Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Commonly linked with the revisionist social control and new penology literatures of the 1980s and 1990s, transcarceration refers to the widespread profusion of regulatory organizations, practices, authorities, and subjects across and beyond traditional boundaries of institutional governance in contemporary western societies. The intellectual impetus for the transcarceration concept derived in large part from Michel Foucault's (1977) writings on the rise of the disciplinary society and “carceral archipelago”; from Andrew Scull's (1984) critique of conventional approaches to understanding community criminal justice and mental health initiatives; and from Stanley Cohen's (1985) analysis of late twentieth-century “master patterns” of deviancy classification and punishment. From a range of disciplinary and substantive perspectives, theorists and researchers in the 1980s sought to account for the failings of the diversion, decarceration, rehabilitation, and reintegration schemes of the prior two decades – and of the post-World War II liberal reconstructionist and civil libertarian political philosophies that these movements had embodied. Transcarceration became both a metaphor and empirical yardstick for the unsettling paradox that state and civil projects aimed at downsizing control structures were in practice having precisely the opposite effect. Instead of disestablishing the old regimes, ... log in or subscribe to read full text