Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland: Politics, Penal-Welfarism and Political Imprisonment
| Author | Róisín Mulgrew |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474514529204 |
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
moments of the practice’s resurrection, instead of the history of its abolition, elides
previous forms of the practice’s demise, perhaps Solitary Confinement misses some-
thing in its adherence to a wave analogy that limits its lessons.
The strength of the work’s periodization, however, is that it reads solitary con-
finement’s relationship to American behavioralism’s wartime science of persuasion,
one that continues to shadow life inside prison walls. Guenther reveals how behav-
ioral science produced a series of mind modification programs borrowed from anti-
democratic regimes in the course of US wars. State and federal prisons used these
techniques against a civilian population in violation of domestic law, and taught
policymakers, wardens, and custodial staff that opinions could be guided through
the creation of structured-choice environments controlled by ‘rational decisions’ to
live. Guenther’s critique of social science’s domestication of wartime prison prac-
tices does incredible work in finally putting behavioralism in its place, and in
revealing ‘the complicity of behaviorism’s core assumptions with the violence of
its experiments and its applications’ (p. 120).
The science of Cold War imprisonment has led, in the 21st century, to a normal-
ized ‘era of the control prison’ that structures mass incarceration (p. xvi). People
who live in US prisons have become ‘risks to be managed, resistances to be elimi-
nated, and organisms to be fed, maintained, and even prevented from taking their
own lives’ (p. xvi). This securitized prison regime is supported by a legal architec-
ture that has formally abandoned ‘that rehabilitation thing’, as US Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia called it during oral arguments in Miller v. Alabama (2012:
132 S.Ct. 2455). In condemning criminalized youth to a lifetime of punishment
without any possibility of parole, the dissenting justices argued that penology’s
promise of rehabilitation had been abandoned for a new legal process of ‘deserved
punishment’ (p. 58). Those said to deserve life in a control prison will endure an
impossible demand for accountability in a prison that actively works to undermine
their very capacity for a sense of responsibility to themselves and to others. Ending
her insightful work with the consequences of solitary confinement’s continued place
within mass incarceration, Guenther resists the prison’s division of the living from
the living dead by asking, ‘Who might we become together if we joined in solidarity
to create new afterlives in resistance to social death?’ (p. 256).
Sara M Benson
San Jose State University, California, USA
Mary Rogan, Prison Policy in Ireland: Politics, Penal-Welfarism and Political Imprisonment, Routledge,
Oxon, 2011; 246 pp. (with index): 9780415616195, £30.99 (pbk)
Mary Rogan’s book traces the development of penal policy in Ireland from 1922
onwards, and perhaps more significantly, explores the factors influencing the devel-
opment of such policy. It identifies links between prison policy and social, eco-
nomic, political and cultural developments within the state. In so doing, it provides
618 Punishment & Society 16(5)
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