Punitiveness and the criminalisation of the other : State wards, unlawful non-citizens and Indigenous youth

This paper explores the genealogies of bio-power that cut across punitive state interventions aimed at regulating or normalising several distinctive ‘problem’ or ‘suspect’ deviant populations, such as state wards, non-lawful citizens and Indigenous youth. It begins by making some general comments about the theoretical approach to bio-power taken in this paper. It then outlines the distinctive features of bio-power in Australia and how these intersected with the emergence of penal welfarism to govern the unruly, unchaste, unlawful, and the primitive. The paper draws on three examples to illustrate the argument – the gargantuan criminalisation rates of Aboriginal youth, the history of incarcerating state wards in state institutions, and the mandatory detention of unlawful non-citizens and their children. The construction of Indigenous people as a dangerous presence, alongside the construction of the unruly neglected children of the colony — the larrikin descendants of convicts as necessitating special regimes of internal controls and institutions, found a counterpart in the racial and other exclusionary criteria operating through immigration controls for much of the twentieth century. In each case the problem child or population was expelled from the social body through forms of bio-power, rationalised as strengthening, protecting or purifying the Australian population.

Offending Youth : Crime, Sex and Justice

Rates of female delinquency, especially for violent crimes, are increasing in most common law countries. At the same time the growth in cyber-bullying, especially among girls, appears to be a related global phenomenon. While the gender gap in delinquency is narrowing in Australia, United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, boys continue to dominate the youth who commit crime and have a virtual monopoly over sexually violent crimes. Indigenous youth continue to be vastly over-represented in the juvenile justice system in every Australian jurisdiction. The Indigenisation of delinquency is a persistent problem in other countries such as Canada and New Zealand. Young people who gather in public places are susceptible to being perceived as somehow threatening or riotous, attracting more than their share of public order policing. Professional football has been marred by repeated scandals involving sexual assault, violence and drunkenness. Given the cultural significance of footballers as role models to thousands, if not millions, of young men around the world, it is vitally important to address this problem. Offending Youth explores these key contemporary patterns of delinquency, the response to these by the juvenile justice agencies and moreover what can be done to address these problems. The book also analyses the major policy and legislative changes from the nineteenth to twenty first centuries, chiefly the shift the penal welfarism to diversion and restorative justice. Using original cases studied by Carrington twenty years ago, Offending Youth illustrates how penal welfarism criminalised young people from socially marginal backgrounds, especially Aboriginal children, children from single parent families, family-less children, state wards and young people living in poverty or in housing commission estates. A number of inquiries in Australia and the United Kingdom have since established that children committed to these institutions, supposedly for their own good, experienced systemic physical, sexual and psychological abuse during their institutionalisation. The book is dedicated to the survivors of these institutions who only now are receiving official recognition of the injustices they suffered. The underlying philosophy of juvenile justice has fundamentally shifted away from penal welfarism to embrace positive policy responses to juvenile crime, such as youth conferencing, cautions, warnings, restorative justice, circle sentencing and diversion examined in the concluding chapter. Offending Youth is aimed at a broad readership including policy makers, juvenile justice professionals, youth workers, families, teachers, politicians as well as students and academics in criminology, policing, gender studies, masculinity studies, Indigenous studies, justice studies, youth studies and the sociology of youth and deviance more generally.-- [from publisher website]

A common ‘outlawness’ : criminalisation of Muslim minorities in the UK and Australia

Since mass immigration recruitments of the post-war period, ‘othered’ immigrants to both the UK and Australia have faced ‘mainstream’ cultural expectations to assimilate, and various forms of state management of their integration. Perceived failure or refusal to integrate has historically been constructed as deviant, though in certain policy phases this tendency has been mitigated by cultural pluralism and official multiculturalism. At critical times, hegemonic racialisation of immigrant minorities has entailed their criminalisation, especially that of their young men. In the UK following the ‘Rushdie Affair’ of 1989, and in both Britain and Australia following these states’ involvement in the 1990-91 Gulf War, the ‘Muslim Other’ was increasingly targeted in cycles of racialised moral panic. This has intensified dramatically since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing ‘War on Terror’. The young men of Muslim immigrant communities in both these nations have, over the subsequent period, been the subject of heightened popular and state Islamophobia in relation to: perceived ‘ethnic gangs’; alleged deviant, predatory masculinity including so-called ‘ethnic gang rape’; and paranoia about Islamist ‘radicalisation’ and its supposed bolstering of terrorism. In this context, the earlier, more genuinely social-democratic and egalitarian, aspects of state approaches to ‘integration’ have been supplanted, briefly glossed by a rhetoric of ‘social inclusion’, by reversion to increasingly oppressive assimilationist and socially controlling forms of integrationism. This article presents some preliminary findings from fieldwork in Greater Manchester over 2012, showing how mainly British-born Muslims of immigrant background have experienced these processes.

Cost and performance analysis of new wood-fuelled power plant concepts

The objective of the thesis was to analyse several process configurations for the production of electricity from biomass. Process simulation models using AspenPlus aimed at calculating the industrial performance of power plant concepts were built, tested, and used for analysis. The criteria used in analysis were performance and cost. All of the advanced systems appear to have higher efficiencies than the commercial reference, the Rankine cycle. However, advanced systems typically have a higher cost of electricity (COE) than the Rankine power plant. High efficiencies do not reduce fuel costs enough to compensate for the high capital costs of advanced concepts. The successful reduction of capital costs would appear to be the key to the introduction of the new systems. Capital costs account for a considerable, often dominant, part of the cost of electricity in these concepts. All of the systems have higher specific investment costs than the conventional industrial alternative, i.e. the Rankine power plant; Combined beat and power production (CUP) is currently the only industrial area of application in which bio-power costs can be considerably reduced to make them competitive. Based on the results of this work, AsperiPlus is an appropriate simulation platform. How-ever, the usefulness of the models could be improved if a number of unit operations were modelled in greater detail. The dryer, gasifier, fast pyrolysis, gas engine and gas turbine models could be improved.

Kansakunnan parhaaksi. : Suomalaiset naisten- ja lastensairaalat 1920 1940-luvulla arkkitehtonisena, lääketieteellisenä ja yhteiskunnallisena suunnittelukohteena

This dissertation addresses the modernization process of Finnish hospital architecture between the First and Second World War, with focus on facilities explicitly designed for women and children, which as special hospitals reflect specialization, a distinct feature of the modern era. The facilities considered in the study are the Salus hospital, Dr. Länsimäki s women s hospital, the Folkhälsan in Svenska Finland association s child-care institute, the Helsinki Women s Clinic, the Viipuri Women s Hospital, the Helsinki Children s Clinic and the Children's Castle (Lastenlinna) in Helsinki. The study considers hospital architecture as an architectural, medical and social object of design. The theoretical starting point and perspective are the views of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1925 1983) concerning the relationship of bio-power and architecture. Underlying the construction of health-care facilities for women and children were not only the desire to help but also issues of population policy, social policies, training and professionalization. In this study, hospital architecture is interpreted as reflecting developments in medicine, while also producing and reinforcing discourses associated with the ideologies of the time of design and construction. The results of the present research provide new information on the field of hospital design. The design of hospitals was no longer the sole prerogative of architects. Instead, modern hospital design involved the collaboration and networking of experts in various fields. During the period studied, the pavilion system was incorporated in hospital architecture in the block system, which was regarded as a rational. Rationalization was implemented upon the conditions of medical work. This led to spatial design in accordance with medical practices, through which norms were reinforced and created. An important aspect of the material is that the requirements of light, air, openness and hygiene created architecture in glass of an x-ray character, strongly associated with the element of discipline. The alliance of hygiene and architecture became a strategy for controlling the behaviour and encounters of people, for producing pedagogical and moral hygiene, and for reinforcing class hygiene. The modern hospital building also had to meet the requirements of aesthetic hygiene. Health-care facilities designed for women and children became production-oriented machinery, instruments for producing a healthy population and for reinforcing medical discourses.

A influência do discurso médico no poder punitivo

Esta dissertação discute a relação entre a medicina, a psiquiatria, a psicologia, o poder punitivo e o Direito Penal, bem como a influência que o discurso de uma produziu no outro, e vice versa. Defende a idéia de que a medicina é um espetáculo de poder que, acasalado com o poder punitivo, e interagindo com, e sobre, o indivíduo, invade e se apropria do seu corpo para, usando-o como instrumento de dominação política, discipliná-lo de acordo com a conveniência, sobretudo, da higiene e, naquela sua relação espúria com o poder punitivo, diferenciá-lo e controlá-lo social e penalmente. Sustenta, ainda, que, malgrado o acasalamento não tenha sido intencional, o Estado via na medicina o instrumento para reforçar o seu poder, enquanto essa via naquele o apoio para o seu espraiamento, embora Medicina e Estado tenham convergido, mas também divergido, por vezes tática e estrategicamente, porquanto nem sempre os dois poderes reconheceram o valor da aliança que haviam estabelecido. Então, defende a tese de que o Estado acatou a medicalização das suas ações políticas e admitiu o valor político das ações da medicina, e com vantagens para ambos que, dividindo o poder, conquistaram. É que, a medicina, mais rápida e mais adequada aos problemas salutares apresentados, ajudava-o a se imiscuir no corpo para a permanência parasitária daquela. E, para manter seu direito ao discurso, sustenta que a medicina reinventou constantemente uma necessidade para, diante dela, apresentar-se como única solução, tendo conseguido isso mediante a apresentação de uma retórica dominial eloquente, mas, sobretudo, tecnificada, é dizer, inacessível ao dominado. Com isso, a disciplina, o controle e a repressão do indivíduo, penal e medicamente, estavam prontas, pois, Direito e Medicina, aquele com a lei, esta com o remédio, juntos, dominaram e dominam os destinos do indivíduo, e da coletividade. Demonstrou, ainda, que os higienistas nunca se desocuparam de suas funções. E, por fim, que os princípios penais devem, independente da qualificação que se os dê, sempre refrear o poder punitivo.

Aprimorando a raça brasileira: uma análise dos discursos da psiquiatria no início do século XX no Brasil

O presente trabalho tem por objetivo analisar a noção de causalidade biológica da doença mental através dos discursos eugênicos e higiênicos nas décadas de 1920 e 1930 no Brasil. Para tanto, selecionamos a revista Archivos Brasileiros de Hygiene Mental. Esta revista foi escolhida por ser produzida pela Liga Brasileira de Hygiene Mental, uma instituição bastante representativa destes discursos neste período, e também por ser uma revista editada no Rio de Janeiro, nosso recorte geográfico. A revista foi produzida de 1925 a 1947 e o período selecionado para sua análise foi o de 1925 a 1935. Para tal propósito, utilizamos um referencial teórico foucaultiano, especialmente no que tange às discussões em torno do tema do biopoder. Acreditamos que uma análise histórica, necessariamente desnaturalizante, dos discursos psiquiátricos desse período no Brasil, possa contribuir para a compreensão de certas peculiaridades dos discursos psiquiátricos atuais, a fim de possibilitar uma revisão das concepções estabelecidas de tratamento, incitando a ressignificação das experiências de saúde e adoecimento e, conseqüentemente, de propostas terapêuticas.

O significado das UPPs, seus limites e possibilidades: a Santa Marta na cidade do Rio de Janeiro

Esta dissertação analisa o significado das Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (UPP) enquanto técnica de controle incorporada ao espaço, usando como pano de fundo a fragmentação do tecido sociopolítico-espacial em curso na cidade do Rio de Janeiro que, junto com o biopoder Foucaultiano, propicia a formação das UPPs como novos dispositivos de segurança protetores da Raça Pura e assim, possam legitimar o poder do Estado. Além disso, a presente dissertação observa o significado da favela para a cidade do Rio de Janeiro e a regulação de poder dentro dela no período Pós-UPP, em especial, a forma de atuação dos principais agentes reguladores desse poder: traficantes de drogas armados; moradores e policiais. Finalmente, mede o grau de violência na Santa Marta antes e depois da UPP, usando os dados do Instituto de Segurança Pública (ISP) e entrevistas realizadas durante a pesquisa além de estabelecer alguns limites e possibilidades dessa nova política no que tange a prevenção da violência, usando três categorias de análise: redistributiva; institucionalista e culturalista.

Casa da Solidariedade: lugar de afirmação da vida

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo analisar a vida de alguns Moradores de Rua no encontro com a Casa de Apoio Casa da Solidariedade ACASO, percebendo o que dessas vidas pode servir como analisador de nossas próprias vidas, analisando também a produção de assistencialismo, não autonomia e outros efeitos que uma prática deste tipo pode vir a causar. Em tempos de biopoder como estamos vivendo nos dias de hoje, em que a vida vale como uma mercadoria e Moradores de Rua são desqualificados como pessoas e estão sendo expulsos e vitimados pela força bruta do Estado, ousamos afirmar que a vida vale por si mesma. Esta tese também pretende analisar a Política para a Inclusão da População em Situação de Rua e enfrentar o tema da criminalização da pobreza, bem como a produção de vitimização desta população. Partindo dos conceitos de biopoder em Michel Foucault e Peter Pál Pelbart, bem como o de desfiliação em Robert Castel, analisa as tramas dos que escolhem a rua como lar. Um importante aspecto, também ressaltado pela tese, é a forma como a ACASO exerce suas práticas através da religião como forma de cuidado e acolhida ao diferente e àqueles e àquelas que se encontram excluídos da sociedade de consumo. Outro importante viés desta tese é a discussão de dois estereótipos da vida dos Moradores de Rua que os marcam cotidianamente, o de vítima e de criminoso

Museums as a factor for the social integration of art in the community. The experience of cultural volunteering by members of the senior community

After considering museums as cultural institutions responsible for preserving cultural memory and its evolution over time, this article describes the cultural practices within our society that are aimed at disseminating art and at reproducing and transmitting culture, history and identity. Further, it considers the key role that older people are steadily assuming in Spain’s ageing society. New social-empowerment activities based on volunteering by the elderly are linked to generativity because the individual and social groups acquire new skills through those activities, thereby strengthening a society for all ages. Never in the history of social work have so many older people been prepared to participate actively at the community level, and never has a social movement with these features gone so unnoticed by so many social agents.

Sobre la noción de biopoder en el pensamiento de la Corte Constitucional colombiana: análisis de jurisprudencia sobre el derecho a la vida

Detrás de la expedición de derechos, más allá de ese ruido incesante creado por un aparato legal que defiende a la vida y la convierte en un derecho pueden ser halladas relaciones de poder precisas y espacios de regulación y control de los cuerpos y de las poblaciones. Este trabajo pretende observar en la labor de interpretación que lleva a cabo la Corte Constitucional colombiana sobre el derecho a la vida, el establecimiento de una lógica política, que es el biopoder, de acuerdo con los elementos que lo constituyen, tal y como fueron analizados por Michel Foucault. El estudio del biopoder permitirá dar cuenta de tecnologías políticas, técnicas y dispositivos que no solo están presentes en la dimensión biológica de la vida de los colombianos, sino en espacios sociales y éticos que adquieren importancia cuando la vida es cualificada por parte del saber legal. El discurso jurídico aquí juega un papel central pues vincula una vida que era considerada simplemente biológica con nuevos significados y valores como el de la dignidad, y crea, a su vez, formas de sujeción. Temas como el aborto, la eutanasia, la sexualidad, la autonomía de cada quien para decidir sobre su cuerpo, entre otros, dan cuenta de nuevos ámbitos donde se ejerce el biopoder, y que eran poco explorados antes de la Constitución de 1991. Se verá cómo, a partir del análisis de la línea jurisprudencial sobre el derecho a la vida, la Corte Constitucional genera este tipo de espacios y lleva a cabo una intervención sobre una vida que es constantemente cualificada y que es modificada a medida que evoluciona el pensamiento de este tribunal.

Proceso de negociación del tratado sobre el comercio de armas: tensiones y dinámicas de poder

El interés del presente estudio de caso es analizar la articulación de las dinámicas de poder y estrategias de negociación detrás de un proceso tan complejo como el de la creación del Tratado sobre el Comercio de Armas.El estudio examina la evolución de las tensiones principales entre los Estados participantes frente al Tratado y resalta las lógicas de poder al interior de las negociaciónes, así como los factores externos que influyeron para solucionar o agravar dichas tensiones. Con el apoyo de diferentes conceptos teóricos de negociación, se observa en específico el rol de las coaliciones como una importante estrategia utilizada por Estados pequeños para contrarrestar de alguna forma la asimetría de poder en un escenario donde los grandes exportadores e importadores de armas en la negociación tienen mayor peso.

La universidad terrateniente: biopolítica, poder soberano y resistencia indígena-campesina en las haciendas de la Universidad Central en la Provincia de Cotopaxi, 1930-1980 (Estudios)

Este artículo estudia el proceso de constitución, apogeo y disolución de las haciendas que fueron de propiedad de la Universidad Central del Ecuador, en el cantón Saquisilí, provincia de Cotopaxi, entre 1930 y 1980. Este estudio considera que la hacienda constituyó un sistema de poder (biopoder) con alto grado de autonomía respecto a las leyes e instituciones del Estado, sometida a la voluntad soberana del hacendado y administrada por arrendatarios que ejercían a menudo una autoridad despótica. El artículo destaca la resistencia indígena, la participación de la izquierda en la crítica al sistema de hacienda, y la reticencia de la Universidad Central a entregar la tierra a los campesinos.

Becoming a region, becoming global, becoming imperceptable: territorialising salmon in Chilean Patagonia

Our article focuses on the region of Chilean Patagonia and considers how it has developed as a leading producer of salmon for global food markets. It addresses the problem of how to decentre conventional views of the forces driving regional development that give primacy to the role of capital and technology, instead giving due recognition to the knowledge and practices of situated actors and to the relationships that form between human and non-human entities in food producing regions. As an alternative, we ask whether an assemblage approach can improve our understanding of regional transformation. To explore this question, we present original ethnographic data on constitutive practices that have transformed the Patagonian region, from the territorialization of Salmonidae species to experimentation in ocean ranching and sea water fish farming, and finally the development of a global industry. The evidence leads us to argue that in a complex globalised world, assemblage theory offers a valuable approach for understanding how regional potential is realised. In the case of Chilean Patagonia, it is apparent that forms of bio-power generate new relations between life, agency and nature, stimulating contemporary regional transformations in ways overlooked by the lineal logic of capital objectification discourses. Applying an assemblage approach enables the significance of new contemporary human – non-human relationships and inter-subjectivities to come to the fore, keeping the social in view as potential for regional transformation and new power asymmetries continuously emerge.