Punishment & Society

Criminologists have spent the past decade writing about the border. Sociologists have documented the growing convergence of punishment and migration control, while legal theorists have critiqued the concepts of sovereignty and citizenship. Over time, these inquiries have cohered into what Katja Aas and Mary Bosworth call the ‘criminology of mobility’. One central premise of this new criminology, perhaps even its motivating concern, is that globalization has altered the relationship between punishment and identity. This article expands on that theoretical claim. What do we mean when we say that punishment and identity are intertwined? How have mass mobility and waning sovereignty affected the practice of punishment? With these questions in mind, this article examines the relationship between three aspects of identity – gender, sexuality, and nationality – in one space of punishment, the British prison. Drawing on interviews with foreign national prisoners in five men’s prisons, I argue that sexism and homophobia work as resources for prisoners who seek to establish themselves as members of the British polity. In the contemporary prison, asserting gender conformity is one way to lay claim to a British national identity.

According to official statistics, about half of the male prisoners in Norwegian prisons are fathers. At the same time, just over three prisoners in 10 are foreign nationals. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Norwegian remand prison, this article will discuss some of the problems imprisoned ethnic minority fathers are facing, and detail some of the solutions they employ. I will focus particularly on two narrative problem-solving strategies. One is the promotion of parental values based on a strong (paternalistic) version of the pater familias combined with narratives about the sorry state of Norwegian parenting. The other is a form of symbolic resistance through narratives about violent revenge taken on responsible state agents. Finally, I will show how the imprisoned ethnic minority fathers reposition themselves as both real men and good fathers in the process.

In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status subordination in the IRC played out across a range of emotional responses, mediated and framed by gender. While these responses emerged in everyday interactions, the frustrations of life in an IRC, we argue, speak to much wider struggles over the status of immigrants in the UK, the confused and contested purpose of IRCs and the widening of detention as a strategy of migration control; in short, to matters of living under conditions of mass mobility.

To examine the micro politics of new carceral spaces this article considers the very human(e) interactions that occur in an increasingly depersonalized, technologically remote-driven space: the border. This interrogation is also specifically interested in the enactment of gender at the border in relation to the increasing numbers of women making irregular maritime journeys and the competing paradigms of enforcement (masculine) and rescue (feminine) in the use of interception and custody in the border’s daily operation. In an effort to ground recent theoretical excursions empirically into the geographical margins of the state, this article examines the narratives of Australian customs agents who undertake maritime border enforcement and are charged with the custody of asylum seekers.

In many parts of Asia, critics have noted the common but hitherto under-researched practices of detaining victims of human trafficking in semi-carceral institutions or ‘shelters’, in the name of victim protection and rescue. Although the formal justification for immigration detention and ‘protective custody’ may be different, there are clear parallels between the experience of trafficking victims in semi-carceral institutions and what Kalhan has termed ‘a quasi-punitive system of immcarceration’. This article seeks to add to the critical work on the changing nature and harms of immigration control by exploring the logic and practices of protective custody in Asia. How can we make sense of the regulatory purposes performed by semi-carceral institutions for trafficking victims? What do we know about women and girls’ experiences of protective custody in South and South-East Asia? In what ways does the dominant anti-sex trafficking discourse of ‘protection’ and ‘rescue’ intersect with gendered notions of belonging and citizenship? And, ultimately, what can a study of gendered carceral practices tell us about the problems and paradoxes of trafficking control?