Abstract
Crime and punishment are two related concepts. Where there is a crime, punishment is expected to be inflicted. Prisons, in this sense, play an essential role in being a place where punishment meted out. Just like crime and punishment, prisons exist everywhere around the world, without exception. However, its universality does not guarantee to be the same everywhere. In each country, there is a different use of incarceration. The Politics of Punishment offers a comparative sociological analysis of the differences in imprisonment in Ireland and Scotland.
The author, Dr Louise Brangan, who is a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom, primarily focuses on the comparative and historical study of imprisonment, penal politics, and penal culture in their studies. In their last book, The Politics of Punishment, Brangan seeks answers to the questions of why penal politics and imprisonment vary between nations and how the differences in cross-national uses of incarceration can be explained. To answer these questions, they examine the prison and penal culture comparatively in Ireland and Scotland between the years 1970 and 1990s. The main arguments of the book are twofold: First, Brangan remarks on the strength of comparative study and argues that the comparative approach and cross-national study make the common and domestic order of penalty obvious as well as enhancing the knowledge of punishment about the compared nations. Second, the framework offered in the book presents distinct categories and tools to examine and analyze prison and penalty policymaking in any country. In addition to that, the selected cases in the book show that “imprisonment regimes display the distinctive hallmarks of the prevailing political culture, which itself reflects structural biases and cultural norms” (p. 158).
The book consists of nine chapters. It starts with an Introduction chapter that presents the main arguments and the outline of the book while arousing the readers’ curiosity successfully. After revealing the aim of the book and the questions that make them conduct such a study, the author gives brief information about the distinctiveness of Ireland and Scotland in terms of their place in the punitive as being outliers within Anglophone penality. Then, the author explains the conceptual challenges of comparative penology. According to the author, it is not very possible to see studies in the comparative literature that focuses on the social contingencies and governmental choices, which are the causes of the differences in penal practices in different countries, and this empirical deficiency stems from the conceptual limitations of comparative criminology.
To overcome these limitations, the author proposes two distinct concepts, imprisonment regimes, and political culture, to compare Ireland and Scotland. They explain these concepts in detail in Chapter 2. The author criticizes the statistical trend in the comparative studies of punishment, and instead of approaching statistically to prison populations, they coin the concept of imprisonment regime, which is a concept “that compares the various ways in which people are housed, categorized, disciplined, and monitored across a prison estate” (p. 3). Political culture, on the other hand, refers to the “institutional dynamics, based on political science conceptions of ‘consensus’, ‘majoritarian’, or ‘conflict’ political systems” (p. 19), which has two key dimensions: cultural sensibilities “such as crime anxieties and understanding of prisoners” and political reasoning “which includes ideological rationalities, a desire to cultivate citizen-subjects and the practical techniques of government” (p. 19). These dimensions show why and how the governments of various countries create penal systems. In sum, political culture refers to “the ideational and cultural views, as they were practiced, in relation to the prison” (p. 27).
While the main argument of Chapter 2 is that prison systems always demonstrate the cultural, emotional, and ideational currents of political culture, it also includes methodological notes about the study. The study relies on oral histories, seven interviews in Scotland and eight interviews in Ireland which are conducted with people who were from governments and the prison administrations of the selected countries; and archival research, which is based on the examination of under-researched archives, unread files, memos, minutes, and unpublished reports for the years between 1970 and 1990s in Ireland and Scotland.
The book is a historical book as much as being a comparative one. The analysis in the book is presented as historical case studies. After Chapter 2, the book is divided into two sections. In Section 1, which consists of Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5, Ireland is examined thoroughly in terms of its imprisonment regime and political culture starting from 1970 to 1999. In Section 2, which consists of Chapter 6, Chapter 7, and Chapter 8, on the other hand, Scotland is analyzed in the same way from 1970 to 1995. Both sections start with the 1970s since this period is considered as the starting point of new trends in Anglophone penal policies. In Chapter 3, it is argued that the Irish imprisonment regime in the 1970s was significant for its mild-mannered practices and humanistic approach toward prisoners. It was a result of the pastoral penal culture in which collective social morality was highly valued. Hence, the 1970s in Ireland was a period of supportive and permissive prison policies. In Chapter 4, the 1980s are reviewed, arguing that the challenging social change in Ireland in this period caused a damaging effect on the imprisonment regime of the country. Chapter 5, which is the last chapter on Ireland, demonstrates the impact of the country’s social and political transformation on the penal culture. Through the end of the 1990s, the prison in Ireland was repositioned in a way that reflects the socio-political structure of the country. Following a similar manner with Section 1, the first part of Section 2, Chapter 6, reveals the social, cultural, and political structure of Scotland in the 1970s, as well as explaining how the existing structure shaped prison policymaking in the country. In this chapter, the author argues that the Scottish prison system was a dreary and punitive set of routines that were influenced by the country’s social hierarchies and liberal political ideals. While Chapter 7 elaborates on a series of riots and how the prison administrators, as well as government officials, tried to deal with these shocking events, Chapter 8 shows how these events paved the way for civilizing penal transformation in Scotland in the 1990s.
After the historical approach in Section 1 and Section 2, Chapter 9 compares two countries’ similarities and differences in terms of their imprisonment regimes and political cultures. It is asserted that penal transformation in both Ireland and Scotland differed, and these transformations were not just about controlling crime in these countries. At the same time, they were obvious political statements about state power, the shifting socio-political structures, and newly emerging cultural sensibilities.
The Politics of Punishment is a strong book about prison policymaking in Scotland and Ireland. The strength of the book comes from its comparative and longitudinal approach. It critically analyzes two countries at the same time, guiding the reader through both places in a detailed way, with a deep understanding of the penal cultures of Ireland and Scotland. Besides, it relies on rich data, digging into under-research archives along with hours of interviews with people from key positions in both countries. It also contributes to the comparative penology literature by providing a new framework to compare different nations’ penal cultures with a great extent of scope. However, as a reader of this book, I expected to see how Ireland and Scotland, as two outliers within the Anglophone penalty, affected and were affected by the transformations in international penal culture. Moreover, it would be impressive to have at least an idea of how gender played a role in imprisonment regimes in both countries.
Despite its minor drawbacks, it would be fair to conclude this review by recommending this book to anyone who has an interest in the sociology of punishment, prison policymaking, penal culture, and politics, along with comparative studies and historical sociology. With its accessible tone, it is for sure that the book will appeal to not just scholars from these fields but also ordinary readers who are interested in the histories of Ireland and Scotland.