Abstract
For over three decades Joe Sim has been one of the most persistent and perceptive critics of contemporary penal politics, and his latest book can be regarded as a comprehensive statement of his thinking over this period. In the book he charts the relationships between state power and penal policy in the UK, from 1974 up to the end of Tony Blair’s New Labour project in 2007, from an abolitionist position steeped in critical scholarship. Indeed, the book begins with a scathing assessment of current criminological knowledge and quickly establishes the need for an alternative understanding of penality that is informed by work contesting orthodox perspectives. Having set up this challenge the opening chapter identifies four key dimensions shaping Sim’s own distinctive analysis.
The first takes issue with the ‘discontinuity thesis’ initially outlined in Feeley and Simon’s (1992) influential account of the ‘new penology’ and subsequently elaborated in Garland’s (2001) celebrated discussion of the punitive turn driven by neoliberalism since the 1970s. Sim is careful to acknowledge the sociological importance of their interventions, but contends that the thesis is ‘built on a reductive periodization’ and problematically tends to read the ‘social history of the prison as an account from above’ (p. 2)—where accounts from below are either absent or largely marginal to the narrative. The second dimension questions the rhetoric and reality of reform. In particular, he points to how those who ran the criminal justice system in the immediate post-war period were deeply attached to the welfare logic of rehabilitation, yet there often lay behind the policies brutalizing practices, ranging from abuses of medical power to outright violence. A third element concerns the ways in which penal power is challenged and contested, both by professionals working within the system and by prisoner groups, which suggest there are limits to state power. The fourth thread running through the book is the development of an abolitionist position, through a Gramscian effort to replace ‘common sense’ with ‘good sense’ (p. 12), so that somewhat different understandings of crime, law, order and punishment can emerge. These four dimensions provide the overarching framework and set the scene for what follows.
The substantive work begins with a chapter documenting the emergence of a Thatcherite bloc in the Conservative Party, which was to play such a pivotal role in the ideological reshaping of law and order politics in the 1970s. Rather than present these developments as a radical break with the past, they are ‘perhaps better understood as an intensification’ (p. 15, emphasis in original) of processes already well entrenched in the political and cultural landscape. Sim describes how the penal crisis symbolized a broader social crisis, frequently depicted in apocalyptic terms, enabling the Thatcherite project of a strong, authoritarian state to be realized. The next chapter details the consolidationof state power during the 1980s, which included the biggest prison building programme of the 20th century, the extension of police power and their increasing militarization, combined with the proliferation of surveillance technologies and the extended capacity of state servants to intervene in public protest. Throughout all these developments the sense of crisis within and beyond prison walls continued, despite some liberalizing tendencies that were to appear in the government towards the end of the decade.
In the following chapter, which details the period from 1990 to 1997, the ways in which the Conservative government responded to a reinvigorated New Labour party are described. The opposition ‘not only embraced the punitive orientation of the government’s law and order and penal policies, but also was proactive in intensifying them still further’ (p. 51). Michael Howard’s slogan ‘prison works’ condensed a number of austere measures designed to reinforce the law and order credentials of the Government. By now both parties had become locked into a spiralling contest of ever tougher policies, so that by the time of the 1997 election the Conservative government was disintegrating from internal divisions within and the ideological success of New Labour’s transformation of crime into a defining domestic policy problem. Once in power Tony Blair’s three governments set about establishing a ‘particular form of statecraft, which involved continuing with law and order and social welfare policies developed by the Conservatives while simultaneously articulating their own strategic responses to crime and punishment’(p. 93) and these developments are charted in the fifth chapter. Here the distinctive combination of neoliberal and social democratic impulses are described, with a particular focus on how antisocial behaviour becomes associated with the powerless, while the social harms generated by the powerful are ignored and questions surrounding structural inequality are minimized.
Having set out the political context the final substantive chapter turns to how successive Blair administrations understood the role of prison, where old punitive mentalities mingled with a renewed emphasis on collaborative partnerships between different professional groups. These psychological interventions are criticized for their ‘individualised and reductive’ assumptions (p. 106), while ably demonstrating the ‘elastic connection between the punitive and therapeutic’ (p. 119) through the concept of the ‘therapunitive’ (Carlen and Tombs, 2006). The remaining two chapters turn explicitly to the abolitionist cause and set out a number of proposals that have the potential to fundamentally change penal institutions. Specifically these include a moratorium on prison building, redirecting criminal justice expenditure to support victims and alleviate poverty, dismantling the culture of prison officers, as well as more general interventions ranging from reforming sentencing policies to rejecting American neoconservative thinking that has done so much to shape domestic policy for over a generation. The book concludes with a consideration of the contradictions that lie at the heart of contemporary penality, and Sim emphasizes that ‘the carceral, penal state is not an unrelenting, historical inevitability’ (p. 156) for the penal management of poverty results from corrosive political choices.
Overall, the book is an impressive and provocative achievement. A brief summary cannot do justice to the wealth of detail and subtlety of argument contained in the pages. Among the many important themes explored in the book perhaps the most significant is the enduring presence of the prison within the political landscape of the last three decades. Indeed, one of the major strengths of the book is the way each of the substantive chapters has a nuanced grasp of the ideological struggles surrounding crime and punishment within both Conservative and New Labour administrations. Yet in following this punitive path, there is little sense of the cultural meanings the institution generates—especially since Sim refers in a passing footnote to Bourdieu’s concept of doxa to invoke that ‘which is unquestionable and taken for granted within a culture’ (p. 149)—and it is here that much work remains to be done. Given the breadth of coverage achieved in the book, it would be unfair to criticize Sim for failing to answer questions he had not set out to ask. Instead, a key issue raised is the relationship between ideological and utopian thinking, which pervades the abolitionist position—or indeed any form of political struggle—as one of the central contradictions exposed is the gap between existing social relations and an ideal of what they should be. Of course, few books in the sociology of punishment raise these questions and fewer still are as animated by them as Punishment and Prisons.