Review: Imaginary Penalties
| Author | Bill Munro |
| Published date | 01 March 2010 |
| Date | 01 March 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02645505100570010102 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
91
Reviews
Imaginary Penalties
Pat Carlen (ed.)
Willan Publishing; 2008; pp 368; £25, pbk
ISBN: 978–1–84392–375–6
In October 2005, Pat Carlen carried out research in the Aus-
tralian prison Optima. This was a new institution designed to
run re-integrative programmes on female offenders. Optima
was run by a non–punitive and enthusiastic staff, and prison
facilities were excellent and well resourced. However, what
Carlen found most striking about Optima was the general
attitude of the staff towards the aims of the regime. While, on the one hand, prison
staff insisted that the prison’s rehabilitative goals had little chance of realization,
on the other, they simultaneously performed their duties ‘as if’ such goals were
achievable. It was this adherence to a set of rehabilitative aims, while simultan-
eously denying their chances of success, that inspired this edited book on imaginary
penalties.
The notion of the imaginary is drawn from the work of the French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan.1 Ideology, for Lacan, is a form of imaginary misrecognition,
whereby the subject misrecognizes not only the external world but its own nature
as subject. In the introduction and opening chapter, Carlen draws on the notion of
the imaginary to show how various political and populist ideologies on crime and
security structure a representation, or image, of penal policy and practice. Such
representations both naturalize the dominant discourse of governance – what in
this volume, Carlen refers to as ‘risk crazed governance’ – and excludes other more
open-ended and imaginative discourses on justice and social cohesion.
The thirteen chapters that make up this volume, written by a wide range of inter-
national contributors, draw on a tension between the imaginary, being captive to
a particular ideological representation, and the imagination, the creative openness
towards new conceptions and social practices. The book’s authors cover a range
of issues in relation to ideological misrecognition in legal and penal discourse. A
dominant theme in the book is the actuarial logic of decision making. Jacqueline
Tombs deals with this theme in relation to sentencing – where the con ict is between
judicial discretion and the logic of risk accountability – and Kelly Hannah-Moffat
deals with the theme in relation to gender responsivity within Canadian correctional
institutions. Here the con ict is in relation to the dominant correctional model of
risk-needs assessment and the misrecognition of the women’s personal biography.
On a similar theme Anne Worrall investigates imaginary probation practice in rela-
tion to the notion of the ‘seamless management’ of the offender. Joe Sim’s chapter
looks at misrecognition in relation to crime. The excluded in this case relates to the
categories of crime: deaths at work, deaths in custody, income tax evasion etc.,
that are excluded from both legal and criminal justice discourses.
The chapter by Pat O’Malley and Philip Bougen, and those of Andrew Jefferson
and Barbara Hudson address the imaginary in relation to international security
and law; Jefferson addressing the excluded other in Human Rights discourse and
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