Had you asked me five years ago, when I started my PhD studies, what my research was about, not in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that my response would include the prison toilet. And yet, here I am five years later, and the prison toilet—as a crucial matter of penal standardization and an object of material politics within penal government—plays a central role in my research. By using penal standards as an analytic of government, and through an amalgam of critical document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, my research examines the application of standard penal practice(s) within two cases of penal government intervention: Canada’s role within the penal aid and justice reconstruction effort in Haiti; and the investigation into ‘sub-standard’ penality in Nunavut, Canada. The unique contribution of my research, emerging from my empirical focus on the material politics of penal standards, is that penal standards matter as evidenced by the matter (or materiality) of penal standards.
In studying the matter of penal standards my research makes three core arguments: first, that penal standards promote technicization in penalty (or penal technē), rather than the actualization of ethical punishment or prisoner human rights; second, that penal standardization aims to disembed a penal government’s relationship from a specific locality or culture, recasting this relationship as a universal, normalized, and primarily carceral response to punishment; and third, in both of the cases of penal standardization that I study penal agents must contend with the paradox of punishing inequality—how to maintain the monopoly over the authority to punish, or penal legitimacy, without subjecting prisoners to patently inhumane conditions and practices within contexts of significant marginalization and inequality.
I began this research presentation with my version of an art installation where I had several material objects on display including a sock, beer bottle, plastic bag, soapstone carvings, and toilet paper, all of which are associated with controversies of penal government that I uncovered in my research on penal standardization in Haiti and Nunavut. My art installation (a nod to Peter Sloterdijk’s installation on ‘Inflatable democracy’) demonstrates the ‘matters that matter’—as Latour and Weibel explain in their important work on Making Things Public—or what Gay Hawkins calls ‘thing-power’ within penal standardization missions. While many people find standards to be boring and mundane, and while the material politics of toilets and toilet paper (for example) tend to fall under the radar of important sociological/criminological analyses, my research demonstrates that these objects are in fact at the centre of controversies over prisoner human rights and the (ethical) treatment of prisoners. For example, the political economy of penal standards prioritizes penal infrastructure and the materiality of punishment (the supply of justice), such as the material composition of the prison toilet (porcelain or steel), rather than the actualization of a ‘duty to care’ (the demand for justice), such as access to toilets on a regular or unregulated basis.
In tracing the material politics of standardized penal government my research uncovers two processes that I am highly critical of. First, penal standardization which rides roughshod over local differences and cultures of penality—this process problematically assumes we can fully know another system of penal government by virtue of shared characteristics (a shared materiality of punishment) and similar remedies for crime (carceral punishment). My research reveals how the civilizing discourse of penal standardization missions—which aim to universalize Eurocentric punishment as a globally accepted norm—expunge Indigenous legal orders and practices of penal justice. Both ‘correctional culture’ and Indigenous cultures are (re)produced in struggles over standard penality and so my research focuses on the importance of situating penal culture and practice in historical narratives in order to show how culture and practice are mutually constitutive. Second, is the process of carceralism or hyper-incarceration which locks prisoners up with little regard for their rehabilitation and well-being. This process operates on the highly problematic assumption that carceral punishment is a global norm—evidenced by the high concentration of penal standards on the administration of prison operations, prison design, and prison staff/prisoner conduct within the carceral institution. However, my research emphasizes how both a Haitian and Inuit ethos of punishment (different in their historical trajectories and logics of punishment) challenge this so-called ‘global’ carceral norm.
My research reveals how penal standards in maintaining the carceral norm (the prison) as the model of penal government severely limits what Valverde calls ‘penal imagination’ within penal government—or a failure to think outside of the carceral box. I argue that contrary to the claims of standard penal policy penal standardization has become implicated in post-colonial, civilizing missions that are not directly related to the ideals of ethical, moral, human rights actualizing punishment. Rather, penal standards work to entrench the state’s monopoly over the power to punish through the promotion of the carceral norm (and hyper-incarceration) entrenching, rather than ameliorating sub-standard penal conditions in Haiti and Nunavut—two places where the relationship of power and inequality are extremely asymmetrical and punishment targets deeply marginalized communities.
In Haiti and Nunavut standard (read: ethical, human rights actualizing) punishment remains the collateral damage of the unmitigated inequality that accompanies post-colonial government. Concrete steps toward change in penal standardization must involve concurrent efforts to revoke the post-colonial politics of penal government (redressing conditions of social inequality) while shifting the focus of the material politics of punishment from the supply of justice to a demand for justice. Doing so will create the space needed to implement penal standards that aim to generate more imaginative, ethical, and accountable forms of punishment or a material politics of punishment that imagines penal practice outside of the carceral box.