Exceptional states: The political geography of comparative penology
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Louise Brangan |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520915995 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Punishment & Society
Exceptional states: The
2020, Vol. 22(5) 596–616
! The Author(s) 2020
political geography of
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comparative penology
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520915995
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Louise Brangan
University of Stirling, UK
Abstract
It is now common in the sociology of punishment to lament that comparative penology
has not matured as an area of research. While there have been seminal works in the
comparative canon, their conceptual tools tend to be drawn from grand narratives and
macro-structural perspectives. Comparative researchers therefore lack concepts that
can help capture the complexity of penality within a single nation, limiting the cross-
national perspective. Why is this relative lack of comparative refinement still the case?
This article investigates this question by looking specifically at penal exceptionalism, a
concept central to comparative penology. While punitiveness as a comparative and
descriptive category has been critiqued, its converse, penal exceptionalism remains
prevalent but undertheorised. Examining exceptionalism reveals that it is not merely
the macro-structural approach to comparison that has limited the development of
cross-national sociology of punishment, but the Anglocentric assumptions, which are
the bedrock of comparative penology. In this essay, I argue that penal exceptionalism
versus punitiveness is an Anglocentric formulation. These taken-for-granted assump-
tions have become so central to the comparative enterprise that they act as a barrier to
developing new innovative comparative frameworks and concepts. The article con-
cludes by suggesting some methodological strategies that are intended as a way of
helping comparative penology to expand its toolkit and support the ongoing develop-
ment of more equitable criminological knowledge.
Keywords
comparative imprisonment, comparative penology, penal exceptionalism, penal politics,
sociology of punishment, southern criminology
Corresponding author:
Louise Brangan, Faculty of Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK.
Email: Louise.Brangan@stir.ac.uk
Brangan
597
Introduction
Comparative penology tends to be motivated by two central questions: (1) Why do
certain nations, particularly Anglophone, display similar penal patterns and levels
of punitivity? and (2) how come other nations manage to punish differently,
implementing lenient forms of incarceration and maintaining moderate penal pol-
itics (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; Downes, 1988; Green, 2008; Lacey, 2008; Pratt,
2008; Pratt and Eriksson, 2013; Savelsberg, 1994; Whitman, 2003)? While com-
parative penality scholarship has expanded, it is still considered to remain ‘at an
early stage’ of development (Garland, 2017: 2; Hamilton, 2014; Sparks, 2001).
Why is this the case? The aim of this article is to identify some of the barriers to
a more illuminating comparative penology and sketch out some possible method-
ological avenues that could advance this discipline in fruitful new directions.
I do so by focusing on a key orientation within comparative scholarship: penal
exceptionalism. How and why some nations have successfully avoided the per-
ceived punitiveness of our contemporary era is central to the comparative endeav-
our, informing research questions and frameworks of comparative analysis, as well
as shaping our comparative criminological imagination – namely, how we under-
stand our own and other penal systems. While punitiveness as a comparative and
descriptive category has been critiqued (Hamilton, 2014; Matthews, 2005; Sparks,
2001), its converse, penal exceptionalism remains prevalent but undertheorised.
Describing places as singular and unique seems to be a common refrain in com-
parative research, and it serves as a definition for the penal systems in the United
States, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and the Scandinavian nations.
Exceptionalism is now regularly explored empirically and, in some cases, robustly
critiqued, but only in relation to specific nations’ penal profiles. Yet there has been
little exploration of this term in general, what it means and its consequences for
our theoretical and comparative toolkits.
This article undertakes this task using a southern criminology framework,
which elucidates ‘the power relations embedded in the hierarchal production of
criminological knowledge’ (Carrington et al., 2016: 1). Using this critical lens to
appraise exceptionalism highlights that the most common comparative questions,
the usually binary nature of comparisons, the normative agenda underpinning
these projects and even the metrics used to establish difference each tend to reflect
comparative penology’s deeply embedded Anglocentrism. It is the repetition of
these Anglocentric concerns – why are large English-speaking nations increasingly
punitive? And how could they be improved? – that may be slowing down the
development of new and diverse comparative frameworks of analysis.
This article is organised into three sections. First, I provide a brief overview of
comparative sociology of punishment, highlighting its advances and underexplored
avenues. Following that, the contours of the purportedly exceptional nations of
Scandinavia, Ireland, Scotland and the United States are outlined and the
criticisms of these claims of exceptionalism are presented. These critiques are
each made on a regional level rather than addressing the continued presence of
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exceptionalism in comparative criminology. In the second section, however, I
argue that these repeated critiques of exceptionalism indicate an embedded
Anglocentrism within the comparative study of punishment which now hinders
its development. Following Aas (2012), Carrington et al. (2016) and Connell
(2006), I reflect on the epistemological hierarchies that prevail in this literature
and how they prevent a more vivid and perceptive cross-national study of penality
from emerging. Thereafter, in the third section, I ask what lessons might we learn
in light of these critiques? How might we embark upon a new phase of the
comparative penology project, one that may be more demanding, but could
move us beyond metropolitan thinking, and potentially allow us to better research
cross-nationally and theorise punishment.
Comparative penology
Comparative study is a vital and important strand of the punishment and society
project. The contrasting light of comparative reflection admonishes the tendency to
take for granted, revealing the prohibitive moral boundaries, oddities of outlook
and characteristics of punishment and penal politics that may have previously gone
unremarked. Conducting our research questions cross-nationally can help refine
how we theorise the relationships between punishment, culture, politics and social
structure. Thus, the development of comparative study contributes to the ‘increas-
ing maturity’ of the sociology of punishment (Garland, 2018: 15).
While there have been seminal works in the comparative canon, it has been
suggested that comparative penology remains nascent as conceptual tools tend to
be drawn from macro-structural perspectives and there is a tendency for grand
narratives (Barker, 2009; Garland, 2013, 2018; Hamilton, 2014). The development
of comparative inquiries that are conducted below the macro-structural level is
now seen as the most important matter that must be resolved if comparative
punishment and society is to take the necessary next steps to achieve the
discipline’s potential for theory and understanding. Empirically, comparative stud-
ies pitched at a grounded level can help us better understand differences in pun-
ishment and its social meanings from one context to the next. Yet studies of this
kind have been rare (though see Barker, 2009; Downes 1988) and the conceptual
resources necessary to conduct this kind of grounded cross-national research
need to be improved and further developed. Currently, comparative penology
lacks concepts that capture the complexity of either how penal systems are
organised as well as how penal policy worlds operate (Jones and Newburn
2005). In the subfield of comparative punishment and society studies, there is ‘a
great deal of path-clearing work to be done’ (Garland, 2018: 14).
The area that the comparative literature has attended most closely to is the
divergent experiences of punitiveness (Downes, 2011). In the latter stages of the
20th-century, it is argued that the USA and UK, as well as elsewhere, experienced
a punitive turn, evident in the rising prison populations and emergence of a more
populist and virulent penal politics (Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; Garland, 2001;
Brangan
599
Lacey, 2008; Savelsberg, 1994; Wacquant, 2009). The travesty and tragedy of mass
incarceration drew academic attention and occupied a central place in contempo-
rary sociology of punishment (Sparks, 2001). In this atmosphere comparative
study of punishment found energy and purpose, a way to examine and theorise
the punitive turn in the western democracies in the late 20th-century. There was an
urgency to comparative studies as they sought to expose what ignited and sup-
ported this severe, and apparently cross-national, penal trend. This was entwined
with a normative agenda to discover ideas and practices that might engender more
humane and tolerant penal systems. It is in this vein that exceptionalism emerged
in the sociology of punishment, illuminating those nations and regions perceived to
be lenient outliers in punitive...
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