NCJ Number
196001
Date Published
2002
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This chapter examines the limits to reform for women's imprisonment in England, which are embedded in the involuntary nature of a subject's imprisonment and the logical necessity of making prisons secure institutions.
Abstract
The state's power to continue to punish by imprisonment, although formally vested in the criminal law, is politically dependent (in the neo-liberal state) on the maintenance of the popular legitimacy of prison as an institution that should and can keep people in custody. This circumstance has been termed "carceral clawback" (Carlen 2002a) by the author. This chapter argues that despite the appearance of reform in the regimes of the English women's prisons, a "carceral clawback" is already underway, made necessary by the prisons' continuing need for legitimacy, particularly in the face of recent anti-prison discourses about women's imprisonment in England. The author further maintains that most of the cosmetically new policies currently reinvigorating the power of carceral clawback in the English women's prisons have been powered by the common-sense ideologies of optimistic campaigners who have failed to remember that prison is for punishment by incarceration. In England, carceral clawback is proceeding by means of financially coerced, inclusionary controlling measures that are currently bidding for greater control of knowledge about the causes of crime and its deterrence, knowledge that adherents seek to make absolute through accreditation control. Consequently, the need for accreditation of prison programs in England has converted the program priorities of correctional agencies from a professional concern about the therapeutic needs of the client into a functionalist concern about the survival of the organizational contract with the Prison Service. 4 notes