social immobility – Trans-national Im/mobility 101

Sociological and post/colonial stratifications of im/mobility

Bauman (1998:86) described the stratifications of postmodern consumer society in terms of freedom, or lack of freedom of mobility. The de-bordered (de-territorialised) freedom of mobility belongs to the realms of the world’s ‘tourists’, while the world’s vagabonds suffer stasis and forced or ‘unfree’ mobilities. He later differentiated between individualized and deracinated Western consumers and the ‘wasted lives’ of the rest who suffer forms of stasis (Bauman, 2004). Agency over mobility is dichotomised between those who ‘cannot at will leave their place’ are the ‘ruled’, and those ‘rulers’ able to ‘be elsewhere’ (Bauman 2001: 120).

… postcolonial theorists caution against conceiving of freedom in terms of movement, arguing that freedom of occupancy and place is just as important for indigenous and other colonised people.

Historical legacies

Within the 19th century paradigm of liberalism, an individual who transgressed the norms of labour discipline and thus became a ‘pauper’ could be compelled to enter the workhouse system of forced labour. This form of stasis constituted, as Duvell and Jordan observe, a loss of the rights of mobility and association, and thus a loss of substantive citizenship and the liberal status of moral equality.[1] Such disorderly subjects were guilty of transgressing the liberal principle of property rights inasmuch as their poverty represented both a burden upon the ‘common wealth’ and a refusal of marketised discipline (Duvell and Jordan, 2005:97).

Nodes of immobility

Prisons, like refugee camps and immigration detention facilities, are peculiar institutions that function at one end of a continuum of social and physical mobility and immobility. The prison works to forcibly confine and isolate prisoners from the wider community, and then employs regimented and authoritarian regimes and architecture to further confine their mobility inside the prison.

For example:

Aboriginal youths arrested in regional Australia
Rejected asylum seekers incarcerated in the UK;
English sink estate residents incarcerated for involvement in the informal economy, including drugs

In the first example a typical trajectory involves conflict and poverty and irregular international migration, the conviction of the non-resident for a poverty-related crime, forced stasis through imprisonment and detention, and then forced deportation. This confined territorial circulation is also confined social mobility: the escape from insecurity and poverty promised through emigration or lowers the migrant to the status of criminal and then returns her to increasingly impoverished conditions.

Many of the people in English prisons come from sink estates marked by sustained poverty, and unemployment, often in former manufacturing and mining conurbations. These communities often comprise post-war immigrants from former colonies, new groups of asylum-seeking immigrants, and static British residents. The first two groups experience postcolonial and globalised displacement before entrenched stasis in the estate. In the latter (English resident) aspect, there is a displacement from the habitas of manufacturing or mining, prior to entrenched stasis and social immobility.^[1] In this regard there is a partial similarity with the confinements of Aboriginal people (refugees from the land they still inhabit). These multicultural communities circulate between the welfare, justice and penal systems and the informal economy.

Carceral continuum

Wacquant

Unfree Labour, Precarity and Hyper-precarity

Human trafficking is one form of ‘unfree labour migration’, and vulnerability to this form of exploitation as ‘hyper-precarity’ involving neoliberal globalisation, socio-legal status, and micro-level experiences/circumstances ( Lewis et al., 2015).

O’Connell Davidson (2015) and others critique liberal (ideological) and neo-abolitionist frameworks of trafficking as ‘modern slavery’, which individualise trafficking as the result of individual malign actors and individual incapacity, isolates it from other forms of labour exploitation, and misrepresent contemporary exploitation in terms of an inadequate account of chattel slavery. Instead, Phillips (2011) views unfree labour as intrinsic to global economic networks, and thus as the result of adverse inclusion within the global economy, even or particularly where that inclusion is predicated on forms of social exclusion (for example, in terms of ‘race’, ethnicity, gender, nationality).

Incommensurability and The right to remain

Blagg

Notes

[1] Charlesworth, 2000. Charlesworth’s study of a working class community in Rotherham shows that the disappearance of traditional work and its way of life changes resident’s sense of place and ontological security so that those reliant on precarious and poorly paid labour come to be seen and experience themselves as ‘aliens among their own species’ (9).

Readings:

Anderson, Bridget, Us and Them, …

Bauman, Z. ‘Tourists and Vagabonds’, in Globalization: The Human Consequences, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1989

Bauman, Z. (1991) Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge: Polity

Bauman, Z. (2001) Liquid modernity, Cambridge: Polity.

Bauman, Z. (2004) Wasted lives: modernity and its outcasts, Cambridge: Polity.

Brenner, R. (1999), ‘Globalization as Re-territorialisation: The re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union’, Urban Studies, Vol. 36, No 3. Carfax, Taylor and Francis, 1999, pp., 431-451

Blagg, H. (2016), From terra nullius to terra liquidus? Liquid modernity and the Indigenous Other, in Anna Eriksson. Punishing the Other: The social production of immorality revisited, Taylor and Francis.

Charlesworth, C. (2000), A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience, 2000

Davidson O’Connell, J. (2015), Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom. Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan

Duvell. F and Jordan, B. (2005) Migration: The Boundaries of Equality and Justice, London, Polity Press.

De Georgio, A (2006) Rethinking the Political Economy of Punishment: Perspectives on post-Fordism and Penal Politics, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Gidwani, V. and Kalayanakrishnan, S. (2003) ‘Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 93, No. 1.

Lewis, H. Dwyer, P. Hodkinson, S. and Waite, L. (2015), Precarious Lives: Forced Labour, Exploitation and Asylum, Policy Press, University of Bristol.

Makere S-H, (2013), The New Imperial Order: Indigenous Responses to Globalization, Zed Books

Phillips, N. (2013b) ‘Unfree labour and adverse incorporation in the global economy: comparative perspectives on Brazil and India’, Economy and Society, vol 42, no 2, pp 171-96. Phillips, N. and Mieres,

Abstract

1.1 This article contributes to recent critiques of the culturalist turn in sociology and criminology. I argue that the turn away from class-essentialism towards a focus on diversity-equality and discursive (postmodern, post-structuralist) theoretical approaches have not enabled sufficient critique of ongoing social injustice and inequality in British society and its criminal justice and penal systems.

1.2 The diversity-equality program of seeking individual equality by ending identity/cultural discrimination and celebrating diversity cannot work as long as it neglects two of the main fault lines of inequality: class and political economy. What is needed instead is an intersectional and trivalent approach that takes full heed of Nancy Fraser’s aphorism “no recognition without redistribution”.

Introduction: socio-penal protest and the limits of liberal reformism

2.1 It might be fair to say that we are experiencing a period of socio-political crisis and opportunity. The combined effects of three decades of neoliberalism, oligarchy and the recent austerity-regime have culminated in Brexit and the fragmentation of Conservative party politics while the heretofore unlikely ascendancy of the left-wing of the Labour party may result in the first socio-political sea-change since Thatcherism.

2.2 The current crisis is evident in the realms of socio-penal justice, wherein liberal and culturalist criminologists and sociologists have responded by reasserting the validity of the post-Woolfian balance between penal security-and-inclusion — which uncannily mirrors the “race-relations paradigm’s” balancing of nationalist exclusions (primarily targetting migrants on the basis of class and race) — and culturalist policies of diversity-integration. These approaches cannot help us get beyond what Pat Carlen (2012) describes as the conflicted punishment-rehabilitation model of social and penal justice.

2.3 Its worth, then, revisiting the 1990’s penal riots (and their long development from 1969 onwards), the Woolf report and recommendations and the subsequent project of liberal reform in order to demonstrate its convergence with the latter program of diversity-equality, and the inadequacy of both for the task of developing a model of social justice that might take us beyond the normalisation of ongoing socio-penal inequality and injustice that has provokes both socio-penal protest and its re-incorporation within the balance of liberal inclusion-and its despotic punishments.

….

Prison riot and passive revolution: 1969 to the present

3.1 The current phase of austere prison conditions and punitive over-incarceration has led to an escalating series of prison staff strikes and protests, and prisoner dissent and riots that echo the last historical wave of punitive prison austerity. That period of dissent saw 10 major disturbances between 1969 and 1983 (HO 1984). Further major protests and disturbances followed at Holloway, Gartree, Pankhurst and Albany in 1985, and frequent individual disturbances continued until the riots of 1990, culminated in the Strangeways riot in April 1990 (hereafter ‘Strangeways’). The factors contributing to the riot included overcrowding, understaffing, inadequate staff training, poor regimes, conditions, and staff-prisoner relations, amid a ‘security and control agenda’ (Wolf and Tammin,1990; see also Sim, 1987). As the punitive conditions and lack of procedural justice for prisoners were widespread and longstanding, Strangeways was a riot that could have happened in many other British prisons at the time (Scraton, et al., 1991: ix; Eaton, 2011: chp2).

3.2 This period of prisons crisis was also one of prison staff dissent, with staff taking industrial action on 7 occasions in d 1975, 34 in 1976, 42 in 1978 and 114 in 1978 (Fitzgerald and Sims, 1980). Mike Fitzgerald and Joe Sim (1980:73-4) noted that while the dispute was over pay and conditions, it also involved a contest over prison authority and legitimacy. The bones of contention were the custodial or welfare role of prisons and the relative authority of the different professions working in prisons (welfare officers and education staff, and custodial prison staff).(76). Fitzgerald and Sim argue that prison officers were seeking to maintain income levels that had been protected from austere incomes policy through a range of privileges ( overtime in particular). They were also seeking status and income parity with the police who had been granted higher pay, in a period when government was increasing finding and support for policing social disturbances. The government sought to impose incomes policy on prisons in line with other (non-policing) public services, to destroy the strategy of privileges, and to introduce labour flexibility through the use of auxiliary staff (for example, administration). At the same time liberal academia experts in and government officials sought more staffing in prisoner training, treatment and welfare, and a change in the role of (at least some) prison officers from purely custodial to being partially welfare and treatment focussed.

3.3 In terms of a crisis of authority and legitimacy, it represented a contest between prison officers seeking to maintain their position as a hitherto class aristocracy and their authority as the controllers of a punitive custodial regime, liberals seeking a transformation of the prison system from custody to rehabilitation on the basis of shared liberal values, and government (of both parties) seeking to impose economic rationalism across the public services (Fitzgerald and Sim,1980).. .

3.4 Penal dissent in the current period has seen English and Welsh prison estates marked by multiple instances of rioting and other forms of dissent. The dissent reached a high point in 2016, with riots in HMP Lewes, Bedford, and Swaledale, while the Birmingham prison riot (in November 2016) was reportedly the worst since Strangeways (ref). Although the riots garnered media and political attention, they represent just a small proportion of the total of ‘concerted indiscipline incidents’ in prisons, which more than doubled from 2013 to 2016 (Selous, 2016).^[i]

3.5 To date, there has been no ethnographic research published on the recent wave of prison dissent. Media sources, however, indicate those involved in or witnesses to prison disturbances cite prison conditions as the cause of dissent. For example, a rooftop protest at HMP Manchester (formerly ‘Strangeways’) was directed against lengthy lockdowns and understaffing: prison staff concurred with the protester’s criticisms (Parveen, 2017). Anger at excessive lockdowns caused by staff shortages was the reported motivation for the riot at HMP Bedford (Press Association, 2016). The disturbance at HMP Guys Marsh in March 2017 was reportedly a protest over poor prison conditions (Press Association, 2017a). A prisoner witness to the riot at Birmingham said ‘listen, if you treat people like dogs they behave like dogs’ and reported that ‘there’s not enough training for staff’ (Enoch, 2016). The build-up to the riot had reportedly involved ‘growing unrest over the fall in facilities to prisoners … and an increasing number of hours spent locked up due to staff shortages’ (Pryce, 2016). Another Birmingham prisoner reportedly stated that ‘[W]hen we were told this morning that we were not getting exercise everyone went mad. They have had enough. They cancel gym all the time, the showers are cold, the food is crap, the heating is never on and we never get our mail on time” (325.nostate.net, 2016).

3.6 The current dissent bears comparison with that of the previous period inasmuch as its prisoner protest and the criticism penal experts made of the ‘illiberal prison system’ has been matched by dissent amongst prison staff. Staff dissent involved large-scale walkouts and protests, and the Prisons Union had planned strikes before the High court granted an injunction against strike action in February 2017. Their concerns focused on the heightened risks of working with prisoners angered by the poor conditions caused, in large part, understaffing, and the correspondingly high suicide rates and drug abuse (Munzinger, 2016). The focus of dissent also includes low pay, inadequate training, and the lack of senior guidance caused by the exodus of experienced officers (Doward, 2016; POA, 2016). The staff protests differ from those of the 1970-80s, in as much as prison staff are no longer a class fraction seeking to maintain or further an advantageous position, but rather a profession fighting from a weak position following the economic rationalisation of the prisons department under Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments. The prison staff dissent also differs inasmuch as it no longer represents a fight for authority over the prison system within a punitive custodial ethos. Prison staff arguably accept Lord Woolf’s recommendations that prisons should maintain security and good order by being just, and that such ‘dynamic security’ involves relations of trust and consent between staff and prisoners (refs, Woolf and Tammin, 1990).

3.7 Both of these waves of prison-based protests occurred periods of wider social and criminal justice transformation and dissent. Strangeways occurred at the end of a decade that witnessed ‘wholesale deindustrialisation, mass (especially youth) unemployment, [and] growing anti-immigrant feeling’ (Jefferson, in Hall et al, 2013).These changes contributed to widespread industrial disputes and strikes, including factory and postal workers in 1970-1; construction workers in 1972; miners and allies in 1972 and1974, female Asian factory workers throughout 1976-8, miners, factory workers and public service throughout 1978-9, steel workers in 1980, NHS staff and allies in 1982, miners, shipyard and furniture makers throughout 1984-5, and postal workers in 1988. They also contributed to frequent inner city rioting and protest including Southall, 1979, St Paul’s, Bristol, 1980; Brixton, Handsworth, Birmingham, Moss Side, Manchester, Toxteth, Liverpool, Chapeltown, Leeds, 1981, Broadwater Farm, Manchester students, 1985; and Hackney and Liverpool race riot in 1985.

3.8 These riots, protests and strikes all represent withdrawal of the compliance, obedience, consent and allegiance that those subject to power give to power holders. The prisoner riots indicate, at a minimum, that the rule of prison authorities is not regarded as legitimate. The strikes of prison staff indicate, again at a minimum, that the government’s management of prisons is not legitimate. The period’s wider public protests represented crisis of legitimacy for political and policing authorities amongst trade unionists, female environmentalists, students, black youth, , with, for example, the wave of industrial unrest leading up to the miner’s strike of 1974 preceding the fall of the Health government. However, if the policing of working class and minority groups contributed the loss of legitimacy among those groups in the 1970s-1990s, it also contributed to the loss of legitimacy for the welfare state’s consensus politics, and the legitimate rise of a law-and-order society (Hall et al, 2013 [1987]; Sims, 1987), including its punitive criminal-justice regimes.

…

Notes

[i] An incident is recorded as “concerted indiscipline” if it involves two or more prisoners acting together to defy a lawful instruction or against the requirements of the regime of the establishment. This includes major disturbances, such as riots.

[ii] . Rioting involving British black, white and Asian youth continued after the fall of the Thatcher government, including, for example, riots of 1991 in Cardiff, Oxford and Tyneside, riots in Oldham, Burnley, Bradford and Leeds in 2001; and in London and in Lozells in 2005

bedford-prison-rioters-shouting-in-jail-gangways-video“The Guardian, November 7, 2016.