Punishment as Care? Reflecting on the Intersections Between Punishment and Care in the Community

• In Event: 40461 - Section on Sociology of Law Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Theory

Abstract

The growing convergence of the penal and welfare states in Western contexts has long been a topic of interest in sociological scholarship. However, while this area of study has considered how the welfare state now embodies and replicates the punitive ethos located in the penal state; less attention has considered how the penal state may have adopted some characteristics of the welfare state.

Drawing from data collected in a nine-month ethnographic study in the Breddon Centre, a community-based women’s centre in England, this paper considers the role of the penal state in caring for clients of the Breddon Centre. For instance, while the Breddon community was experiencing large scale welfare retraction, the penal state continued to expand, and was one of the only sites that could offer resources and support to the Breddon Centre. Accordingly, the Breddon Centre became reliant upon funding from the penal state and worked closely with penal organizations to care for their clients. While this necessarily confused the delivery of care in the Breddon Centre, it also suggested that the penal state played a complex role in the Breddon community and could, at times, be located as a site of ‘ambiguous care’ (Sufrin, 2017). As such, this paper considers the extent to which the penal state could disseminate both care and control to the clients of the Breddon Centre and complicates common theoretical framings of the penal and welfare states.

Author

• Kavya Padmanabhan, Rice University