Breaking Penal Boundaries: Bridging the Divides in Punishment Studies

• In Event: Refugees, Immigration, Punishment and Policing

Abstract

Punishment is a contested concept, a highly debated, complex phenomenon defined in various, often conflicting ways. These definitional issues around punishment are augmented by a lack of communication within and across disciplinary boundaries, impeding understanding of the concept’s sociohistorical development and current social manifestation. In this piece, I use penal boundaries as a case study to explore contested concepts and analyze how punishment is studied through five topical areas in punishment scholarship: crimmigration (CR), border criminology (BC), carceral geography (CG), non-punishment punishments (NPP), and collateral consequences (CC). Starting from Beckett’s and Herbert’s (2010) two-part definition of penal boundaries–(1) a spatial regulation technique and (2) a social control mechanism–this paper shows how these five distinct literatures operate in concert with each other and study the expansion of penal boundaries but can be drawn closer together by employing the spatial regulation-and-social control penal boundary framework. Greater theoretical and empirical dialogue across these literatures can expand our conceptualization of punishment and offer law makers more directed attention to how the law is experienced in individuals’ quotidian activities.

Author

• Alena Kalyce Shalaby, University of California, Santa Barbara