EUROPEAN GROUP FOR THE STUDY OF DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL CONTROL
ESTABLISHED 1973
Coordinator: Emma Bell Secretary: Monish Bhatia
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I European Group Conference / Abstracts available on-line Final Call for photo exhibition Conference BlogII Comment and analysis / Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and Jamie-Longazeldiscuss the pains of imprisonment in the United States
Emma Bell reflects on her visits to penal institutions in Oklahoma
AimilaVoulvoulidiscusses Greek academia and the violation of human rights.
III European Group News / New European Group Anthology published Call for volunteers Call for papers
IV News from the Europe and the world / Australia EU France Greece Italy
Spain UK USA
I European Group Conference
European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control
41st Annual Conference
Critical Criminology in a Changing World –
Tradition & Innovation
5th - 8th September 2013
Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law
University of Oslo
Norway
See:
Conference abstracts are now available on-line:
The conference organisers have now collected together over 80 photos to present at thephoto exhibition celebrating 40 years of the European Group. However, there are few pictures from the 1970s and 1980s or of Stan Cohen. If any members of the group have any photos to contribute from these years, please send them to or by mail to Per Jorgen, Postboks 6706 St. Olavsplass, 0130 OSLO.
Don’t forget that the conferenceblog can be accessed here:
II Comment and analysis
The Normalcy of Brutality in U.S. Prisons
In his classic “pains of imprisonment” chapter from The Society of Captives, the late sociologist Gresham Sykes described “the deprivation of security.” For Sykes, this deprivation was not simply physical violence experienced by prisoners, but involved the psychological trauma of having to live with a constant threat of victimization: “The prisoner’s loss of security arouses acute anxiety… not just because violent acts of aggression and exploitation occur but also because such behavior constantly calls into question the individual’s ability to cope with it, in terms of his own inner resources, his courage, his ‘nerve’” (Sykes 2007: 78).[1]
We argue that “the deprivation of security” no longer adequately captures the situation in which numerous prisoners in the U.S. find themselves. In addition to being confronted with the threat of violence by other captives, prisoners today are increasingly brutalized by their captors. Although this observation is not a new one, we contend that the scale and form of guard brutality in the age of mass imprisonment is unprecedented. To understand the widespread use of brutality in contemporary U.S. prisons, it is first important to attend to the present historical moment. Just as Sykes was writing during the Cold War in the 1950s where prison populations were comparatively very low but scholarly interest in the prison as a totalitarian institution was on the rise, both the recent U.S. wars on crime and terror serve as a critical backdrop for understanding what we believe is a dramatic rise in brutal custodial regimes.
A recent volume The Violence of Incarceration (2009) edited by Phil Scraton and Jude McCulloch presents important insight into why this is so. Reflecting on the “normalization of legitimate violence,” especially in U.S. prisons, Scraton and McCulloch challenge the notion that the international scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was an extraordinary incident. In a remarkable chapter in this volume, “The United States Military Prison: The Normalcy of Exceptional Brutality,” sociologist Avery F. Gordon documents how the brutalization of prisoners at Abu Ghraib has direct connections to punishment regimes in U.S. prisons. Gordon persuasively illuminates the role of U.S. military organizations such as the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP) in enlisting high-level civilian prison personnel—including the former directors of supermax prisons in Connecticut, Virginia, and Utah—to create military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. That is to say, the crisis of mass imprisonment catalyzed by the domestic war on crime has become a model for brutal U.S. military prisons abroad. At the operational level, Gordon shows how the National Guardsmen at Abu Ghraib—many of who were also employed as prison guards in notoriously brutal U.S. prisons—described their actions to the FBI as chillingly normal.
An increasingly common form of prison guard brutality is the use of teams of guards trained to suppress disorder by any means necessary. These Special Operations Response Teams (SORTs) or some variation thereof (e.g., Correctional Emergency Response Teams (CERTS)) are used throughout federal and state institutions in the U.S. SORT raids typically involve dozens and sometimes hundreds of prisoners who are not gang members. This “goon squad” methodology is invariably a one-size-fits-all approach in which all prisoners in a particular cell block or institution are stripped naked and subjected to various forms of brutality, including the use of vicious dogs, painful restraint techniques, and weapons such as stun guns and Tasers to gain intelligence or confessions. In the most extreme instance, goon squads in California prisons have engaged in a sadistic campaign of brutality, including the use of lethal firearms that resulted in the deaths of 175 prisoners over a five-year period between 1989 and 1994. Despite an FBI probe of one institution, Corcoran State Prison, where a prisoner was shot to death by a guard in his cell, Christian Parenti in Lockdown United States: Police and Prisons in an Age of Crisis
reports:
[B]rutality continued unabated. During the summer of 1995—even as FBI agents
were gathering evidence from Corcoran’s files—a gang of guards beat and tortured
a busload of thirty-six newly arrived African–U.S. prisoners … Two years later one
of the worst Corcoran COs had turned state’s evidence … His specialty had been
strangling inmates while other guards crushed and yanked the victims’ testicles
(Parenti 2000: 174)
While the aggressive use of lethal force against prisoners in California may be less common in prisons in other states, the excessive prison-guard brutality well documented in states such as Georgia and Texas is not anomalous, nor is such behavior restricted to prisons in particular regions of the country. Consider the multitude of brutality that has been documented all across the United States:
Pennsylvania: Prisoners are routinely subjected to unprovoked beatings and other forms of brutality by groups of prison guards. Four years of prisoner abuse logs (2007–2011) documenting the experiences of 900 prisoners from prisons across the state obtained by the Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh chapters of the Human Rights Coalition reveal horrifying beatings, aggressive use of pepper spray, unprovoked use of Tasers, and the deliberate starvation of prisoners.
New Jersey, Colorado, Oklahoma, etc.: These and many other state systems have aggressively turned to using restraining or “devil” chairs in which prisoners are tightly bound. Class-action lawsuits filed in numerous states show how prisoners are strapped down for many hours at a time. These cases reveal that prisoners are often beaten or pepper-sprayed while in restraints. The use of restraining chairs by multiple prison guards against prisoners has thus resulted in numerous serious injuries and at least 20 deaths.
Understanding widespread brutality behind bars cannot be separated from the broader total institutional context of the prison. [The] brutalization of prisoners by their captors has become commonplace. One of the most insidious catalysts is grievances that prisoners file against prison staff. Here, we can see that the harsh conditions of confinement in this era of mass imprisonment are nearly always tied to brutal acts of officer retaliation and cover-ups. In a cruel irony—one that differs substantially from the “society of captives” described by Sykes—the very system designed to make prisoners safer and more secure leads prison officials to falsify reports, disable surveillance video cameras, and use excessive force to make prisoners far less safe.
References
Gordon , Avery F. 2009 . “ The America Military Prison: The Normalcy of Exceptional
Brutality .” Pp. 164-186 in The Violence of Incarceration, Phil Scraton and Jude
McCulloch eds . New York :Routledge .
Parenti , Christian. 2000. Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in an Age of Crisis. NewYork : Verso
Scraton , Phil and McCulloch , Jude (eds.) 2009 . The Violence of Incarceration.
New York :Routledge .
Sykes , Gresham. 2007. The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison.
Princeton Classics Edition . Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press
Author biographies
Benjamin Fleury-Steiner is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware (U.S.A). For more than a decade, he has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on inequality, mass imprisonment, and the death penalty. Fleury-Steiner’s recent books include, Jury Stories of Death: How America's Death Penalty Invests in Inequality and Dying Inside: Th e HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison (both published by the University of Michigan Press).
Jamie Longazel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at the University of Dayton (U.S.A.). He teaches and conducts research in the areas of crime and punishment, law and inequality, and immigration. His recent publications have appeared in Punishment & Society ,Sociology Compass, Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review , and Race & Justice.
CELEBRATING 40 YEARS …
An excess of punishment
One of the first things that struck me on my first ever trip to Oklahoma was the luminosity, the extraordinary brightness of the wide blue skies that stretch for miles across the open plains of this central American state. So it was that on my visit to Oklahoma State Penitentiary (OSP) in McAlester I was equally struck by the darkness, by the lack of natural light within the interior walls of the prison, and by the distinctly unenlightened attitudes of the senior warden who escorted us through the dark underbelly of the American penal system.
All prisoners in this maximum security prison, with the exception of a minority of prisoners suffering from the most severe mental health problems, are locked down for 23 hours per day in cramped cells without air-conditioning or the possibility of opening the narrow oblongs of reinforced security glass which serve as windows. For those on death row, windows are non-existent. The entire unit, euphemistically known as ‘H-unit’, which houses all those awaiting execution by lethal injection (currently 54 people) in addition to administrative and disciplinary segregation inmates from the general population, is surrounded on all sides by high piles of earth, rendering it partially subterranean. Cells are lit with a single naked bulb and prisoners may only catch a glimpse of sky through a small skylight on their way to the execution chamber or if they cast their eyes upwards beyond the high walls of the tiny prison yard in which they may exercise alone for a very short period of time each day.
Aside from the deprivation of natural light, death row prisoners are also deprived of normal human association and interaction. Apart from statutory legal visits, only non-contact visits from people on a prisoner’s approved visiting list may be permitted on a twice-monthly basis. Association with other prisoners is not permitted. Only prisoners in the general population may share cells and, even when these prisoners released for short periods for ‘exercise’, this occurs only in small outdoor cages, thus preventing any physical contact between inmates.
I was also struck by the silence which prevailed in McAlester, by the total absence of the sound of normal human interaction. This deafening silence was reinforced by the fact that I was not allowed to speak to any of the prisoners. I was even advised not to make eye contact with them. I couldn’t avoid the sense of voyeurism as I looked upon abject human misery.
Perhaps the aim (conscious or not) of the prison authorities in preventing such contact was to contribute to the dehumanisation of the prisoners. Indeed, this is something that is prevalent in prisoner officer culture, enabling them to create distance from their charges and legitimate the imposition of pain (Scott, 2009). The warden at OSP constantly presented prisoners to us as dangerous, violent individuals, devoid of normal human sentiment: they would kill without hesitation. For him, all prisoners lie and even those admitted to the mental health unit and placed on suicide watch are ‘just attention-seeking’. The otherisation of the prisoners detained at OSP even extended outside the prison walls and into the town of McAlester itself where the main road approaching the town displays signs warning the passing public that hitchhikers may well be escaped prisoners who are automatically assumed to be dangerous (see accompanying image).
Yet, it is not just attitudes which dehumanise prisoners but also the conditions in which they are detained which fail to respect the norms of basic human dignity. Prisoners placed on suicide watch are detained in cells with glass doors. The stainless steel toilet is placed just in front of these doors, denying the prisoners all sense of privacy. The ultimate act of dehumanisation is inflicted on prisoners who are executed: those whose bodies are not reclaimed are cremated and their ashes buried in the nearby cemetery just outside the prison walls. Their graves are marked only by a number, these individuals deemed unworthy of carrying their own names in death.
For the senior warden who showed us around OSP, even the harshest of punishment is not sufficient. For him, even the death penalty is ‘too easy’ since it allows those executed ‘to just go to sleep’. Yet, it is far from clear that this is a painless death: I was told that it may take up to 17 minutes for a man to die. In addition, the very architecture of the prison and the petty rules that govern the daily lives of those incarcerated seem to inflict extraordinary psychological pain. Furthermore, prisoners in Oklahoma can expect to be detained for longer periods of time than those in most other American states. Those on death row may await years for an execution date: the longest-serving prisoner currently on death row in OSP has been there for almost 30 years. Yet none of this pain is considered sufficient compared to the pain an offender may have inflicted on him victim. Pure vengeance seems to lie at the heart of the system.
Nonetheless, on visiting two other carceral institutions, I did see some signs of humanity and a recognition that prisoners are human beings with the potential to change. I had the opportunity to speak with some women involved in the nation-wide Inside Out Programme whereby prisoners and college students alike take courses on criminal justice together, helping to encourage dialogue and break down some barriers between those on the inside and those on the outside of the criminal justice system. All those involved seemed to find this a rewarding experience, although it is to be regretted that inmates appeared to be handpicked for the placed-limited programme by the prison authorities, leaving the vast majority of inmates largely excluded from significant contact with the outside world. This is particularly problematic where many prisoners are detained hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles from their families. I met one man who was serving a life sentence in Oklahoma, more that 2,500 kilometres from his home town in Maine.
Overall, my experience confirmed the idea that prisons inflict so much more pain than the deprivation of liberty alone. The physical and psychological harms to which inmates are exposed represent nothing other than an extremely ‘unjust measure of pain’ (Ignatieff, 1978).
22nd April 2013
References
Ignatieff, Michael (1978) A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution: 1750-1850 ( New York: Pantheon Books).
Scott, David (2009) Ghosts Beyond our Relam: A Neo-abolitionist Analysis Of Prisoner Human Rights And Prison Officer Culture (VDM Publishing, 2009).
Author biography
Emma Bell is senior lecturer at the Université de Savoie, Chambéry, France. She is author Criminal Justice and Neoliberalism, Palgrave, 2011 and current coordinator of the European Group.
CELEBRATING 40 YEARS …
During the last two and a half years, Greek academia has been in conflict with the government which last year passed a new law regulating higher education: Law 4076/2012. The changes the law seeks to bring about[2] are resisted by the majority of the academic community (academic, research and administrative staff as well as the vast majority of students). Yet, a small minority of the academic community, mainly academic staff, with ties to the three-party coalition government, amongst which are representatives from the university administration, support the government. Instead of representing the interests of their constituents[3], many members of the university administration boards decided not only to implement the law but also to engage in the moral and professional persecution of members of the academic community, mainly members of Unions, who declare their opposition to the governmental decisions regarding higher education.
At the University of Crete, for example, Associate Professor DemetriosPatelis, is being tried and has been called before the Hellenic Council of State (HCS) with the accusation that in articles he authored in newspapers as well as on internet sites he referred to “the Rector and the vice-Rectors of the University of Crete in a disrespectful manner not worthy of their status”. It is the first time since 1943 that an academic is being tried due to his political convictions which conflict with those of the Rectorate[4].