ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with the theme of the new punitiveness at the level of the political. Much writing on past and recent penal trends has tended to pitch its analysis in such a way that large areas of political thought and action disappear from view. Consider for a moment the ubiquity of the following terms in recent writing on penal matters: ‘modernity‘, ‘late-modernity’, ‘late-capitalism’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘governmentality’. We can apprehend distinct political meanings or associations in each. Yet in a curious sleight of hand these conceptual-analytical structures draw attention down onto the penal subject while simultaneously achieving a radical decentring of the political agent. Modernity, late-modernity, or neoliberalism thus become essentialized concepts, hollowed out of the very detail, character, dispute, idiosyncrasy, assumption, and referents that make (or made) them features of lived experience. Instead, we are liable to speak of penal modernism’s key tenets – rationality, scientism, and restraint – or of neoliberalism’s tropes of rationality and choice. Of course, this is not to say that political voices are not heard at all, for much if not the majority of contemporary penal theorizing is developed out of an analysis of discourse and texts. But this textual analysis has its own important silences that I will mention again in a moment. My aim in writing this chapter has therefore been to find a way to reinsert the political agent and some idea of a non-essentialized political analytic into contemporary debates about penal trends – in this case, the possible rise of a new punitiveness. In so doing I hope I may begin to clear up some important omissions of attention in contemporary penal theory.
