Punishment, globalization and migration control: “Get them the hell out of here"

Journal article

This article considers the future of punishment in a world shaped by competing and reinforcing forces of globalization and nationalism. In it, we call for a wider conversation about the growing interdependence between criminal justice and migration control and of its implications for many of the key concepts and approaches within the field of punishment and society. We also draw attention to how the progressive destabilization of citizenship and the precarity of membership and belonging are inimically linked to increasingly potent exhortations of penal power that affect us all.

As globalization and global mobility continue to accelerate, there has been a concomitant growth in border control methods that are separate to, yet increasingly integrated within, systems of punishment. Such developments, in which the criminal justice systems in many countries of the global north are put to work in managing migration, are shifting the reach, impact and nature of punishment. Yet, outside the field of border criminology, such developments remain largely absent from view (Aas, 2014; Aas and Bosworth, 2013; Barker, 2013b; Bosworth, 2017a; Kaufman, 2015; Barker, 2017b). Instead, studies of punishment and penality remain firmly anchored within the nation state and its penal institutional backbone (courts, prisons, probation services, etc.). Intrinsically connected to modernity and the nation state, much of the scholarship thus assumes a bounded national polity.

In this article, we seek to update some of the central conversations in the field which have been structured around punishment and (late) modern society (Garland, 1990; 2001) and reorient them around the global. We take some of the central concepts which have defined the field of punishment and society and examine how they might be adjusted and rethought in the context of mass migration to capture the current transformation of penal power better. We also highlight the growing body of scholarship on how the global is situated in and transforming everyday penal practices in national and local settings.

Authors: Bosworth, M; Franko, K; Pickering, S

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Journal: Punishment and Society
• Volume: 20
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 34-53
• Publication date: 2017-12-21
• Acceptance date: 2017-10-02
• DOI: 10.1177/1462474517738984
• EISSN: 1741-3095
• ISSN: 1462-4745