Abstract
The enterprise that we have come to know as Punishment and Society was originally kicked off almost 15 years ago at a dinner organized by David Garland on 20 November 1997, during the ASC meetings in San Diego. Subsequently it took almost a year to actually get the journal off the ground with David himself as Editor in Chief for the first two issues of 1999 and then the years 2000 and 2001. Richard Sparks took on the helm for 2002–2004, followed by Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon for 2005–2009, and finally Dirk Van Zyl Smit and Allison Liebling for 2010–2012. I am deeply honoured to be taking my turn as Editor in Chief, and look forward to following in the footsteps of such able stewardship. I too intend to pursue the original vision of the journal, as described in detail in a most fascinating and dense ‘Editorial’ by David Garland (1999) which appeared in the first issue of the journal.
In a sense, one could conceive of that project as a way of responding to the issue raised by Donald R. Cressey (1955: 396–398), many years before, regarding an ‘important deficiency in current criminology’, that is a ‘failure to integrate and organize, according to some theoretical system, the research studies and general knowledge about the area variously called “penology,” “corrections,” or “crime control”’. In that pioneering article, Cressey went on to mention the six ‘hypotheses’ that had up to then been advanced in the field: Sutherland’s ‘(cultural) consistency theory’, the psychoanalytic (‘scapegoat’) interpretation, Rusche’s Marxist approach (that Cressey had learned from Sutherland), Ranulf’s ‘resentment’ hypothesis, Durkheim’s well-known thesis of a relationship between the social division of labour, solidarity and punishment, and a Chicago-derived ‘social disorganization’ thesis. When, in 1990, David Garland had laid out the bases for the comprehensive project of building a new ‘sociology of punishment’, or ‘penology’, in a foundational volume entitled Punishment and Modern Society (1990), several of these ‘hypotheses’ were dropped, but, most significantly, a new one was added, and that was Foucault’s crucial contribution.
In that first Editorial, much importance was attributed – and rightly so – to punishment’s significance for politics (and politics’ significance for punishment!). What was at the time the most obvious phenomenon in the sociology of punishment, ‘mass imprisonment’ in the USA, was widely referenced. If the ominous presence of mass imprisonment in the USA in the last few years has certainly not disappeared, it has at least shown a few signs of abatement. Back in the late 1990s, however, we were still under the influence of the residual thrust of the ‘Reagan and Thatcher revolutions’ that had triggered what seemed to be a very successful drive towards a world dominated by the double constellation of ‘globalization’ and seemingly unrestrained economic development. Those ‘revolutions’ had, at the same time, however, and not unrelatedly, started the race to punish, through imprisonment and capital punishment, an increasing number of Americans (largely poor and racially definable). The first 15 years of Punishment and Society run concurrently, then, with Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and subsequently the worldwide economic crisis, which unfortunately is still going strong. The crisis has come, in a sense, as a mixed blessing about the issues with which we occupy ourselves in this journal. If, in fact, on the one hand, it has greatly accrued the accumulation of misery and suffering which ends up contributing to crime and punishment, on the other hand, not only in the USA but also in Western Europe and perhaps all over the world, it has encouraged preoccupations, others from the ‘fear’ of losing out, to competition or to crime, so rightly decried by many of the Punishment and Society founders, in primis Jonathan Simon in his Governing through Crime (2007). As in fact Ivan Jankovic first pointed out in his brilliant pioneer research on the relationships between unemployment and imprisonment, when he realized that such relationship did not hold during the Depression, ‘the extent of unemployment during the Depression and the conciliatory policies of the New Deal prevented the positive correlation between imprisonment and unemployment’ (Jankovic, 1977: 27). Especially in situations of quasi-cataclysmic economic crisis, such as in the 1930s and perhaps again today, a kind of solidarity is established whereby the sharing of a common destiny among large masses of people, brings forth an attitude of tolerance that somehow mitigates the most envious tendencies. The importance of politics in this regard cannot be denied.
The relationship between punishment and economic crisis may be worthy of more attention, therefore, than has been the case until now. Again, Garland’s suggestion in his Editorial, in which he invoked the heritage of the ‘classic’ works in the sociology of punishment, is certainly a lead to follow. Such classic works, by the likes of Rusche and Kirchheimer, or Durkheim, called for exploring the relationship between punishment and society. Especially, state punishments and society. However, there are at least two areas of exploration and investigation where what we could call the boundaries of state punishment are called into question. One certainly is the issue of gender and, relatedly, the kind of questions that have been raised in the tradition of Foucauldian studies. For instance, while it is quite true, almost a ‘penological universal’, that women are minimally represented in the prison populations of all penal systems – and even historically the exceptions are few and far between – a possible explanation for such a situation cannot be found, I believe, in the idea that women are a kind of island of autonomy and freedom, safe from any kind of constraining and repressive attention of the social order. Rather, a more interesting and realistic hypothesis would be that the pressure of social control is exercised on women elsewhere and probably also before the penal system, in the social order at large. Likewise, our attention has been increasingly drawn lately to news of ‘non-penal’ detention of migrants in North America, Western Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania – in a way that, as Giorgio Agamben illustrated in his work on the ‘genealogy’ of ‘the camp’ (1995), it is hard not to reconnect to a heritage of colonial domination first, and then to various ‘states of exception’, the most notorious of which was the National-Socialist. The idea therefore of connecting penology to sociology in the tradition of the classics, as David Garland suggested in his first Editorial, represents a promise to explore – together with an established and renovated interest in ‘penology’ – what we may want to call the boundaries and contours of public punishments.
As Allison Liebling and Dirk Van Zyl Smit stated in their Editorial (2010) we therefore look forward to continuing to receive the usual high number of quality submissions. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions, empirical as well as theoretical, and in particular – I would like to stress – contributions from geographic areas not usually represented in international English-language journals. Punishment and Society is already one of the most international among the English-language journals in the social sciences. However, if there is a sense to the generous and somewhat courageous decisions of my co-editors (and SAGE!) to entrust a non-native English speaker with the responsibilities of Editor in Chief, I believe that this sense also goes in the direction of sending a clear message about the journal’s special commitment to being a ‘truly “international” journal of penology’, as Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon (2005: 5) wrote. For this, a special reliance on reviewers’ collaboration and good-will across the globe will be particularly necessary. We are already aware of the extent to which we rely on the absolutely essential contribution of our reviewers, and we thank them warmly for their crucial support, a support that we shall need even more in the future. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge and thank our new Associate Editor in Bologna, Dr Ester Massa, without whom the day-to-day running of the journal would be impossible, and the ‘Interdepartmental Centre of Research in History, Philosophy and Sociology of the Law’ (CIRSFID), which is graciously hosting the journal’s office at the University of Bologna. Thanks to all, and Buon lavoro!