The interconnections between prisons, risk, rehabilitation and welfare

Session Submission Type: Pre-arranged Panel

Abstract

This panel brings together scholars who are interested in the multi-fold ways in which the penal welfare state shapes understandings, experiences, and practices around punishment, rehabilitation, and risk. Using rich empirical data from a study comparing prison practices and experiences in England & Wales and Norway, data from fieldwork in Danish prisons, archival studies, as well as analysis of Norwegian rehabilitation policies and practices, the authors address issues that are rarely discussed empirically, and concepts which hitherto have been explored rather vaguely. Taken together, the panel analyzes the ways in which the prison and the welfare state are intertwined, and with what effects for the men and women who has spent time in Norwegian prisons; the different way risk affects the experience of imprisonment for men who are serving indeterminate sentences in two similar yet contrasting penal contexts (Norway and Denmark); the (problematic) ways in which rehabilitation has been invoked in discussions about ‘Nordic exceptionalism’, and finally how youth crime control is one of the most key examples of the deep and historically embedded intertwinement of punishment and welfare in the Nordic region. Hopefully, the panel will add new ideas to discussions in prisons scholarship on the relationship between punishment and welfare, risk and rehabilitation, and Nordic penalty more broadly.

Subtopic

• Topic 5: Social Control and Criminal Justice / Imprisonment, Prisons, Prison Life and Effects of Imprisonment (Prisons WG)

Chair

• Kristian Mjåland, University of Agder

Individual Presentations

• Welfare and punishment: A longitudinal analysis of entry into and release from prisons in Norway - Kristian Mjåland, University of Agder

• Risk and the indeterminate sentence: An interview and ethnography-based comparison of Norwegian and Danish practices - Julie Laursen, University of Copenhagen

• Searching for Rehabilitation in All the Wrong Places: Understanding (Allegedly) Exceptional Penal Systems - Thomas Ugelvik, University of Oslo; Kristian Mjåland, University of Agder