EUROPEAN GROUP FOR THE STUDY OF DEVIANCE AND SOCIAL CONTROL Coordinator: Ida Nafstad ESTABLISHED 1973 Secretary: Per J. Ystehede An international network working towards social justice, state accountability and decarceration NEWSLETTER No 02, 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. (p. 3) Editorial II. (p. 4) David Scott: Against Imprisonment III. (p. 20) Call for Papers: EG conference 2018 in Ljubljana IV. (p. 22) News from the Prison, Punishment and detention working group V. (p. 24) News from Europe and Around the World Front page photo: Oslo Prison by Jonathan Hobber Winter. 2 I. Editorial In 1887, Peter Kropotkin in his essay In Russian and French Prisons posed the question: are prisons really necessary? Kropotkin’s answer was in large parts a simple no. According to Kropotkin: “Humanity has seldom ventured to treat its prisoners like human beings; but each time it has done so it has been rewarded for its boldness.” The time is long overdue for those in power to be bolder! “At a time when England and Wales has the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe, it remains essential that a coherent, united and strategically-coordinated abolitionist movement comes together to promote progressive and humanitarian legal, political and social change” writes David Scott in Against Imprisonment: An Anthology of Abolitionist Essays which we are happy to present excerpts from in this Newsletter. The book will be published 28th February by Waterside Press and will be of interest to many in our group. The book can already be pre-ordered. As the book is published by an independent publisher which does not have massive marketing resources it would be great if EG members could share news about the book with colleagues, students and libraries. Against Imprisonment is a follow up to the European Group Press book Emancipatory Politics and Praxis by David Scott with Emma Bell, Joanna Gilmore, Helen Gosling, JM Moore, and Faith Spear, a book which also might be of great interest to members of the group. It can be ordered from EG Press. The third volume of abolitionist essays by David Scott is in preparation for publication in 2019, also by Waterside Press. The planned British/Irish section conference had to be postponed. It is now planned for 2019 – so do not overbook your calendars for 2019. We will bring more updates about this event in later newsletters. A planned conference happening in 2018 however is the EG annual conference which this time will be held in Ljubljana. Please remember that the deadline is approaching fast!!! Please submit a short abstract of 150-300 words to the relevant stream coordinator by 31 March 2018. Excited to see you all very soon! In solidarity, Ida and Per 3 II. Against Imprisonment, Chapter 1 From Against Imprisonment: An Anthology of Abolitionist Essays By: David Scott Let me start, if I may, with a metaphor about ‘penal horticulture’. A gardener aims to create the right condition for their chosen plants to grow, but there is always a natural tendency for certain florae to prosper in a given set of environmental (climate) and physical conditions (the garden), which are shaped by the soil, temperature, hours of sun, rainfall and so on and so forth. We may introduce new flowers, but if the natural conditions are wrong then they may die and ‘weeds’ (that is plants we did not wish to cultivate) will grow in their place. Some of the seeds we sow may well survive, but they are likely to be dispersed, isolated and have a relatively short life-span. But let us imagine for a moment that when gardeners sow seeds on some of the most barren land on earth it is inexplicably forgotten that climate, soil and nurturing are intimately interconnected. What if here, counterintuitively, many gardening books and tales of those who have tended such soil in the past propagate a myth that if only we keep on toiling at the land and following (failed) traditions of horticultural practice, we can cultivate rare and exotic flowers found growing elsewhere only in freedom. Let me now translate this ‘penal horticultural metaphor’ into a reflection on the modern-day prison. Today courts sentence people to prison in the belief that they are planting seeds of reform and rehabilitation in the minds of prisoners that will grow and bear fruit in terms of reducing offending. Yet historical and contemporary evidence indicates that there are certain inherent tendencies within prisons (the garden) likely only to deliver estrangement, violence, suffering and death. The prevailing line from the government, judiciary, practitioners, reformers and many penologists (the gardeners) that we can and should impose a humanitarian vision on the prison place seems almost blind to the evidence that any such vision will always struggle because it does not fit with what a prison is. Prisons are hostile landscapes, which are hotbeds 4 for institutionally-structured violence: the constant and systematic deprivation of human need. What grows best in these physical conditions are hurt and resentment – weeds that strangle even the strongest of commitments to values like love, kindness and compassion. The prison is a barren land when it comes to reforming lawbreakers. It is not a moral place embedded with commitments to the recognition of human rights or empathy with the suffering of others. Whilst it is true that sometimes the seeds of rehabilitation do take root and that appeals to common humanity can break through the bleakness of prison life, it is always just as likely that any such sentiments will be overwhelmed by the dehumanising character of this abnormal place. The extent of moral exclusion created in the prison place is also influenced by the penal climate – the political, economic and socio-economic conditions of a given nation at a specific time. England and Wales is a grossly unequal society with a punitive political culture where humanitarian initiatives have historically struggled to establish a foothold in penal establishments. Yet the mythology of the ‘utopian prison’ as a place of salvation continues to be widely propagated in official and academic penological literature. The aims of this opening chapter are threefold. First it explores the mythology of the ‘utopian prison’, highlighting claims by penal reformers, politicians and practitioners in recent years that prisons can work. Second, the chapter considers one of the main implications of this mythology – that the imprisonment of poor and vulnerable people in England and Wales is cloaked in a humanitarian rhetoric legitimating the prison place. Third, consideration is given to the arguments of those who most consistently stand in opposition against the dystopian realities of the prison place – penal abolitionists – and their call to take action against brutal penal realities and radically change the way we respond to wrongdoing. The penal utopia (or how we learn to stop worrying and to love the prison) The mythology of the utopian prison appears to have gained renewed energy in the second decade of the 21st Century. In a time when there are record penal incarceration rates all around the world (Scott, 2013f), conservativism and pessimism seem to have taken a firm grip of imaginations regarding how we can most humanely tackle problematic behaviours. The continued existence of the prison appears to be perceived as inevitable and despite its problems, we just have to make the best of it. This is characterised by the assumption, coined some time ago by the abolitionist philosopher Michel Foucault (1977), that the prison is a “detestable solution that we cannot live without”. For a number of modern-day liberal humanitarians (Rutherford, 1994; Coyle, 1995; Ramsbotham, 2003; Murtagh, 2007) the best we can do is make the prison place as ‘least detestable’ as possible. But there is also a tradition in liberal 5 humanitarian penological thinking promoting the idea that prisons can be more than this and become “humane” places of “promise” and progress (West, 1997; Jones, 2006). For its advocates the prison can become a ‘good place’ – a kind of penal utopia. Someone following the logic of this perspective can, with good conscience, support the sentencing to imprisonment of a lawbreaker with complex needs because the prison place has the potential to address such needs and turn their life around. Recent titles promoting this myth of a ‘penal utopia’ include The Good Prison (Lemos, 2014); The American Prison: Imagining a Different Future (Cullen, Jonson and Stohr, 2014b); Health and Health Promotion in Prison (Ross, 2013); and The Beautiful Prison (Sarat, 2014).1 This ‘utopian prison’ literature generally claims that prisons can be reimagined as potential places of safety and reform. Evidence of such existing ‘utopias’ in this body of literature are, however, sparse and largely isolated to small illustrations of good practice in a single prison or short-lived initiatives that have subsequently been shut down (see for example Lemos (2014) as a particularly good illustration of this tendency). Ironically, the myth of the prison utopia ultimately condemns the prison through the limited nature of its praise. Yet the idea that prisons can, if appropriately funded and managed, become ‘good places’ needs to be taken seriously. Let us then consider briefly the idea that prison can work as a place of safety and reform. The idea that prisons can be places of health and safety has a long history in penological literature (Scott and Codd, 2010); and partly underscores the rationale of the emergence of ‘reformed prisons’ in the early 1800s (Scott, 2008a). Irrespective of much evidence to the contrary, the claim that modern prisons can be safe places (Steiner and Meade, 2014) and generate good health (Woodall, 2012; Potter and Rosky, 2014) continue to have plenty of contemporary advocates and are deeply embedded in official discourse. In recent years, though we have seen a shift in rhetoric away from the language of health to the language of safety in English penal policy (Ministry of Justice [MoJ], 2016), and whilst the two ideas still closely intertwine, there are subtle differences in terms of how they shape policy and practice. Talk of the health of prisoners was very much at the forefront of penal policy in the 1990s and early 2000s (Scott and Codd, 2010). For example, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prison’s [HMCIP] (1999) thematic review Suicide is Everyone’s Concern noted that the basic requirement of a “healthy prison” is for the Prison Service to ensure the safety and respect of prisoners and that each prison generated sufficient numbers of purposeful activities and appropriately facilitated preparation for release.2 For discussion of the “Beautiful Prison” see also Larson (2014) and Hartman (2014). For critique see Brown (2014). I took inspiration for the ‘penal horticulture metaphor’ from Bauman (1989) and Brown (2014). 2 The wording of the HMCIP (1999) of the four principles were as follows  The weakest prison feels safe. 1 6 Prisons meeting these criteria were considered by the HMCIP to be legitimate institutions. Despite the very restrictive criteria of the HMCIP definition, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the “healthy prison” is the extraordinary large number of prisons each year that fail to meet this basic standard (Scott and Flynn, 2014). In 2002 the more ambitious idea of health-promoting prisons was introduced by the UK Government. Here the prison was conceived as a “unique chance to tackle some serious health issues … [among] a population it would normally be hard to reach” (Prison Health Policy Unit and Prison Health Task Force, 2002: 1). In this vision the prison was believed to have the potential to be a healthy setting that could improve spiritual, physical, economic and social health (Scott and Codd, 2010). This vision of a health-promoting prison, however, would only remain plausible if penal confinement continued to be considered as something that successfully combined healthcare, treatment and punishment whereby the offender was conceived as someone primarily suffering from ill-health (Scott 2007). Within only a few years it was not. A change of government in 20103 saw a shift in penal policy away from a psycho-medical understanding of rehabilitation towards one where the reform of offenders was to be achieved in safe places prioritising education and work. This change of government rhetoric, I think, has seen the emergence and consolidation of the utopian idea of the virtuous prison. Underscoring the virtuous prison are two basic assumptions. First, that criminal activity is caused by morally-deficient individuals and second, that the reason why the prison has proved unsuccessful in rehabilitating prisoners in the past is because it has failed to be effective in habituating moral virtues. Those advocating the virtuous prison wish therefore to see the (re)creation of the prison as a place of virtue that can educate prisoners and help them to foster and internalise moral characteristics (Cullen, Sundt, and Wozniak, 2014c). Perhaps the most prominent advocate of penal ‘virtue ethics’ in England and Wales is the former Justice Secretary, Michael Gove. In an influential 2015 speech entitled The Treasure in the Heart of Man – Making Prisons Work, Gove noted that “no society can protect the weak and uphold virtue” without recourse to the prison sentence. For prisons to work, however, it must be recognised that many prisoners have grown up in “moral deprivation – without the resources to reinforce virtue” (Gove, 2015). Hence, the idea of the virtuous prison is grounded in an  All prisoners are treated with respect.  All prisoners are busily occupied, are expected to improve themselves and are given the opportunity to do so.  All prisoners can strengthen links with their families and prepare for release. 3 The Conservative Government from May 2010 – May 2015 was in coalition with the Liberal Democratic Party, although the Conservative Party was by far the most dominant partner and all the Justice Secretaries since 2010 have been Conservative MPs. 7 impossible utopian aspiration of transforming the prison into a place that can teach prisoners how to live a virtuous life. The ideas of former Justice Secretary Michael Gove, which were built upon by his successors Liz Truss and David Lidington, focussed firmly on moral education and the individual deficits and moral weaknesses of prisoners. The prison was to “liberate the prisoner through learning” and this meant “an end to the idleness and futility of so many prisoners’ days” (ibid). The cornerstone of Gove’s vision was that purposeful activity in prison would undermine laziness and instead foster moral virtues, like hard work, through the granting of earned privileges for educational achievement. In so doing, Gove (2015) reasserted individual prisoners’ responsibilities to change rather than allow them to be ‘excused’ through psycho-medical diagnosis; and thus allowed the establishment of austere penal regimes that characterised the tenure of Gove’s predecessor, Chris Grayling4. Though these recent turns in the “penal merry-go-round” of the aims of imprisonment (Scott, 2007) may initially appear insignificant, changes in official discourse and penal policy have meant that since 2010 attention has shifted from addressing the physical and mental health problems of prisoners to those emphasising the situational controls of pathologically violent prisoners and the control of the supply of illicit substances going into prisons. Rather than focussing on the often tragic and disastrous life-course events of serving prisoners as an explanation for their wrongdoing, it is physical violence and psychoactive drugs that are placed in the spotlight, as they are regarded as undermining safety and thus creating obstacles in the delivery of the reformative goals of imprisonment: training and the acquiring of employability skills (MoJ, 2016). Combined with the attempts from 2010-2015 to drastically cut prison budgets, political focus is now almost exclusively on the immediate physical safety of both prisoners and prison officers from an apparently rising tide of prisoner violence. In so doing, recognition of the damage that prisons themselves have wrought upon individuals and communities for centuries, alongside concerns about the long-term health implications of imprisonment on prisoners and prison staff, have been either sidelined or completely ignored. The utopian re-imagining of the prison place as a safe and virtuous place transforming the lives of pathologised lawbreakers through individualised personal reflection and reformation has at least three different modern faces: the restorative prison; the spiritual prison and the therapeutic prison. They each bring with them the certain promises of turning prisons into places of life rather than violence, suffering and death: 4 Chris Grayling occupied the post of Justice Secretary in England and Wales from 2012-2015. 8    The promise of the restorative prison (Edgar and Newell, 2006; Presser, 2014) is that it will transform the prison place into an inclusive, healing and respectful environment that will provide a means of healing, empowering and holding prisoners to account. It is envisaged as a victim-orientated space that will put harm right through dialogue, mediation and the principles of conflict resolution. The promise of the spiritual prison (Newall, 2002; Johnson, 2014) is that prisons will become places of hope, purpose, love and commitment that will foster new positive relationships both within the prison and the wider community. These faith-based regimes will create new meanings, offer fulfilment in life and build skills to deal with the daily problems of living. The promise of the therapeutic prison (Genders and Player, 1995; Cullen and Makenzie, 2011; Stevens, 2012; Smith and Schweitzer, 2014; Brown, Miller, Northey and O’Neill, 2014) is that it will generate a democratic and egalitarian community of care and respect that will provide personal growth through enhanced interpersonal relationships and the fostering of therapeutic alliances. The therapeutic prison will deliver a radical penal counter-culture and provide more humanitarian interventions that can transform the lives of the prisoner. The problem with these bold promises is that we have heard them all before. It was the very claim that the prison place could create ‘new life’ that inspired the original advocates of the penitentiary in the USA and UK (Scott, 2008a). Confinement in the nineteenth century penitentiary would result in the extinguishing of the former self of the offender and the creation of a new law-abiding person. The prison has failed for more than 200 years to deliver on this promise of new life. All it has brought in the past is violence, suffering and death. The evidence supporting current reformative interventions is also flimsy to say the least. For a prison population of 86,000 there are only 700 places currently available in therapeutic prisons, meaning they can provide for less than 1% of the prison population. Evidence of the actual impact on recidivism rates of ex-prisoners who have been through enlightened regimes like the therapeutic prison is also rather disappointing (Genders and Player, 2010). Indeed the regimes in these virtue-instilling prisons do not seem that radically different from those they wish to replace and none of them appear to have been successful thus far in helping prisoners lower ‘the mask’ protecting them in brutal prison conditions. The prison is a “total institution” where a significant number of like-situated people are “cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, [and] together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (Goffman, 1963: 11). A new world is created within its walls, shaping the interests and meanings for those on the ‘inside’. In this new world, moral exclusion and moral indifference are much more likely to evolve than moral inclusion (Christie, 1981; Bauman, 1989). Prisons are predicated on moral judgements which label, stigmatise, categorise and distance a perceived morally inferior person – the prisoner. The prison exists as a space to 9 deliver pain. It also places boundaries around the development of relationships, producing a closed moral universe among those who consider themselves members of the law-abiding and morally untarnished majority – prison officers. The virtuous prison and its grand aspirations for moral reformation look a little like a form of ‘soft Othering’, where their pastoral attempts at salvation simply construct the prisoner as pathologised and lesser/weaker/immoral selves. Prisons are not places of dialogue or voluntary choices, but of coercion, punishment and separation from the victim. They are places of spiritual distress not spiritual growth and always more likely to destroy human meaning and a positive sense of self. Further, understandings of therapeutic alliances and caring relationships are often predicated upon rather restricted notions of good prisoner-staff relationships, which is generally more about the absence of verbal and physical abuse than the presence of solidarity, friendship and mutual aid. Peace should always be conceived as a presence rather than just the absence of conflict (positive peace) – and in prison divided between the keepers and the kept a conflict of interests is almost certainly an inevitability. The virtuous prison is perhaps unsurprisingly vulnerable to the accusation of re-legitimating the prison place rather than delivering on its utopian promise. The dilemma for the humanitarian is that there is overwhelming evidence from the daily experiences of confinement that the prison is not working on virtually any level. Tempted by the fact that the harms of confinement can be either exacerbated or mitigated and that moral exclusion occurs in degrees, it is perhaps understandable that penal reforms constantly search for new ideas that can somehow make the prison work in a way that is morally and politically acceptable to their sensibilities. But this search will always be utopian in the worst sense of the word – it is a search for a nonplace. The virtuous prison does not and cannot exist. The humanitarian penal reformer is perhaps suffering him/herself from a failure of imagination, both in terms of reflecting upon the institutionally-structured violence of the prison place and how his/her often noble ideas can be mutated and colonised to not only reflect but legitimate existing penal logic. Neither is it acceptable to argue that penal reform is the only option in our time of record prisoner numbers. Instead this is exactly the time to reassert the profound moral limitations of penal confinement. In the current political context the use of the prison as a means of punishing the poor should sharpen any utopian desire to find realistic but radical non-penal alternatives to the dystopian realities of imprisonment. The penal dystopia (or punishing the poor with a good conscience) Prisons can never be normal institutions; whatever the enlightened motives of those who design our prisons, they are experienced as a form of violence. The requirement 10 to exclude, contain, control and discipline means that prison is more likely to harm people than help them. In the largely hidden world of the prison, dignity, self-respect, personal safety and other pre-requisites of humanity are always threatened and prisoners have to live with the constant possibility of systematic abuse, maltreatment and ultimately dehumanisation. Yet the propagation of the mythology of the utopian prison has real implications, not least in terms of providing a good conscience for those who send people to prison. England and Wales have been on a clear expansionist penal trajectory since at least the 1970s. Although there was a small reversal in this trend from 1989-1992 when the prison population fell from 50,000 to 41,000, since 1993 the prisoner Average Daily Population [ADP] has increased year on year by an average by 3.7 % for nearly twenty years (Berman, 2012). The result is a more than doubling of the ADP of prisoners, which surpassed 80,000 for the first time in December 2006 and reached a record high of 88,179 prisoners on the 2nd December 2011. This was an incredible eight times higher than the imprisonment rate in the late 1930s. In 1908, more than 200,000 people were sent to prison, largely for short sentences. The ADP that year was 22,029, yet by 1918 it had halved to 9,196. By the late 1930s, there were 11,000 in prison and fewer than 40,000 people were sentenced to prison each year (Scott, 2008a). The prison population in England and Wales was cut by promoting alternatives in place of prison sentences, abolishing imprisonment for debt and allowing time for fines to be paid. The main reason for the collapse in prison numbers, however, was because politicians and the judiciary recognised that prisons were brutal institutions that did not work. In the early 20th century, suffragettes, prisoners of war, conscientious objectors to World War I, political prisoners and those criminalised for their homosexuality all directly experienced prisons. Prisoners, like Lady Constance Lytton, who was sister-in-law to a Liberal prime minster, talked openly about the pain and unnecessary suffering of prison. Thus, a bad conscience was created among the political elite about the use of imprisonment (Scott, 2016c). We need politicians today to once again recognise that the only rational way forward is to adopt a bad conscience and radically reduce prison populations (de Haan, 1991). Prisons have become a default form of warehousing some of the most troubled and troublesome people in the community. The welfare of some of those most in need is missed, neglected or ignored and it only becomes highlighted as a problem when these same people are imprisoned. A very large number of the people we send to prison have grown up in care homes; experienced abuse as a child or witnessed familial violence; can barely read or write and have been expelled or truanted from school; were unemployed or on benefits before imprisonment; and have multiple and often serious mental health problems (Scott and Codd, 2010). ‘African Caribbean’ 11 women constitute only 1% of the national population but make up 24% of the women currently imprisoned whilst ‘African Caribbean’ men are eight times more likely to face the sanction of penal incarceration than white men (Sudbury, 2005; Berman, 2012). When a society cuts back on welfare and allows growing social and economic inequalities, not only are the most vulnerable and excluded failed by society but there is increasing emphasis on prisons as the answer to social problems. A cursory glance at the data on the social background of prisoners compiled below in Table 1 evidence the terribly impoverished backgrounds of prisoners in England and Wales today. Table 1: Social Background of Prisoners in England and Wales in 2016 Characteristic Prison Population Taken into care as a child 24% (31% for women; 24% for men) 29% (53% for women and 27% for men) 41% (50% for women and 40% for men) 59% Experienced abuse as a child Observed violence in the home as a child Regularly truant from school Expelled or permanently excluded from school No qualifications Unemployed in four weeks before custody Never had a job Homeless before imprisonment Have symptoms indicative of psychosis Identified as suffering from anxiety and depression Have attempted suicide at some point Have experienced suicidal thoughts (suicidal ideation) in their lifetime, Have used a Class A drug General Population 2% 20% 14% 5.2% 42% (32% for women and 43% for men) 47% 68% (81% for women and 67% for men) 13% 15% 1% 16% 4% 25% (49% for women and 23% for men) 46% for women and 21% for men 15% 55% for women 40% for men 14% for men and 4% for women 64% 13% (Source: Prison Reform Trust, 2016) 12 15% 7.7% 3.9% 4% 6% Prisons take things away from people; they take a persons’ time, relationships, opportunities, and sometimes their life. Prisons constrain human identity and foster feelings of fear, anger, alienation and social and emotional isolation. For many, prisons offer only a lonely, isolating and brutalising experience. They are places of dull and monotonous living and working routines depriving prisoners of basic human needs. Combined with saturation in time consciousness/awareness, these situational contexts can lead to a disintegration of the self. Indeed, they are intended to do so. We must as a society recognise once again that imprisonment can never be ‘virtuous’. It is also essential that we take a holistic view and look closely at the people who break the law and start to understand the trauma, hardship and injury that people have experienced throughout their life-course. We should name the prison for what it is and collectively say NO to the prison. Saying NO is perhaps best illustrated in the tradition known as penal abolitionism, which provides a vision of genuinely peaceful outcomes and positive human relationships without recourse to penalising judgments. The point is to change it (or to act upon a bad conscience) As two wrongs cannot make a right, penal abolitionists argue that the onus should always be on the defenders of punishment and prisons to justify their existence. If the violence, harm and suffering of the prison cannot be morally defended, then the call should be for the institution to be abolished; for only if convincing arguments can be made to justify pain infliction should the deprivation of liberty be considered legitimate. Penal abolitionists maintain that such arguments have not yet been successfully made. Consequently, penal abolitionists are conscientious objectors to prisons, punishment and any other policies or practices which are grounded in the deliberate infliction of pain. Though sometimes prisons are portrayed as ‘holiday camps’ there is considerable illiteracy among the general public about the nature of penal confinement. One of the explicit goals of penal abolitionism is to help educate the masses about the harms generated through the institutionally-structured violence of the prison place. The aim of abolitionism is to first generate and then motive people to act upon a “bad conscience” (de Haan, 1991). Penal abolitionists maintain that there are no radical differences between criminals and non-criminals and divisions between such categories are largely achieved because similar behaviours are treated differently (Hulsman, 1986). Connecting individual biographies with broader structural relations of a given historic period, abolitionists examine how penalisation operates within a society that is deeply divided around the structural fault lines of ‘race’, class, gender, sexuality and age. As discussed in the previous section, the penal law is disproportionately applied to the poor, 13 underprivileged, unskilled and ‘unrespectable’. At the heart of this process is the use of separating or ‘dividing practices’. Through the act of dividing the manipulative from the genuine; the deserving from the undeserving; and the ‘us’ from the ‘them’; a false dichotomy is established facilitating the differential treatment of people. This means of ‘Othering’ is also linked to the construction of social and psychic distance of the offender – the greater the distance between offenders and victims, the more likely the criminal law will be used, particularly if they are deemed to be ‘unrespectable’ and low status. For penal abolitionists, prisons are understood as counter-productive institutions that create ‘crime’ rather than resolve social and moral conflicts. The prison place is conceived as a toxic environment and all humans placed in such a degrading and damaging place are considered vulnerable to its structured pains and harms. There are a number of different ‘abolitionist perspectives’ but they are all shaped though by a concern with the moral and political legitimacy of the prison and the need to find a peaceful means of resolving conflict. Different abolitionist perspectives also share common ground in recognising that prisons and punishment must be understood with the corrosive nature of social and economic inequalities and the need to build rights-regarding cultures within societies that are grounded in the principles of social justice. Penal abolitionists therefore demand that as a society we should take seriously the needs of all victims of social injustice and that we collectively work towards building a society which prioritises human need. Abolitionism is more than just a perspective aiming to generate knowledge charting the brutal nature of imprisonment. It is not enough to not only correctly interpret penal realities; the point is to radically change them. Abolitionist-inspired organisations, movements and campaigns have a long history in England and Wales. In the last five decades a number of anti-prison pressure groups have been founded by families of those who have died in prison, ex-prisoners and/or families of serving prisoners in an attempt to highlight the common humanity and plight of those behind bars. Aiming to also provide a voice or platform for the marginalised and otherwise excluded, abolitionists have long promoted the “view from below” (Sim, Scraton and Gordon, 1987). For decades abolitionists have aimed to challenge the Othering of prisoners through one dimensional negative representations based solely on their wrongdoings and campaigned for prisoners to be treated as fellow human beings and recognised as sons, daughters, parents or partners that are loved and valued by others (Scraton and Chadwick, 1987). Abolitionist-generated action in England and Wales has had its highs and lows since the 1970s. The important work of groups such as Radical Alternatives to Prison [RAP], Preservation of the Rights of Prisoners [PROP], INQUEST and Women in Prison [WIP] – 14 all of which had direct links to prisoners, ex-prisoners and prisoner families – in the 1970s and 1980s largely stumbled from the 1990s when most of these abolitionist groups either dissolved (as in the case of RAP and the prisoner union PROP) or became much more mainstream and reformist-orientated (as in the case of WIP). Abolitionism continued to find expression in international forums such as the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control [European Group] and the International Conference on Penal Abolition [ICOPA]. The European Group and ICOPA provided a haven for abolitionists in England and Wales in these barren years as well as allowing UK abolitionists to establish connections with abolitionists across Europe and elsewhere around the globe, which was especially important in the absence of a national abolitionist social movement.5 Despite the growth of international abolitionist groups, the necessity for abolitionist action in England and Wales continued. Though short-lived, No More Prison [NMP], a pressure group formed in late 2005 and active until around 2010, was an explicit attempt to revive RAP and kickstart a new abolitionist social movement in England and Wales. Initially the group gained considerable support, building strong networks in Brighton, Bristol, London, Leeds and Preston. NMP made connections to former members of RAP and those active in the European Group and ICOPA, as well as connecting with new members in anarchist groups such as the Anarchist Black Cross [ABC]. Despite being relatively short-lived, NMP arguably provides the stepping stone from RAP to current abolitionist social movement[s] and is therefore worthy of some consideration. Deaths in prison were the mobilising force behind the actions of NMP. Indeed, much of the activism of the group from 2005-2008 revolved around the direct action of Pauline Campbell. Pauline Campbell, whose daughter Sarah Campbell had died in HMP Styal in 2003, protested outside every women’s prison in England where a prisoner had taken their own lives from 2004-2008.6 She emphasised that the death of a prisoner indicated the prison had failed in its duty of care and therefore was not safe to admit new prisoners. Though accompanied by supporters (such as Joan Meredith and various members of NMP and other pressure groups), it was only Pauline who laid in front of the prison van at the prisons gates. A prolific letter-writer, public speaker and defendant in the criminal courts (she was charged five times for public order offences), Pauline Campbell was a modern-day suffragette who became a human bullet against the Capitalist State. Before she took her own life by her daughters’ graveside on the 15th May, 2008, Pauline Campbell was involved in 28 demonstrations and was arrested at 15 of them. With the death of Pauline Campbell, 5 INQUEST has had a continuous presence on the political and academic landscape in the UK since then. Though Pauline started her protests before the formation of NMP, her activism provided the main rallying point for the organisation. 6 15 the weaknesses of NMP as a nationwide movement became more apparent and it moved away from direct actions to merely having a presence on social media before ceasing activities entirely in 2010. Abolitionist social movements active since NMP continue to follow the British abolitionist tradition of exploiting possible contradictions within the workings of the Capitalist State so as to achieve progressive and immediate humanitarian change, whilst at the same time standing outside the ambit of the Capitalist State and participating in grassroots movements campaigning against the inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners (Sim et al., 1987; Sim, 1994c). Broadly speaking, abolitionist social movement[s] in England and Wales have been committed to the principles of accountability, social justice, human rights and democracy. There is of course considerable overlap and integration between these principles and, though my discussion of the abolitionist groups below are indicative rather than comprehensive, other abolitionist-inspired movements conform to these ethico-political commitments. Accountability Abolitionist groups highlighting State accountability are likely to pursue legal and policy avenues and challenge the civil death of prisoners (death in law) as part of their campaign goals. Abolitionist-inspired groups, charities and organisations focussed on accountability attempt to expose the current failings and malpractice of the penal and criminal law, such as around the over-criminalisation of certain social groups or self-inflicted deaths in prison. The most established and arguably the most significant abolitionist-inspired organisation working for State accountability today is INQUEST. INQUEST was founded in 1981 by the families of those who died in State custody and adopts a bereaved-centred approach when providing direct support and legal advice to the relatives and associates of people who have died in prison (Ryan, 1996). Alongside undertaking case work and directly lobbying government and parliament to help find answers for families about the deaths of loved ones in prison, INQUEST engages in high-profile media work; direct interventions with families in dialogue with government and the prison service; participation in, written submissions for and recommendations to official inquiries on prison deaths; alongside delivering talks and releasing accessible publications. INQUEST consistently highlight in their interventions the substandard treatment of vulnerable people by the criminal process (such as those suffering from mental health issues, women, children, Black or Minority Ethnic [BME] groups) and their over-representation in deaths in prison. Another abolitionist-inspired group campaigning for greater accountability of the Capitalist State, and one which was also formed by families of the friends of those who have died in prison, is the United Friends and Familiar Campaign [UFFC]. Founded 16 in 1999, the UFFC provides friendship, solidarity and mutual assistance to the families of those who have died in prison. Bringing together individual campaigns and campaigners as part of one larger umbrella group, the UFFC highlight in particular social divisions and minority group deaths in custody. Through engagement with grass roots activists, the UFFC delivers a radical platform for campaign work, complementing the work of INQUEST. Each year the UFFC hold an annual remembrance procession from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street (in silence) followed by speeches and demonstrations. Like INQUEST, the core aim of the UFFC is to hold the Capitalist State to account and prevent future deaths in custody. Together these two organisations have provided the backbone of abolitionist interventions for the last three decades. Promoting human rights and social justice alternatives The abolitionist groups RAP and NMP were both grounded in the principles of human rights and social justice. A number of contemporary abolitionist groups find their roots in these abolitionist pressure groups both in terms of intellectual legacy and also in terms of some continuity of shared membership. The Reclaim Justice Network [RJN] was formed in London in 2012. It is a coalition of academics, activists and practitioners working towards an alternative vision of justice alongside critiquing the injustice of the criminal process and free market economics. RJN (which is also closely associated with the ‘Justice Matters’ initiative by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies) has been involved in attempting to highlight human rights abuses at G4S AGM meeting protests,7 in organising protests, such as Tower of London Arms Trade protests, and they work alongside INQUEST in campaigns against deaths in prison and police custody. RJN is still a growing network and, although primarily based in London, it has members across the country. The contributions of RJN have been focussed on policy and media interventions, building educational resources to confront penological illiteracy and facilitating a national coalition of individuals and groups that question the legitimacy of the criminal process An associated group of RJN, which has organised demonstrations since the closure of HMP Holloway, London in 2016, is Reclaim Holloway [RH]. RH is a broad-based coalition promoting the creation of social housing and a women’s centre on the land that was HMP Holloway. The group has drawn explicitly upon the 1970s RAP pamphlet on Alternatives to Holloway by Carol Smart and others, as well re-establishing connections to Women in Prison. The campaign work of RJN and RH are significant in that they both promote the importance of human rights and social justice principles in the dismantling of the penal apparatus of the Capitalist State and the need for the 7 Members of RJN have bought one share of the company so they can attend and vote at the AGM 17 promotion of radically alternative social policies that can effectively address all forms of injustice, dehumanisation and social harm. Democracy and direct action Further groups of abolitionists have developed independently of the previous mainstream abolitionist social movements. These new abolitionist groups, which find their roots in anarchist organisations like Anarchist Black Cross [ABC] (which was set up to support anarchists imprisoned for direct actions criminalised and prosecuted by the Capitalist State), draw mainly upon anarchist networks for membership. Though a number of different groups exist across the country, they are generally very small in number and most members are known to each other prior to the formation of the specific abolitionist organisations. The anarchist group Empty Cages Collective (and its public campaign name Community Action on Prison Expansion [CAPE]) was formed in November 2013 by an anarchist exprisoner and has the explicit aim of challenging the emergence and development of the ‘prison industrial complex’ in England and Wales. The early actions of CAPE were focussed on the planned construction of a mega prison in North Wales (HMP Berwyn) and engaging in workshops/tours trying to mobilise local anarchist groups and others to resist prison slavery from early 2014 onwards. CAPE have also successfully established a number of local groups in the areas where new mega prisons have been proposed across England and Wales from November 2016 - March 2017. CAPE are focussed primarily focussed on undertaking direct action against the prison, such as through demonstrations, occupying offices, phone blocking and other disruption of government and businesses associated with prisons. Direct actions provide a way of raising public consciousness and making something happen to draw attention to the harm, violence and suffering of the prison place. In actions which can perhaps be referred to as “abolitionist rain-dancing” ,anti-prison direct actions also provide a way of keeping a protest group together and provide an opportunity to create solidarity with other local activists and sufferers of social injustice. A further abolitionist-inspired group, the Incarcerated Workers Organising Committee [IWOC] was established in late 2015, although its first incarcerated members did not join until early 2017. IWOC are a subsidiary of the USA-based international union of the Wobblies – the industrial workers of the world – which were formed in the early 1900s in the USA and, after decades of being close to extinction, have recently seen a revival. The IWOC group in the USA appears to have become established very quickly and was involved in organising the longest ever prison strikes towards the end of 2016. While the establishment of IWOC in England and Wales is a noble attempt to reestablish a prisoner union (though no connections are claimed with its historical 18 antecedent PROP) the UK group remains small and much membership is shared with CAPE. These different strands of abolitionism in England and Wales today provide encouragement and hope for the future, but remain tragically disjointed, fragmented and underfunded. At the same time, the ethico-political commitments of abolitionist activists are undoubtedly strong and there exists dialogue, solidarity and personal friendships stretching far and wide. At a time when England and Wales has the highest incarceration rate in Western Europe, it remains essential that a coherent, united and strategically-coordinated abolitionist movement comes together to promote progressive and humanitarian legal, political and social change. For abolitionists, the ethics and politics of knowledge production are directly tied to ongoing social struggles against the harms of imprisonment, the repair of human injury and the building of non-penal radical alternatives grounded in the principles of social justice. The ontological and epistemological assumptions of abolitionism require both reflection and action. Consequently, ethical and political reflections alone are never enough. For the penal abolitionist, intellectual engagement should lead to political commitments and activism directed against imprisonment. David Scott works at the Open University where his research interests include the ethical and political foundations of penal abolitionism, human rights and social justice, critical approaches to poverty, and prisons and punishment. He is a former editor of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice and the co-founding editor of the European Group Journal Justice, Power and Resistance. 19 III. European Group 46th Annual Conference: Ljubljana, 22-24 August 2018 Social harm in a digitalized global world: Technologies of power and normalized practices of contemporary society The world in which we live in is more interconnected and changing more rapidly than ever before. Accelerated technological advances, climate change and large-scale migration, to name a few, are all having an increasing effect on how we experience our lives today and how we will in the future. It leads to new modalities of social control and understandings of deviance as well as to increasing gaps between those who are able to take part in a digitalized global world, and those who are not – those who are privileged by globalizations and those who are harmed by it. The changes brought on by globalization and the rise of technologies of power are influencing different aspects of different people’s lives. While the transformations have been positive for many, they have also been extremely harmful for countless of others. Analyzing the changes and wide specter of consequences brought on by trends such as consumerism, transnationalism and digitalism in different parts of the world is a necessary prerequisite to understand and act upon new ideological, policy, legislative, and enforcement solutions. Distinctions between public and private modes of provisions and control are becoming increasingly blurred, preventing oversight and bringing surveillance and repression, driven by economic incentives. Resisting harms resulting from the normalized practices of contemporary society as well as harms brought on by technologies of power is not an easy task as it encircles our everyday life. In an aim to preserve human dignity, the normalized practices of contemporary socioeconomic conditions as well as technologies of power that are changing the world as we know it must attract our attention in order for us to act upon it. 20 Streams The call for papers is organized under streams pertaining to the titles of the European Group’s Working Groups, and suggests a series of key themes for that working group in relation to the overarching conference theme. We do, however, also welcome papers that explore other critical trajectories pertaining to the wider intersections of the overarching conference theme and the concern(s) of the working groups. If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact one of the stream coordinators. Please submit a short abstract of 150-300 words to the relevant stream coordinator by 31 March 2018. The quest for growth and the issue of social harm Contact: katja.simoncic@pf.uni-lj.si Crimes of the Powerful Contact: samantha.fletcher@open.ac.uk Social harm/Zemiology Contact: C.Pantazis@bristol.ac.uk S.Pemberton.1@bham.ac.uk Fear and looting in the periphery: Approaching global crime and harm in (and from) the south(s) Contact: aleforero@ub.edu rfaria@direito.up.pt djf@unizar.es ignasi.bernat@gmail.com Prison, Punishment and Detention Contact: Victoria.Canning@open.ac.uk Historical, philosophical and artistic approaches on the study on deviance and social control - The "normal", harmful practices of contemporary society - Technological progress and ethical issues - Privacy and data protection, a question of class? - Big data, Algorithms and Policing - Privacy as a privilege of the powerful; - Critically examinations of technologies and the statecorporate relationship; - Accountability in global, transnational and/or digital economies; - From the local to the global - green criminology and the environment; - Resisting and contesting the crimes of the powerful: Activism and protest in the digital ‘global’ world - Uncovering harms of the sharing economy - Technology and surveillance in the southern borders. - Controlling the (poor) migrants - Turning the predator into the prey: mapping and documenting harms and crimes to support resistance and social memory - Technologies and data treatment against global statecorporate crime. - Social torture and social murder under debtocracy - Synopticon, state repression and the (southern) violence of austerity - Crimmigration; - Imprisonment and resistance; - Immigration detention; - Abolitionist perspectives on confinement; - Punishment; - Torture and state sanctioned violence - history of crime and social control - criminological theory - crime in arts and literature Contact: s.georgoulas@soc.aegean.gr 21 IV. News from the Prison, Punishment and Detention Working Group Campaign: These Walls Must Fall is gaining momentum, and challenging the use of immigration detention. Check out their website for information on campaigns in the UK, and wider info on detention which will be useful for colleagues and activists more broadly: http://detention.org.uk/ Book launch and memorial for A. Sivananadan - 7th February, Manchester: Join Liz Fekete for the launch of her new book Europe's Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right where she will also be discussing the legacy of the late A.Sivanandan Europe's Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right is published by Verso. More information at: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2555-europe-s-fault-lines Blog and interview with Prof. Joe Sim: Liverpool: A Broken Prison in a Broken System https://ccseljmu.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/liverpool-a-broken-prison-in-abroken-system/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-oZFVX5G3M&t=318s Conference – Society of Captives, June 2018: To mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of Gresham Sykes’s The Society of Captives, a conference is being held on June 27-28 2018, at the University of Leicester. For details of the programme, see http://www.crim.cam.ac.uk/download/60th_Anniversary_of_Sykes_Conferenc e.pdf Bookings can be made using the following weblink: https://www2.le.ac.uk/news/events/2018/june/the-society-of-captives-todaycelebrating-the-60th-anniversary 22 New Book: Prison Break - Toward a Sociology of Escape: Tomas Max Martin and Gilles Chantraine, https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319643571 PhD opportunity, Keele University: ESRC CASE studentship: Operationalising ‘vulnerability’: Investigating the processes by which police officers identify and respond to people who are categorised as vulnerable. http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/BHH801/esrc-case-studentship-operationalisingvulnerability-investigating-the-processes-by-which-police-officers-identify-andrespond-to-people-who-are-categorised-as-vulnerable Good News sent from PPD member Maeve McMahon: French authorities dropped all charges against Hassan Diab last month. After a very long three years and two months, Hassan was released from prison and arrived in Ottawa on Monday January 15, 2018. More information here: http://www.justiceforhassandiab.org/ Best wishes for February! Vicky Canning and Simone Santorso 23 V. News from Europe and Around the World Call for papers for an ephemera special issue on: Speaking truth to power? The ethico-politics of whistleblowing in contemporary mass-mediated economy. Issue editors: Randi Heinrichs, Bernadette Loacker and Richard Weiskopf. Ever since the NSA affair in 2013, the WikiLeaks-disclosures or the publication of the Panama Papers in 2015, hardly a day goes by without the media reporting on whistleblowing, leaks, hacks, and uncovered truths. In contemporary global knowledge economy, organizations have become ‘leaky containers’. The conjunction of openness and closure, visibility and invisibility, and transparency and secrecy of information is increasingly precarious (Curtis and Weir, 2016). Public perceptions of whistleblowers are rife with ambivalence. For some they represent traitorous violators of a code of fidelity to their organization, suspicious figures who betray secrets and reject their obligations of loyalty to the employer. Others view whistleblowers as heroic truth-tellers: martyrs to the cause of transparency and openness and veritable ‘saints’ of today’s secular culture (Grant, 2002). In light of the increasing attention that whistleblowers and acts of whistleblowing attract, this special issue of ephemera is interested in exploring whistleblowing as a phenomenon that is socially mediated and shaped, with the principal aim of gaining better insights into the political and the ethical questions that accompany practices of whistleblowing. We notice that organizational research into this area tends to be somewhat a-political, evaluating whistleblowing in terms of whether predefined rules or ethical codes have been followed (Hoffman and Schwartz, 2015). Many studies in the field focus on predicting the likelihood of whistleblowing occurring in a given organizational setting (Bjørkelo et al., 2010; Miceli, 2004) or on creating typologies of motivations for why people speak up. Others concentrate on examining the kinds of retaliations and personal impacts that organizational whistleblowers suffer (Alford, 2001; Glazer and Glazer, 1989). Such approaches are valuable for enhancing our understanding of whistleblowing as an experience, but where the focus is exclusively upon micro-level issues such as retaliation, motivation and personal impacts, there is a tendency to ignore the wider political, cultural and institutional contexts in which they occur. A few studies have addressed contextual issues by exploring, for instance, the relation between whistleblowing and power, seeing the former as a type of organizational resistance (Martin, 1999; Vinten, 1994; Rothschild and Miethe, 1999). Whistleblowing has further been conceptualised as an institutionally shaped and culturally mediated social practice (Perry, 1998), or as a modern form of courageous truth-telling (parrhesia) (Foucault, 2001), in which the whistleblower risks all in the process of ‘speaking truth to power’ (Contu, 2014; Munro, 2017; Weiskopf and Willmott, 2013; Weiskopf and Tobias-Miersch, 2016; Wildavsky, 1979). 24 Today, the truth-telling of the whistleblower is mediated in multiple ways: by new media and digital technologies of communication, by a plethora of legal, institutional and organizational regulations and whistleblowing-policies, or by intermediary organizations that seek to support, amplify, channel and also capitalise on the truthtelling of whistleblowers in the name of increased transparency, democracy or justice. We see, for example, a new form of investigative journalism that seeks to amplify the truth-telling of whistleblowers (e.g. CIJ and the Panama Papers), organizations that provide an infrastructure for leaking (e.g. Wikileaks), or governmental and non-governmental organizations that mobilise truth-telling in the ‘fight against corruption’ (e.g. Transparency International). They might represent sources of support for whistleblowers, but might also lead to their enmeshment in dynamics of power and domination even beyond the context of the organization in which they have blown the whistle (i.e. media pressure, party politics, and so on). The increasingly networked character of information and the decentralized infrastructures of hybrid ‘online-offline worlds’ reshape the space for whistleblowers and truthspeaking (Nayar, 2010), with digital, anonymous forms of whistleblowing and, specifically, networks like the ‘hydracollective Anonymous’ (Coleman, 2014) indicating most clearly that concepts such as the public sphere, political activism, and individual and collective responsibility are in transformation (see also Bachmann et al., 2017; Munro, 2017). Against this backdrop, this special issue situates the experience of whistleblowing in the context of contemporary discourses and practices, such as security, transparency and accountability, and is thereby particularly interested in the exploration of the ethical and political dimensions and implications of practices of whistleblowing. It raises the question of who is considered to be qualified to blow the whistle, under which conditions, about what, in what forms, with what consequences, and with what relation to power (Foucault, 2001). How is the figure of the whistleblower socially and discursively constructed and is there, for example, a specific relation to gender, race and class implied? How and at what cost do whistleblowers as political actors constitute themselves as ethical subjects, capable of taking risks and posing a challenge, capable of governing themselves and of governing others? Moreover, why are we suddenly faced with a boom of whistleblowing and an intensified ‘problematisation’ of the phenomenon in so-called digital cultures? Or, from another perspective, for which social, political, legal and also technical difficulties is whistleblowing the answer? For this issue of ephemera, we would thus like to invite contributions that extend our understanding of whistleblowing as a socially mediated practice and put emphasis on the ethico-politics of whistleblowing and practices of ‘speaking truth to power’. Possible contributions might seek to address, but are not limited to the following issues:   Conditions, possibilities and limitations of whistleblowing and truth-telling in mass-mediated societies Discursive constructions of whistleblowers in contemporary media 25          Whistleblowing in the context of digital cultures The possibilities and limitations of truth-telling in an age of big data and algorithmic governance The regulation of whistleblowing and its ethical and political implications Ethical and political implications of mobilising whistleblowers in the context of corporate malpractices and scandals Spectacles of truth-telling and the societies of spectacle Truth-telling in relation to societal discourses of transparency, secrecy and accountability The role of intermediary organizations in promoting and shaping whistleblowing Subjectivity-formation through socially mediated practices of truth-telling Ways of conceptualising whistleblowing in relation to power, resistance and critique in different organizational and professional contexts Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2018 All contributions should be submitted to one of the issue editors: Randi Heinrichs (randi.heinrichs@leuphana.de mailto:randi.heinrichs@leuphana.de>), Bernadette Loacker (b.loacker@lancaster.ac.uk <mailto:b.loacker@lancaster.ac.uk>), Richard Weiskopf (richard.weiskopf@uibk.ac.at <mailto:richard.weiskopf@uibk.ac.at>). Please note that three categories of contributions are invited for the special issue: articles, notes, and reviews. Information about these types of contributions can be found at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/how-submit. The submissions will undergo a double-blind review process. All submissions should follow ephemera’s submission guidelines, which are available at: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/how-submit (see the ‘Abc of formatting’ guide in particular).For further information, please contact one of the special issue editors. Portugal Summer School “Surveillance technologies, Criminality, and Human Rights” We would like to inform you about the first edition of the Summer School “Surveillance technologies, Criminality, and Human Rights” which will take place at the University of Minho, in Braga (50 Km away from Porto) Portugal. This 4 dayscourse is organized by the project EXCHANGE and funded by the European Research Council. This Summer School aims to reflect on human rights in the particular area of surveillance technologies and crime control practices. The deadline for applications is the 3rd of April. We appreciate if you could share the call with potentially interested persons. 26 Please direct all your queries to: exchangeprojectevents@gmail.com regarding the summer school Kind regards, The Exchange Team Switzerland Automated Justice: Algorithms, Big Data and Criminal Justice Systems Conference April 20th, 2018 Collegium Helveticum, Zürich Keynote speakers: - Jeff Larson, ProPublica, New York, USA - Prof. Dr. Mark Andrejevic, Pomona College, Claremont, USA Programme Committee: Prof. Dr. Dean Wilson, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Prof. Dr. Mark Andrejevic, Pomona College, USA Dr. Uwe Ewald, International Justice Analysis Forum, D Michael Veale, University College London, UK Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aleš Završnik, Collegium Helveticum, CH Please send proposals for papers (300 words) with your name, address and affiliation by March 1, 2018 to zavrsnik@collegium.ethz.ch More about the conference at: https://collegium.ethz.ch/en/veranstaltungen/?event=3829&cat=upcoming 27 UK BORDERS, RACISMS, AND HARMS: A SYMPOSIUM 2–3 May 2018 | School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London Call for Participation The current socio-political context is characterised by Brexit and Europe’s shoring up of borders in response to irregular migration via the Mediterranean, hypercriminalisation of migrants, growth of corporate involvement in the management of migration, travel bans, rise of right-wing populism, racisms and xenophobic sentiments across much of the West, and rapid erosion of rights. At the same time, there are constantly new modes of solidarity and resistance emerging, which are also subject to state responses and controls. This event aims to bring together scholars at various stages of their careers, third sector workers, and people with direct experience of immigration controls and borders to examine the theme of border harms from different substantive angles and theoretical perspectives. The idea of border harms encompasses the variety of ways that bordering practices produce harm and are interconnected with race and racisms. We therefore invite proposals on any of the following broad areas: • The policing of migration • Refugees and asylum seekers • Border deaths • Migration and state violence • Resistance, solidarity, protest, and advocacy • Immigration detention • Deportation • Foreign national prisoners • The criminalisation of solidarity • The politics of reform and advocacy • Everyday borders and bordering practices • Racialisation, securitisation, criminalisation, and surveillance • Brexit and the ‘hostile environment’ • Populism, nationalism, and citizenship practices • Empire, colonialism, and state racisms In addition to academic papers, we welcome proposals for other types of participation, including workshops, performances, and art. Participants are strongly encouraged to consider issues of race, gender, and other social factors in their contributions. This 28 event is interdisciplinary and will be of interest to scholars from criminology, sociology, social policy, law, human geography, anthropology, and psychology, as well as people with lived experience of border harms and NGO workers involved in practice, advocacy, policy, and research. Attendance will be free. Confirmed keynote speakers are Professor Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University), author of ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders (Palgrave, 2010) and editor of After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives (Palgrave, 2018) Dr Alpa Parmar (University of Oxford), Associate Director of Border Criminologies and co-editor of Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2018). Please email your proposal (250 words maximum) to the symposium organisers, Monish Bhatia, Gemma Lousley, and Sarah Turnbull (Birkbeck, University of London), by 5:00pm on Friday, 6 April 2018 at BorderHarms@gmail.com. We are planning a publication based on a selection of work presented at the symposium. If you are interested in putting your work forward for consideration in this publication, please so indicate in your proposal. Thank you! Right to Remain Newsletter https://www.righttoremain.org.uk/ In this edition:  Our new Toolkit is here!  Human rights and asylum housing: Sheffield Conference 24th Feb  Video: Manchester City says “End detention now”!  Legal update: Changes to immigration bail  Launch of new Amnesty report on detention 29 Middlesex University Department of Criminology and Sociology The Burroughs London NW4 4BT Terrorism, Restorative Justice and Reconciliation A Horizon 2020 Seminar Thursday 22 February 9.00-11.00 Room CG09 Guest Speaker: Dr Brunilda Pali* Chair: Professor Vincenzo Ruggiero *Dr. Brunilda Pali is researcher at the Restorative Justice and Victimology research team in the Leuven Institute of Criminology. She was lead researcher in the FP7 project ALTERNATIVE and is co-editor of Restoring Justice and Security in Intercultural Europe (Routledge 2017), and Critical Restorative Justice (Hart 2017). She is also Secretary of the Board of European Forum for Restorative Justice. This event is part of the project TAKEDOWN: Organised Crime and Terrorist Networks Funding has been received from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement N. 700688. https://www.takedownproject.eu/ 30 Please feel free to contribute to this newsletter by sending any information that you think might be of interest to the Group to Ida/Per at: europeangroupcoordinator@gmail.com Also feel free to contribute with discussions or comments on the published material in the newsletter Please submit before the 25th of each month if you wish to have it included in the following month’s newsletter, and provide a web link (wherever possible). If you want to subscribe to the newsletter, do not hesitate to send an email to europeangroupcoordinator@gmail.com 31