2025/01/01 by Matteo Tiratelli · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics
paper · doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwaf022
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Histories of mass incarceration in Britain are normally structured around a moment of rupture in the early 1990s, when penal populism took off and prison numbers started to climb. But for Britain's black and Irish communities, expansive incarceration had been the norm since at least the 1970s. What then connects these two phenomena? How was the longer history of targeted incarceration related to this broader penal turn? Generations of activists answered this question by arguing that the state first trialled techniques of coercion on marginalized groups, before rolling them out to everyone else. But this simple, sequential logic cannot do justice to the messy web of connections between these two historical processes. Rather than trial-then-roll-out, hyper-incarceration and mass-incarceration appear as separate projects that intersect in various ways during the 1990s: in the imagery used to justify the penal turn, in the continued targeting of Britain's West Indian communities, and in the slow brutalization of the British state. The penal turn was not the inevitable sequel to earlier experiments. What this history instead reveals is the variegated and often contradictory ways that different projects of racialization and incarceration intersect at different historical moments.