Imagining the global corporate gulag: lessons from history and criminological theory

Abstract

This article explores the enabling pre‐conditions of global mass imprisonment from historical and criminological perspectives. Driven in part by Western first‐world anxieties about weakening economic supremacy, declining safety, declining standard of living, and increasing social isolation in a diaspora of strangers, this article explores the spread of penal populism beyond American shores, with a particular focus on the proliferation of privatized, for‐profit, punishment schemes. The expressive and instrumental functions of actuarial punishment schemes are noted.

Keywords:

• mass imprisonment
• global incarceration
• cultural criminology

Notes

1. As Greenberg and West (2001, p. 638) put it: ‘Sociological analyses of the history of penality have taken as their premise, that institutionalized punishment practices are not entirely determined by the functional necessity of preventing crimes.’

2. ‘Cultural criminology’ is arguably so popular among students because the alienating reality of so much of mainstream criminology is that it fails to recognize the disconnectedness and isolation that is the fountain of high crime in the first place.

3. Beckett and Sasson (2002, pp. 46–47) point out regarding the supposed ‘success’ of welfare reform as it relates to rising incarceration rates: ‘Reduced welfare expenditures are not indicative of a shift toward reduced government intervention in social life, but rather a shift toward a more exclusionary and punitive approach to the regulation of social marginality.’

4. Kraska (1999, p. 238) laments that many criminologists become ‘security specialists’ as opposed to social scientists.