The Prison and National Identity: Citizenship, Punishment, and the Sovereign State
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Description
Settler countries have always built prisons as one of their first orders of business, not only to hold offenders but also to mark out the symbolic and actual limits of the nation state. In periods of conflict, new institutions of confinement spring up to hold enemy combatants, displaced refugees and prisoners of war. As immigration and crime control measures have intersected over the last decade, prisons in a number of countries have ended up housing a growing population of foreign national offenders and immigration detainees. Today, in the USA and in England and Wales, foreign national prisoners whose criminal sentences have expired can be held indefinitely in prisons and detention centres as they await deportation. Given this range of examples, it is somewhat surprising that criminologists have spent so little time exploring the relationship between imprisonment and national identity. With notable exceptions, scholars almost universally treat the prison as an institution bounded by and contained within the nation state. This chapter seeks to disrupt that tradition of prison studies by drawing on testimonies gathered from a range of custodial institutions in England and Wales. Comparing accounts from foreign national prisoners and immigration detainees, we explore the implications of the global and transnational reach of the prison. Ultimately, we argue that the prison is a site for the construction and contestation of the late-modern nation state. Our claim is both theoretical and empirical. The prison is not only a projection of national sovereignty and an expression of state power. It is also a concrete space where global inequalities play out. Aiming to capture both of these dimensions of imprisonment, this chapter weaves together policy analysis and first-hand narratives. We begin with an account of incarceration trends in Britain, which in the last decade has witnessed significant increases in the foreign national prisoner population and a rapid expansion of the immigration detention estate. The first two sections of the chapter trace these structural developments and highlight some of the many convergences between immigration and criminal imprisonment. The next section examines these systems of incarceration in the context of feminist and post-colonial theory. Using interviews we conducted in prison and detention centres, we draw out the voices and experiences of incarcerated ‘foreigners’ to explore how the practice of imprisonment creates an exclusionary vision of British national identity. In the end, this chapter argues that any answer to the question ‘why prison?’ must begin from critical assessment of the relationship between punishment, citizenship and sovereignty.
Source Publication
Why Prison?
Source Editors/Authors
David Scott
Publication Date
2013
Edition
1
Recommended Citation
Kaufman, Emma and Bosworth, Mary, "The Prison and National Identity: Citizenship, Punishment, and the Sovereign State" (2013). Faculty Chapters. 965.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/965
