Punishment, citizenship and identity: An Introduction

Abstract

This collection of articles addresses the interconnections between punishment, citizenship and identity. As immigration and crime control measures have intersected, prisons in a number of countries have ended up housing a growing population of foreign-national offenders and immigration detainees. It is somewhat surprising that criminologists have traditionally spent so little time exploring the relationship between the prison and national identity. With notable exceptions, scholars almost universally treat the prison as an institution bounded by and within the nationstate. This special issue seeks to disrupt that convention of prison studies and criminology more broadly. Focusing on the incarceration of foreign-nationals in diverse contexts, the contributions to this issue collectively argue that the prison is a projection of national sovereignty and an expression of state power. It is also a concrete space where global inequalities play out. When considered through the lens of citizenship, our understanding of imprisonment shifts to include other geographical sites both within the nation-state and elsewhere, the prison's intersections with other legal frameworks, and enduring matters of race, gender and class. The contributions capture these dimensions by weaving together policy analysis and first-hand narratives from around the world.

Foreign, criminal: a doubly damned modern British folk-devil

“…However, political pledges to increase the detection and deportation of FNOs have found limited success. Despite a growing number of foreign nationals within prisons across Europe and North America (Bosworth, Hasselberg, and Turnbull 2016), the proportion in English and Welsh prisons has been relatively stable. And although the number of FNOs deported after 2006 nearly doubled in two years, the figure since then has also been stable, at around 5000 a year ( Table 2).…”

From prison to detention: The carceral trajectories of foreign-national prisoners in the United Kingdom

“…Whereas the difference in rights and entitlements available to formal citizens versus long-term legal residents are, in practice, negligible (Gibney, 2013;Hasselberg, 2015), in the event of a criminal conviction, the distinction of citizenship is immensely important. In fact, at HMP Huntercombe, prisoners felt less defined in relation to their own citizenship than to that which they did not have: British citizenship (see also Bosworth et al, 2016). Finding themselves in a prison exclusive to foreigners added to their sense of vulnerability:…”

Kaznovanje tujcev: Kaznovanje tujih storilcev kaznivih dejanj v Sloveniji

“…Other explanations are needed to understand these phenomena -in the case of UK, a look at institutions housing migrants that are nominally not prisons, but essentially are not different from prisons (cf. Bosworth et al 2016), might be a good way to search for such explanations.…”

“…One of the associations most commonly assumed in contemporary public discourse and often acted upon very quickly is that with crime -the idea of the "deviant migrant" is a strong and persistent one (Franko 2007). In order to better analyse it and often disprove some "common sense" assumptions, increasingly detailed and thoughtful literature on various issues and in different global settings has emerged (Bosworth, Hasselberg, Turnbull 2016;Franko 2014;Franko, Bosworth 2013;Hernandez 2014Hernandez , 2015Kogovšek Šalamon 2017;Stumpf 2006). This paper will address just one of the many facets of crimmigration, and that is the more traditional one: we will look at how foreign offenders are treated within national criminal justice systems as a consequence of committing an offence (Delgrande, Aebi 2009;Melossi 2003;Ugelvik 2014).…”