Crime and Conflict Research Centre

Middlesex University
Hendon Campus
The Burroughs
London NW4 4BT
UK

The Barn

Friday 30 March 2012

Day Conference

The Poverty of Punishment

While it has become increasingly clear that penal policies worldwide are aimed at ‘punishing the poor’, it is also becoming urgent to discuss the ‘poverty of punishment’, namely its debatable utility, official and hidden motivations, social and individual effects and visible dysfunctions.

This conference addresses the cultures and philosophies of punishment, which include dreams of socialisation, impulses of revenge, social defence and deterrence. Are we faced with what Nietzsche termed ‘a vulgar substitute for irascibility’? With what Durkheim described as ‘the instinct of vengeance’? Or with what Marx equated with ‘the glorification of the hangman’?

Cultures and philosophies of punishment will be addressed from a variety of angles: the right to rehabilitation, the effectiveness of deterrence, the infliction of pain, the reproduction of crimes and offenders, the warehousing of social problems.

The conference will host a photographic exhibition by Robert Gumpert, who has taken pictures inside a San Francisco penitentiary, and will be among the invited guests.

This is a free event: see detailed programme overleaf.

For further information, please contact Professor Vincenzo Ruggiero: V.Ruggiero@mdx.ac.uk

Programme

9.00 Coffee

10.00
Jan Williams (Dean of School), Carole Adams (Head of Department)
‘Welcome’

10.15
Vincenzo Ruggiero (Middlesex University)
‘Introduction: Cultures of Punishment’

10.30
Roger Graef (Mannheim Centre, LSE)
‘Punishment as a National Sport in the UK’

11.15
Mick Ryan (Greenwich University)
‘Delivering Pain in the Big Society’

12.00
Anthony Goodman (Middlesex University)
‘Resettling Offenders in the Community’

12.45-13.45
Lunch

13.45
Robert Gumpert, photographer, illustrates his work in San Francisco jail:
‘Locked and Found: Take a Picture and Tell a Story’

14.00
Leonidas Cheliotis (Queen Mary, University of London)
‘A Suitable Amount of Rehabilitation: A Critical Look at Arts-in-Prisons Programmes and their Evaluation’

14.45
Ruth Jamieson (Queen’s University Belfast)
‘Framing Blame and Punishment: Former Politically-Motivated Prisoners in Northern Ireland’

15.30
Frances Crook (Howard League for Penal Reform)
‘Punishing the Poor: The Purpose of the Penal System?’

16.15
Joe Sim (Liverpool, John Moore University)
‘Shock and Awe in the Criminal Justice System: Punishing the Poor after the Riots’

17.00
The end

—
European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control

Coordinator: David Scott
Secretary: Joanna Gilmore

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The European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control provides a forum for and recognition of emancipatory science and emancipatory politics as legitimate areas of study and activism. The focus of this forum is the analysis of the continually changing face of social control.

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