ABSTRACT

Punishing the Other draws on the work of Zygmunt Bauman to discuss contemporary discourses and practices of punishment and criminalization. Bringing together some of the most exciting international scholars, both established and emerging, this book engages with Bauman’s thesis of the social production of immorality in the context of criminalization and social control and addresses processes of ‘othering’ through a range of contemporary case studies situated in various cultural, political and social contexts.

Topics covered include the increasing bureaucratization of the business of punishment with the corresponding loss of moral and ethical reflection in the public sphere; punitive discourses around border control and immigration; and exclusionary discourses and their consequences concerning ‘terrorists’ and other socially and culturally defined outsiders.

Engaging with national and global issues that are more topical now than ever before, this book is essential reading for academics and students of involved in the study of the sociology of punishment, punishment and modern society, the criminal justice system, philosophy and punishment, and comparative criminology and penology.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction 1

chapter 1|19 pages

Dehumanization, social contact and techniques of Othering 1

Combining the lessons from Holocaust studies and prison research

chapter 2|21 pages

The legal civilizing process 1

Dignity and the protection of human rights in advanced bureaucratic democracies

chapter 3|26 pages

The rehumanization of the incarcerated Other 1

Bureaucracy, distantiation and American mass incarceration

chapter 5|23 pages

Swedish ‘prison exceptionalism' in decline 1

Trends towards distantiation and objectification of the Other

chapter 6|21 pages

Doing away with decency? 1

Foreigners, punishment and the liberal state

chapter 8|19 pages

Controlling Roma in Norway 1

Governing through the administration of social distance

chapter 9|24 pages

On Bauman's moral duty 1

Population registries, REVA and eviction from the Nordic realm

chapter 10|22 pages

Immobilization in the age of mobility 1

Sex offenders, security and the regulation of risk

chapter 11|17 pages

From terra nullius to terra liquidus? 1

Liquid modernity and the Indigenous Other

chapter 12|23 pages

Symbiotic Othering 1

Terrorism, emotion and morality