Rethinking penal persistence

• In Event: Punishment & Society. Theoretical advances and problems

Abstract

Departing from the discussion of the presence of authoritarianism as a governmental rationality in the contemporary penal field in Latin America, I would like to introduce a theoretical discussion on the problem of penal persistence. Researchers in punishment & society has been strongly focused in the last decades on the question of change, but some contributions have introduced recently the question of inertia or continuity. Unlike certain perspectives in recent years linked to the discussion of ‘path dependence’ in the penal field (Schoenfeld, 2010; 2014; Dagan and Telles, 2014; Rubin, 2023; Rubin, Yeomans and Guinney, 2023), I try to show how this persistence of authoritarian penal practices is the product not only of “initial conditions”, a series of decisions and policies that produce “feedback effects”, but also an agentic process, in which diverse actors resist successive attempts at transformation, even in the face of “critical junctures” generated by various “external shocks”, in a field always characterised by constant struggle (Goodman, Page and Phelps, 2015; 2017). In this sense, authoritarian penal practices are not just a ‘layer’ in the penal field that remains the same over time and produces its effects in successive layers (Rubin, 2016) but mutate, at least partially, as a consequence of subsequent innovations, that gives the penal field a configuration that Quinn and Phelps (Quinn et al, 2020; Goodman & Quinn, 2023) has defined as palimpsestic. In this paper, I would argue that the notion of ‘metamorphosis’ (Castel, 1995; Sozzo, 2007; 2015) “as a dialectic of the same and the different” across time could open a better standpoint to consider this combination of heredity and innovation.

Author

• Maximo Sozzo, Universidad de A Coruña / Universidad Nacional del Litoral