COVID-19 and European carcerality: Do national prison policies converge when faced with a pandemic?
| Author | Olga Zeveleva,José Ignacio Nazif-Munoz |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745211002011 |
| Published date | 01 October 2022 |
| Date | 01 October 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
COVID-19 and European
carcerality: Do national
prison policies
converge when faced
with a pandemic?
Olga Zeveleva
University of Helsinki, Finland
Jos
e Ignacio Nazif-Munoz
Universit
e de Sherbrooke, Canada; Harvard University, USA
Abstract
The article analyses an original dataset on policies adopted in 47 European countries
between December 2019 and June 2020 to prevent coronavirus from spreading to
prisons, applying event-history analysis. We answer two questions: 1) Do European
countries adopt similar policies when tackling the COVID-19 pandemic in prisons? 2)
What factors are associated with prison policy convergence or divergence? We analyze
two policies we identified as common responses across prisons around the world:
limitations on visitation rights for prisoners, and early releases of prisoners. We
found that all states in our sample implemented bans on visits, showing policy conver-
gence. Fewer countries (16) opted for early releases. Compared to the banning of
visitation, early releases took longer to enact. We found that countries with prison
overcrowding problems were quicker to release or pardon prisoners. When prisons
were not overcrowded, countries with higher proportions of local nationals in their
prisons were much faster to limit visits relative to prisons in which the foreign popu-
lation was high. This research broadens our comparative understanding of European
carcerality by moving the comparative line further East, taking into account multi-level
governance of penality, and analyzing variables that emphasize the ‘society’ element of
the ‘punishment and society’ nexus.
Corresponding author:
Olga Zeveleva, Aleksanteri Institite, University of Helsinki, Unionkatu 33, 00014 Helsinki, Finland.
Email: olga.zeveleva@helsinki.fi
Punishment & Society
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14624745211002011
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
2022, Vol. 24(4) 642–666
Keywords
carcerality, coronavirus, COVID-19, European prisons, penal nationalism, penal popu-
lism, prison policy, prisoners, public health
Introduction
It is well established that prisons are particularly susceptible to infections, and
people in prison face high risks of complications (Kinner et al., 2020; Montoya-
Barthelemy et al., 2020; World Health Organization, 2020c). Moreover, socio-
economically deprived groups and ethnic minorities are overrepresented in prisons,
which implies that when COVID-19 enters prison walls, it will disproportionately
affect those who are already vulnerable and marginalized (Ahmed et al., 2020;
Beckett and Western, 2001; Ruddel, 2005; Todd-Kvam, 2018). In this context,
we turn our attention to the ways in which national governments in the EU and
in neighboring countries tried to prevent coronavirus from spreading to carceral
settings. This research broadens our comparative understanding of punishment in
Europe in three ways: first, we analyze a country sample that extends beyond the
typical comparative penology focus on liberal democracies with longstanding cap-
italist histories (Brangan, 2020; Daems et al., 2013) by moving the comparative line
further East (Haney, 2016; Lappi-Sepp€
al€
a 2008: 314) to include postsocialist states
like Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan. Second, we take into account multi-
level governance of penality in the context of the involvement of international
bodies in formulating COVID-19 policy recommendations, and European harmo-
nization of prison policy (Piacentini and Katz, 2017; Van Zyl Smit and Snacken,
2009; Vaughan and Kilcommins, 2007). Third, we go beyond prison characteristics
and analyze a broad range of variables that could be associated with prison pol-
icies, such as epidemic systems, political orientations of dominant parties, democ-
racy, and GDP per capita. In this way, the country cases examined here represent
vastly differing penal histories as well as uneven or divergent trajectories of har-
monization with European policy, and the variables we analyze emphasize the
‘society’ element of the ‘punishment and society’ nexus. Our findings, then,
speak to debates on the propensity of countries for welfare provision versus the
propensity to incarcerate, discussed by, for instance, Wacquant (2009) and Sutton
(2013); our attention to the variable of incarceration of foreigners also complicates
the welfare versus incarceration dichotomy from the analytical angle of penal
nationalism, as developed by Haney (2016) and Barker (2017, 2018).
It is premature to conduct cross-national comparative analyses of the effects of
COVID-19 on prisons and related communities, as both data on infection and
death rates in penal institutions are limited, and the threat of the pandemic is still
present. Nonetheless, it is possible to begin empirical analyses of how prison pol-
icies designed to tackle COVID-19 have spread across the world. This paper,
therefore, explores factors that may have led to prison systems in different
643
Zeveleva and Nazif-Munoz
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