Penality at the Periphery: Deficits, Absences, and Negation

• Author: Louise Brangan
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10439862221138681
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/10439862221138681

Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

2023, Vol. 39(1) 94 –113

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10439862221138681

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Article

Penality at the Periphery:

Deficits, Absences, and

Negation

Louise Brangan1

Abstract

What might mean to reorientate the field of punishment and society so that we

might be able to say it is democratizing, diversifying, and increasingly inclusive? If we

wish to expand our knowledge of penal politics in particular, but also develop a more

inclusive field of punishment and society, then we need to also examine the impact

this ethnocentricity can have on shaping scholarship and debate within the periphery.

The article contrasts two alternative readings of Irish penal politics to show how

sometimes the concepts from the U.K. and U.S. penality can come to inflect studies of

penal politics outside the mainstream. If we are to make an attempt at democratizing

our knowledge, then it is as de Sousa Santos wrote, that the first struggle is often

against ourselves. The article concludes with a brief critical discussion about who can

speak for Southern and peripheralized places; where is even a southernized place; and

if we are to democratize and diversify the study of penal politics, what role is there

for our existing canon? I conclude that is not where we study, but how we study it.

Keywords

punishment and society, southernizing criminology, Ireland, comparative penology,

penal politics

Introduction

This article explores what it might mean to reorientate the field of punishment and

society so that we might be able to say it is democratizing, diversifying, and increas-

ingly inclusive. I chose this image to orientate this discussion as it nicely sets the tone

and captures something important about borders and representation. This piece of

public art is from the Bay Area in California. On the left side of the grass, there is a

1University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

Corresponding Author:

Louise Brangan, Chancellor’s Fellow in Criminology, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G4 0LT, UK.

Email: Louise.Brangan@strath.ac.uk

1138681CCJXXX10.1177/10439862221138681Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeBrangan

research-article2022

Brangan 95

lean and imposing “HERE,” which is facing a correspondingly bold “THERE.” These

statements are intended to mark the boundary between Berkeley and Oakland.

Berkeley, the sophisticated elite university town is designated as here, and as a conse-

quence the less affluent Oakland is always doomed to be represented—or misrepre-

sented—as forever over there, essentially as other to Berkeley.1

This installation is a physical reminder that our geography, and how we think of

places, has an embedded hierarchy. And it raises a challenge: How might we as

researchers best cross borders and traverse global boundaries, compare differences,

research our own forms of punishment, and pursue conceptual generalizability without

creating a “here” and a “there” in this same way? Put simply, how might we begin to

decolonize the criminological imagination?

There is broad general agreement that to achieve this “epistemological justice”

(Santos, 2014) we need to address the magnetic pull of the Anglo-Saxon nations and the

West within the social sciences. We must expose the limits of mainstream theories and

ideas, marginalize and provincialize them. We need to also temper this Western domi-

nance by making space for theorists and research from outside the metropole. As such,

we must democratize knowledge by elevating unsung and overlooked research from the

Global South and the East (Carrington et al., 2016; Liu, 2009). This seems to be the only

Photo source: Daniel Olsen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oakland_HERE-THERE.jpg