimate and final goal is to elaborate a new narrative of ‘the power to punish’ that would be powerful enough to change public and political discourse. The new regime would recycle the old ‘social gospel’ of religious self-reformation. The aim of prisons should be to produce self-disciplined, de-radicalized individuals who eschew the rationality and the right to engage in political violence. He simply assumes that their radicalized views of the existing systems of political power are illegitimate, irrational, and extremist. In fact, he argues they are dangerous because they might motivate some prisoners to organized violence against ‘Western Targets’. The deeper issue here is Hamm’s obtuse refusal to acknowledge that he is deeply embedded in the assemblage of discourses and practices that incite political violence.
One of the most important determinants of the emergence and continued functioning of an object of knowledge like ‘criminality’ or ‘terrorism’ is its strategic mobility and tactical polyvalence (Foucault, 1977). We should once again recall that the development of the social sciences in the 19th century was energized and legitimated as a rational response to the dangers posed by revolutionary liberalism and the right to fight tyrannical terror with democratic terror (Blain, 2012). Power is immanent in the production of knowledge. Criminals and terrorists had to be incarcerated, records kept, and access to inmates obtained to make Hamm’s research possible. The discourse of terrorism is clearly polyvalent, and its meaning has shifted in genealogical fashion along with the shifting theater of power struggles (recently, resistance to Empire in the Middle East and central Asia; Narcoterrorism in Latin America, etc.). This understanding sheds light on Hamm’s opportunistic use of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s legalistic definition of terrorism. It is tailor made for a reduction of the problem of political violence to criminality. Hamm’s analysis is well within the parameters of thought outlined by the architects of the WOT. Since 9/11, the US power elite and its allies have worked hard to link the current terrorist threat to religious identity, fanaticism, and hostility to liberal conceptions of freedom. The US policy of targeted assassinations in the WOT is legitimated as surgical attacks on Islamic extremists and jihadists.
Hamm’s analysis demonstrates all the features of a biopolitics of terrorism and the prison. In ritual obeisance to the funding agencies and security management, it sounds the alarm on the dangers associated with the ‘evolving terrorist threat’ inside Western prisons. His objective is to identify the conditions of ‘Prison Radicalization’ that produce ‘The Spectacular Few’ who constitute a new terrorist threat. Hamm approvingly cites statements by politicians and government officials who recognize that threat and social scientists inside and outside of government who agree it is real. The only critical remark in the book is directed at those who deny the prison-terrorism threat. Hamm is obviously well-connected with the policy planning network that articulates conventional ‘wisdom’ in the field of terrorism. The empirical basis for this book was a 2-year study he conducted for the US Department of Justice, focusing on trends in prisoner radicalization in US correctional institutions, including both Folsom Prison and New Folsom Prison. He interviewed prisoners who had converted to Islam during their incarceration, including members of ‘Al-Qaeda of California’. These are failed prisons. ‘And’, he argues, ‘within that failure is the greater story of how America is creating terrorists within its own borders’.
The assemblage driving the WOT is evident in Hamm’s decision to accept without question the dramatic urgency of the ‘terrorist’ threat, the nature of the ‘terrorists’, and the need to intensify surveillance and intelligence. There is nothing particularly new or ‘alternative’ in his terrorism research. He sprinkles ideas and quotes from mainstream sociologists to constitute his ‘alternative criminology’ bona fides (Becker, Goffman, Wacquant). The research he reports is based on a database he assembled that includes a sample of 51 ‘terrorists’ (70% Muslim and Black, 20% White Supremacists) linked to the prison system and case studies of individual prison ‘terrorists’ and their management by US, British, and Israeli prisons. He uses Howard Becker’s sociology and methodology to collect and analyze data. There are subcultures of inmate radicalization in US prisons that can lead to terrorism. He adopts a ‘life course’ perspective to identify the critical internal and external incidents leading to the evolution of these subcultures (e.g. mass incarceration and its effects inside prisons; the United States going to war against Iraq). Hamm’s project is biopolitical in the direct sense that he defines his project as one involving the use of social science to augment the ‘security’ goals of the US federal government in its fight against al Qaeda. He is most concerned with ‘how prisoners use criminal cunning, collective resistance, and nihilism to incite terrorism against Western targets’. He identifies several conditions that are conducive to a successful terrorist operation inside a prison: mass incarceration and failed prisons; power dynamics inside prisons; a clandestine communication system; emergence of charismatic leaders and a subculture of resistance, socially organized around a collective identity of some type (i.e. White, Black, Muslim); and an effective narrative of radicalization that includes the desire to engage in violence to achieve a political goal.
As far as it goes, sociologists will find Hamm’s descriptions of life inside the US prison system interesting in a ‘nuts, sluts, and perverts’ sort of way, a common marker of the new narc with PhD and hip ‘alternative criminology’ (see the photograph of the meth freak, Nazi White Supremacist). Comparative sociologists might find his description of the way that the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel manage terrorists enlightening, although Hamm does not delve into the background power struggles that delivered the terrorists to these prison systems. He accepts without criticism the theory that ‘religious extremism’ is the key to understanding contemporary terrorism. This means he does not have to detail the power and political themes in their narratives of radicalization. Hamm might argue that these would detract him from his goals: to show how Islam is ‘sweeping across Western prisons’, creating both ‘unprecedented security challenges and exceptional possibilities for progressive reform’. He would like to see a prison regime based on the restorative power of religion and religious agency. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome of Hamm’s project will be a penology that ratifies more ‘intel’ based on surveillance and subjection of prisoners as ‘terrorists’.
Here we arrive at the limits of Hamm’s indifference to the power relations that produce terrorism and mass incarceration. These things do not occur in a vacuum. Hamm fails to theorize the deep dynamics of the power relations underlying the so-called terrorist threat. He does not take serious the criticisms of existing power relations in the discourses of the terrorists he objectifies. Terrorism is decontextualized. Nowhere in Hamm’s discourse is there any recognition of the subjectivity and desires for power of those who govern the US, UK, or Israeli prison systems or prosecute the WOT. They are simply assumed to be the ‘well intentioned’, ‘God Fearing’, and ‘rational’ agents of legal, legitimate authority. There are no war criminals or terrorists behind the WOT. The idea that some power structure is producing ‘terrorism’ is anathema. Discussions of power in Hamm’s analysis are confined to the ‘narratives of radicalization’ elaborated by charismatic ‘Terrorist Kingpins’ that Hamm describes as one of the most important conditions leading to terrorism. These ideas are dangerous. They might legitimate violence against the so-called Western Targets. The most likely outcome of the new narrative of ‘the power to punish’ would be a top-down, elite, orchestrated ‘De-Radicalization Movement’ inside the prisons.