Long Economic Cycles and Migration: Contributing to a Political Economy of Punishment

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

Neo-Marxist scholars have studied for a long time the relations between modes of production, long economic cycles and long-term trends in prison population. In order to explain the recent evolutions in the last decades, new economical, institutional and political variables have been introduced in their models, aiming to explain these long-term relations. At the same time, Rusche and Kirchheimer’s concept of “less eligibility” has been also applied in order to reconstruct the puzzle ‘crime, punishment and migration’. Does the new rise in punitiveness appear indeed to be marked by the desire to control migration?
Economic cycles and the control of migration appear to be two complementary key components in order to understand long-term shifts in punishment. The round table’s main objective is to investigate how these two key components are combined to produce “interconnected effects” on long-term trends in punishment and prison population. The contributions to the round table will examine these related processes, both at a conceptual and at an empirical level. Finally, the aim is also to examine the feasibility of transnational empirical research about these processes.

Sub Unit

• Area VIII: Roundtables

Chairs

• Dario Melossi, University of Bologna

• José Angel Brandariz, University of A Coruña, Spain

• Charlotte Vanneste, National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology / University of Liège (Belgium)