Imaginary penalities

176 Pages·2008·28.427 MB·English

by  Pat Carlen (ed.)

Imaginary Penalities
Edited by
Pat Carlen
WILLAN
PUBLISHING
Published by
Contents
Willan Publishing
Culmcott House
Mill Street, Uffculme
Cullompton, Devon
EX15 SAT, UK
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
E-mail: [email protected]
website: www.willanpublishing.co.uk
Published simultaneously in the USA and Canada by
Willan Publishing
c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave, Suite 300
Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]
E-mail: [email protected]
website: www.isbs.com
Acknowledgements vii
© The editor and contributors 2008
About the contributors ix
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, Imagine xiii
recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Publishers or a licence
Pat Carlen
permitting copying in the UK issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron
House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London ECIN 8TS.
1 Imaginary penalities and risk-crazed governance
First published 2008 Pat Carlen 1
ISBN 978-1-84392-375-6 paperback
2 Imaginable insecurities: imagination, routinisation
978-1-84392-376-3 hardback
and the government of uncertainty post 9/11
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Pat O'Malley and Philip D. Bougen 26
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
3 The first casualty: evidence and governance in a
war against crime
Tim Hope 45
4 Inventing community safety
Adam Edwards and Gordon Hughes 64
5 Telling sentencing stories
Jacqueline Tombs 84
Project managed by Deer Park Productions, Tavistock, Devon
6 The 'seemingness' of the 'seamless management'
T)^eset by CCS, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire
Printed and bound by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall of offenders
Anne Worrall ■ 113
Imaginary Penalities
7 Pain and punishment: the real and the imaginary in
penal institutions Acknowledgements
foe Sim 135
8 Imaginary reform: changing the postcolonial prison
Andrew M. Jejferson 157
9 The imaginary constitution of wage labourers
Magnus Hdrnqvist 172
10 Re-imagining gendered penalities: the myth of
gender responsivity
Kelly Hannah-Moffat 193
11 Risking desistance: respect and responsibility in
custodial and post-release contexts
Mark Halsey 218 I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all the contributors and to
Brian Willan of Willan Publishing. Their intellectual liveliness and
12 'The best seven years I could'a done': the reconstruction wise counsel made the editing of this book a very pleasurable
of imprisonment as rehabilitation experience.
Megan Comfort 252
13 Re-imagining justice: principles of justice for divided
societies in a globalised world
Barbara Hudson 275
References 295
Index 329
VI
Imagine
Pat Carter)
An Emperor who cares too much about clothes hires two
swindlers who promise him the finest suit of clothes from the
most beautiful cloth. This cloth, they tell him, is invisible to
anyone [who is] either stupid or not fit for his position. The
Emperor is nervous about being able to see the cloth himself so
he sends his ministers to view it. They see nothing, yet praise
the cloth. When the swindlers report a suit of clothes has been
fashioned, the Emperor allows himself to be dressed in their
creation for a procession through town. During the course of the
procession, a small child cries out, 'But he has nothing on!' The
crowd realizes the child is telling the truth and begins laughing.
The Emperor, however, holds his head high and continues the
procession.^ (From The Emperor's New Clothes, a fairy tale by
Hans Christian Andersen).
In Interesting Times, the historian Eric Hobsbawm argues that after the
attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in September 2001
a sudden gap appeared between the way the USA and the rest
of the world understood what had happened on that awful day.
The world merely saw a particularly dramatic terror attack with
a vast number of victims and a momentary public humiliation
of the USA. Otherwise the situation was no different from
what it had been since the Cold War ended, and certainly no
cause for alarm for the globe's only superpower. Washington
announced that September 11th had changed everything, and
m doing so, actually did change everything, by in effect declaring
XIII
r
Imaginary Penalities Imagine
itself the single-handed protector of a world order and definer of The book itself has an imusual history. It began life as a research
threats against it. Whoever failed to accept this was a potential or paper which tells the story of a new prison whose original goals
actual enemy. had been much modified in the few months it had been opened, but
(Hobsbawm 2002: 411) whose staff and headquarters' administrators insisted that though the
original goals were completely unachievable they themselves must,
A tantalising feature of human societies is that knowledge of their ever- none the less, act 'as if' those original goals were still in place (see
changing conditions of existence is reflexively denied us. This self- Carlen, Chapter 1). As a sociologist, I was intrigued by the questions
denial of knowledge apparently bugged Adam and Eve in the Garden raised by such a situation, but the lively and engaged response to the
of Eden (rightly so, in my opinion) and has teased humankind ever paper when delivered in several different venues was unexpected.
since. Aristotle taught that we grasp new knowledge via metaphor People told me that the 'imaginary' syndrome I had outlined was a
and then lose it as it transmogrifies into myth. In different, but related, feature of organisations far removed from the prison - in hospitals,
discourses, other and more recent writers have been concerned with civil service', local government, universities and schools, to name but
the functions and features of ideological knowledge as partial truth a few - while myriad examples of the imdesirable effects of newly
(for example, Mannheim 1960/1936; Lukacs 1971/1923) or as a fashioned imaginary penalities on contemporary criminal justice and
necessary pre-condition for the production of new knowledge (for penal systems were recounted by justice practitioners and researchers
example, Althusser 1971; Hirst 1976a and 1976b). Sociologists (pre­ alike.
eminently Max Weber 1947) have been intrigued by the attempts of Initial correspondence with criminologists in other jurisdictions
bureaucracies to routinise knowledge in order to control its product indicated that imaginary penalities feature widely, but differently,
(see O'Malley and Bougen, Chapter 2), while other scholars, especially in both global and local modes of crime and security governance.
linguistic philosophers, have continued, in the tradition of Aristotle, to Further discussion suggested that, although they might well
examine the poetic and linguistic structuring of discourses, especially be characterised as having all the attributes usually ascribed to
rhetorical discourses. ideological knowledges in general, the specific genesis and modes of
One of the most important conceptual advances for the analysis of sustenance of today's imaginary penalities inhere in almost-hidden
rule-usage - that is, analysis of the relationships between all the rules structures of cultural and penal governance; in micro-structures
available for us to draw on in shaping and justifying action both veinously facilitating the bureaucratic routinisation of knowledge
before and after the event and those which we actually use when (see O'Malley and Bougen, Chapter 2; Hope, Chapter 3) and the
we want to get things done - is Noam Chomsky's (1971) seminal creation of acquiescence in official discourses on crime, lawbreaking
distinction between competence and performance. Competence refers and risk (see Carlen, Chapter 1; Tombs, Chapter 5; Hannah-Moffat,
to people's abstract knowledge of the rules - the rules in repertoire; Chapter 10; Comfort, Chapter 12). It is, incidentally, because of the
and performance refers to their ability successfully to combine them complexity of this web of imaginaries that many of the following
to achieve a variety of public and private meanings - the rules in chapters present very detailed descriptions. The silent build-up of
play (Carlen 1976. See Edwards and Hughes, Chapter 4 and Tombs, social auditing and penal programming machinery (whatever its
Chapter 5 on performatives). original purposes and concomitant other functions) now too often
The eponymous imaginary penalities analysed in this book are also operates to discipline and silently silence those whose views do
primarily concerned with structures of ideological penal policies not sit easily with attempts by governments and state bureaucracies
and practices; with how variously fashioned political and populist to 'govern through crime' (Mathiesen 2004; Simon 2007). Imaginary
rhetorics about the most effective ways to combat crime, risk and penalities are not easily penetrated.
security-threat have ossifying tendencies to become closed and The concept of 'imaginary penalities', moreover, though theoretically
taken-for-granted realities of governance, inhibiting, corrupting and suggestive to many people already puzzling over the totalising and
atrophying any suggestions and opportunities for more open-ended tightening grip which official law and order discourses have recently
imaginative discourses on social cohesion and justice (such as, for had on public knowledge about crime and pimishment, has served
instance, Hillyard et al. 2004). less as a conceptual framework and more as an orientational device
XIV XV
I'
Imaginary Penalities Imagine
for the authors of the empirically based studies presented here. But although Taylor's treatise contains much of relevance to the
None the less, one further theoretical distinction was required, if we themes of Imaginary Penalities, the perspective on imaginary that
were to avoid the implication that all official responses to crime and most influences the concept from which the present volume takes its
security threats must always and already be imaginary Accordingly, title, owes more to the writings of Jacques Lacan (1977) and Louis
once it had been decided to use the concept of imaginary penalities Althusser (1971). It was first put together by Frank Burton and Pat
to inform analysis of some micro-structures of penal governance, it Carlen in their book Official Discourse (1979); Lacan's psycho-analytic
also became important to differentiate between 'imaginary penalities' employment of 'imaginary' was adopted and adapted as a metaphor
(with their tendencies to silence or subvert challenges to official to denote an ideological consciousness which constantly strives for
penal orthodoxies) and the irrepressible 'social imagination' which entry into the symbolic community upon which its existence depends
is forever open to debate about new conceptions of social relations - but only on its own terms. Oppositional or contradictory knowledge
and justice (see, for example, Hope, Chapter 3; Edwards and Hughes, is excluded.
Chapter 4; Sim, Chapter 7; Jefferson, Chapter 8; Comfort, Chapter 12; Althusser had already used the term 'imaginary' to describe a mode
Hudson, Chapter 13). of knowing which he characterised as being 'imscientific' and 'non-
Imaginary Penalities is about one set of contemporary epistemic theoretical' and that usage appealed to Burton and Carlen because
contests: ideological and political battles over the manufacture and it theorised ideology (the already known) as being a necessary
poHcy-hamessing of crime, risk and security knowledges. But, more precondition to knowledge rather than as being the opposite of
specifically, its focus is upon the micro-politics of selected dimensions some godlike truth. Lacan's original metaphoric usage, however, also
and sites of the many imaginary penalities presently dominating remained attractive because of its processual features, its highlighting
ii local, national and international responses to criminal threat. The of the necessary tension between what, in this book, are called
overarching substantive argument linking the chapters is: that because 'imagination' and 'imaginary': 'imagination' denoting a never-ending
* imaginary penalities are (amongst other things) obstructive of new knowledge quest for new knowledge; and 'imaginary' the process and product
, about crime they should be opposed by more imaginative, open and pluralistic of ideological structures attempting either to suppress or incorporate
, approaches to the governance of law and order. The main theoretical focus it. (See Carlen, Chapter 1 for a more detailed exposition and some
is upon questions of ideology, knowledge and critique. The empirical illustrations of the concept of imaginary penalities.)
thrust aims at contributing rich and analytic descriptions of how Six of the essays in this book investigate empirically one or
global trends and national policies are realised in imaginary form at more dimensions of the tensions between imaginative approaches
local level and have deleterious effects not only on crime control, but to crime, punishment and security and the varied manifestations
also on the quality of justice nationally and internationally. of contemporary imaginary penalities (Carlen, Chapter 1; Tombs,
Chapter 5; Sim, Chapter 7; Jefferson, Chapter 8; Hannah-Moffat,
Chapter 10; Halsey, Chapter 11). Three essays untangle a web of
From imaginary penalities to imaginative quests for new undet^ imaginaries in relation to seamless justice (Worrall, Chapter 6); prison
standings of crime, punishment and security labour (Homqvist, Chapter 9); and rehabilitation (Comfort, Chapter
12). Three more focus on the conceptual difficulties of distinguishing
The term 'imaginary' has been employed most recently and between 'imagination' and 'imaginary' (O'Malley and Bougen,
productively by Charles Taylor in his book Modern Social Imaginaries Chapter 2; Hope, Chapter 3; Edwards and Hughes, Chapter 4). The
(2004), where he defines 'imaginary' as book's final chapter (Hudson, Chapter 13) suggests some possibilities
for re-imagining justice, a cosmopolitan justice based not on some
the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit imaginary unity of interests of already-divided nations but on a
together with others, how things go on between them and their judicial discourse recognising, and attempting to accommodate, the
fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper competing values of strangers in a globalised world.
normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.
(Taylor 2004: 23)
xvi xvii
Imaginary Penalities Imagine
Dimensions of imaginary penalities community safety have to be taken seriously because they have political
and regulatory effects. Yet, although imagination is one precondition
The bureaucratisation of imagination for new practice, because of their other preconditions and contextual
polyvalence, neither visions or representations of community, nor
Pat O'Malley and Philip Bougen in Chapter 2 remind us that
communities' actual practices, are ever reducible one to the other, or
imagination is an indispensable precondition for knowledge, especially
to their conditions of existence. Indeed, imaginary commimities are
of the previously unimaginable, such as large-scale terrorist attacks.
invented as a consequence of the indulgence of an epistemic fallacy:
Yet, they also demonstrate that even when governments actively
the confusion of representation of community safety with its effective
seek imaginative solutions to otherwise unknowable problems,
governing practices. To illustrate their point, Edwards and Hughes
imaginative endeavours in relation to risk are constantly atrophied
give an elegant exposition of the varied and sometimes contradictory
by bureaucratic routinisation in the name of actuarial security. And,
effects that academic imaginings of 'community safety' have had on
as the imagination is routinised and becomes myth (often, though
political discourses and local communities.
not necessarily, an imaginary ossification of the bizarre rather than
Apart from the general theoretical arguments being made here
the probable) the new knowledge that imagination was originally
about the relationships between imagination and its imaginary
exhorted to seek is destroyed - and at the very moment of its birth.
constructs, the focus on imagined and imaginary communities also
For, to quote Paul Hirst (1976b), 'ideology is always a form of the
resonates with concerns expressed in other chapters about the ways
creation of recognition'.
in which imaginary penalities either implicitly or explicitly invoke a
The bureaucratisation of imagination is also discussed by Tombs
range of differing and contradictory 'communities' in support of their
(Chapter 5) in relation to sentencing; and Harmah-Moffat (Chapter
policies and practices (see Carlen, Chapter 1; Tombs, Chapter 5; Sim,
10) in relation to Risk, Need and Responsivity Programmes for
Chapter 7; Jefferson, Chapter 8).
women in Canada.
Exclusion of the other
Imaginary truths
The necessity for all discourses to choose between different paradigms
In Chapter 3, Tim Hope demonstrates how conjectural (imaginative)
and justificatory rules has already been discussed. What is important,
devices employed to aid statistical modelling can be selectively used
in relation to the desired production of new knowledge for the better
to produce evidence in support of both official predictions and the
understanding of changing judicial, penal and security contexts, is that
success of government programmes of crime reduction. Selection
debate should be kept open to all kinds of arguments and expertise,
between competing paradigms is, of course, a necessary precursor to
including the expertise of those working in frontline judicial and
scientific discovery. When, however, conjectural methods producing
penal contexts on a daily basis. One purpose of analysing imaginary
results seen to be of non-utility to the government of the day are
penalities, therefore, is to assess which knowledges have been
opposed in secret, rather than in open debate, and results based on
incorporated into judicial and penal discourses and which excluded.^
alternative conjectural methods are elevated to the status of truth (and,
This is the task undertaken by Jacqueline Tombs in Chapter 5 where
later, to the status of evidentiary truths as government predictions
she argues that as a result of sentencers being forced to adhere to
are reflexively fulfilled) the politically legitimated research results
the logic of actuarial risk assessments when passing sentence, the
leave the realm of open conjecture (imagination) and enter the closed
knowledge born of their experience as judges (that is, the discretion
world of the imaginary.
previously held to be a main plank of their discursive authority) is
nowadays too often excluded from the sentencing process as the
Imaginary communities
unaccountable Other which has to be suppressed in the service
Concern with the relationships between the already-known and the not of justice but of risk reduction. Furthermore, she suggests that
new is also the main theme of Chapter 4 where Adam Edwards and the exclusion of judicial discretion from sentencing decisions may
Gordon Hughes argue that, whatever their genesis, theorisations of well account for the increasing numbers of minor offenders being
xviii xix
Imaginary Penalities
Imagine
gaoled in Scotland - even though judges fight back, when they can,
Analysis of these very different imaginary penalities suggests
by trying to pass sentences which are still imaginatively informed
that in systematically excluding more imaginative and politically
by their experience and remaining discretionary powers but which
embarrassing knowledges about crime and risk they also increase
also appear to comply with the logic of pre-given risk assessments. levels of penal pain and incarceration; and serve political ends far
However, although the attempts to limit judicial discretion have, removed from the justifying rhetorics of reform, rehabilitation and
by and large, been done under the rhetorics of accountability and
human rights. It is primarily as a result of selective discursive
consistency in sentencing, the probation service in England and Wales exclusion of the Other of structural inequalities and power that
has been a much more direct casualty of the punitive populist turn
imaginary penalities become peopled by imaginary prison officers
in the governance of crime in the UK, as Anne Worrall demonstrates and imaginary prisoners while inhabiting imaginary prisons and a
in Chapter 6. proliferation of other imaginary penal contexts.
Although English probation officers have attempted to make the
official rhetoric of holistic justice a reality, they (and other non­ Imaginary prisons and imaginary prison officers
custodial programme personnel) have increasingly come under attack
Joe Sim's Chapter 7 begins by identifying another excluded Other of
in official reports on the management of offenders. As a result, they
recent British government discourse on crime. It includes
have attempted even stricter adherence to the imaginary penality
which implies that 'all purposes of sentencing are compatible and
a range of crimes and social harms - domestic violence and
achievable' (p. 131) and which, in so doing, also ejects all awkwardly
murder, rape, deaths at work, deaths on the roads, racist and
non-populist understandings of the complexities of sentencing from
homophobic abuse, attacks and murders, income tax evasion,
officially approved penal discourse. One result, as Worrall argues
deaths in custody and state crime...(p. 136)
in an authoritative critique of recent developments in the 'seamless'
management of offenders in the UK, has been an increase in the
He then proceeds to detail a catalogue of exclusions which constitute
numbers recalled to prison, as probation officers have attempted to
modem imaginary prisoners and prisons before focusing on the
avoid blame before any of the inevitable 'seams' show. This is not
making of modem prison staff in Britain. Here he presents a different
surprising. The imprisonment of offenders is, logically, the only safe
imaginary to Carlen, Chapter 1.^ For Sim's imaginary prison officers
option for workers in an essentially high risk profession which has
are described as
always been the media's, and is now the government's, favourite
scapegoat whenever offenders already serving non-custodial sentences
acting as if they believe they can and indeed want to deliver on
commit further serious crimes.
the promised benefits of the prison if only more time, more
Chapters 7-12 also include examination of what is excluded
resources, more managerial support and more public sympathy
from the official discourses of imaginary penalities. Here, however,
were forthcoming...(p. 146)
the main exclusion always relates to structural conditions, especially
those relating to inequality, poverty or lack of rehabilitative resources
Inspiringly, however, and despite the grim picture he paints of British
outside the prison. As Magnus Hornqvist insists in Chapter 9:
prisons, Sim ends the chapter with illustrations of his concluding
argument that it is 'possible to imagine, develop and implement a
the dominant focus is limited to individuals. Institutions and
penal politics that is not regressive and repressive'.
social structures never enter the analysis (van Berkel et al. 2002:
For a second example of an imaginary penality involving imaginary
70). The response to social exclusion and unemployment is not
prison officers. Chapter 8 by Andrew Jefferson focuses on Nigeria. It
seen to lie in structural change. More or less everything except
highlights a concern about transnational imaginary attempts at penal
the excluded individuals themselves is excluded from policy
reform which are increasingly occurring under the banner of human
considerations, (p. 180)
rights (see also Piacentini 2006). In Jefferson's analysis the excluded
XX XXI
Imaginary Penalities Imagine
Other of human rights training is identified as that which gave rise Imaginary rehabilitation
to the interventionary demand in the first place: the penal practices
The essays on imaginary rehabilitation by Kelly Hannah-Moffat
already embedded in local conditions and culture. His analysis,
(Chapter 10), Mark Halsey (Chapter 11) and Megan Comfort (Chapter
like that of Magnus Hornqvist (Chapter 9), exposes the tendency of
12) demonstrate how imaginary rehabilitation is constructed via the
Western penal programmers to assume that the programme is the
exclusion of those very same Other considerations which, in being
practice. At a time when human, rights discourse has been used by
central to prisoners' social identities, must also be central to any future
the United States as an excuse for 'incursions into states' freedom
desistance from lawbreaking. Thus, in Hannah-Moffat's analysis of the
of action and sovereignty' which many authoritarian third world
selective ways in which gender considerations have been incorporated
leaders have then used as an excuse 'from making the economic
into Risk, Need and Responsivity Programmes for women in Canada,
and political reforms the West urges' (Hutton 2007: 223), Jefferson's
structural and cultural factors such as the women's previous histories
chapter provides a timely warning: against parachuting Western
and ethnicity are either excluded from programme discourses for not
penal values (here in the form of prison officers' training courses in
being 'proven' risk factors or, alternatively, not even considered in
prisoners' human rights) to non-Westem countries without seriously
relation to programmes which have already been pre-defined as gender-
taking into account the influence of pre-existing cultural and economic
neutral. Similarly, in Mark Halsey's depiction of the lack of respect
conditions (see also Arsovska and Verduyn 2008 and the discussion
shown to yoimg men in custodial and post-release contexts in Australia,
of cosmopolitanism in Hudson, Chapter 13).
the analytic focus is again on the discursive abstraction of prisoners
from their social contexts. But here the absent Other of the discourse
Imaginary prisoners
is constituted not only by lack of recognition of prisoners' biographies,
The imaginary penalities analysed in the next four chapters all, to but also by the lack of any concept of social interdependency. Hence,
a greater or lesser extent, centre around complex constructions of all talk about desistance from crime and recidivism reduction becomes
imaginary prisoners. In Chapter 9 Magnus Hdmqvist provides a imaginary. For, as Halsey argues, while young men m penal institutions
sophisticated exposition and analysis of previous and current theories continue to be shown so very little respect by their custodians and the
about the relationship of imprisonment to labour markets, arguing emphasis of training programmes is upon individual responsibilities
that in today's prisons the aim is no longer to produce disciplined and endeavour, they are not being well prepared to imagine a law-
industrial workers but, rather, 'stress-managing service workers'. abiding world characterised by mutually inclusive respect and
Hence the plethora of cognitive behavioural programmes which, reciprocity in social relationships. (See also Hudson, Chapter 13, on
though purporting to equip prisoners with wage-earning skills, are the importance of respect in social relations.)
actually fashioned to make them come to terms with intermittent Finally, in this trio of articles on rehabilitation and desistance,
unskilled work and unemployment. On this analysis, imaginary Megan Comfort examines how, in the absence of welfare provision
prisoners (imaginary because they are officially defined as being outside prison, very poor prisoners and their families in the United
imemployable unless given prison programming) are then turned by States are able and willing to construct an imaginary rehabilitation.
the same official discourses and programmes into imaginary wage They abstract themselves from the pains and debilitations of
labourers. But their chances of getting skilled work after cognitive imprisonment in order to escape for a while from 'the extraordinary
behavioural training are no greater than they were before. (The degradation of life conditions for poor African Americans in the era
partiality of the imaginary construction of prisoners in England is of mass incarceration' (p. 252). And the United States is not alone in
touched on by Joe Sim in Chapter 7; Hdmqvist's examples in Chapter replacing welfare with imprisonment. What an irony it is that, in so
9 come from Sweden, but Chapters 10-12 illustrate that similarly many of the coimtries whose governments are currently preaching
partial constructions are to be found in Canada, Australia and the democracy and human rights to governments of other sovereign
United States.) states, it is only in prison that the poorest citizens of these Western
democracies can obtain the minimum living standards denied them
on the outside.
xxii XXIII
Imaginary Penalities Imagine
But it could be different. And, like several of the other authors in Notes
this book. Comfort ends by suggesting that it is possible to conceive
of ways of doing justice differently. Imagine...' 1 http://.en.ikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor's New Clothes
2 The discursive Other has to be recognised because it is implicated in the
discourse's originating conditions but then it is excluded to enable and
justify the discourse taking the form it does.
Imagine!
3 The object of knowledge is different: Carlen is attempting to explain how
it was that everybody connected to the running of a prison could both
Which is what Barbara Hudson does in Chapter 13, where she sets
explicitly deny the possibility of it achieving its objectives while at the
out an imaginative and alternative way of re-conceiving justice.
same time explicitly claiming that they none the less had to act as if it
Unlike present conceptions of nation-state justice, cosmopolitan
could; Sim explains how some prison officers obstruct reforms while at
justice would not be based on an assumption of shared rationalities.
the same time claiming that they support them.
Instead it would recognise and welcome difference and diversity. It
would not set up imaginary criminals abstracted from their economic
and cultural histories so that it might then more easily programme
them to fit in with official rhetoric about the efficacy of current crime
policies. Nor would it silence, via audit and stigmatisation, any
justice workers holding views rimning counter to prevailing official
discourses on crime and security. Instead, a cosmopohtan justice
would attempt to 'find modes of accommodation and establish
procedures of fair co-operation between groups and individuals who
may have different and even conflicting interests and ideas of the
good life' (p. 277). And lastly, one might add, in recognition of the
inevitable attraction of bureaucratic routinisation to people who (as
well as being imaginative!) have to choose between courses of action
in order to get things done, a reflexively re-imagined justice would
attempt avoidance of judicial closure by continuously reviewing and
debating both its own and competing knowledges and modes of
governance.
Choosing between alternatives and excluding some of them,
together with the accompanying tendency to discursive closure, are
unavoidable prerequisites of meaningful communication. All of us
who discourse on crime and punishment are (wittingly or unwittingly)
complicit in the making of imaginary penalities. But the effects of the
imaginary can be limited; and the imaginary itself can be contested:
first, by investigating what is excluded from its discourse; and then
by analysis and exposure of the means by which the exclusion
is effected. For the same knowledges that are incorporated into
imaginary penalities are also those which, re-imagined differently,
might one day give birth to new, more democratic and more socially
enhancing responses to crime and security threats.
XXIV XXV