This project asks three interrelated research questions: (1) Why has incarceration increased in nearly every European country since 1990? (2) Why are immigrants and other ethnic minorities overrepresented in European prisons? (3) How can we explain cross-national variation in European penal sanctioning? It seeks to explain and understand how immigrants have been caught up in European ambivalence about global integration and neo-nationalism, tensions that are managed differently through nation specific legal and political institutions. How societies adapt to changing conditions by integrating new members is critical to their social, economic, and political stability. European nations that fail to do so could face a grim future built on the social exclusion of perceived outsiders.
The proposed study uses comparative and historical methodology and three case studies (Sweden, the United Kingdom, and France) to analyze and explain cross national penal regime variation and its relationship to immigrant integration. By developing a thick description of historical context and systematic analysis of a small number of cases, the researcher is able to expose why (not just how) societies use criminal law differently and what it means to the people involved.
This project intends to contribute new knowledge about how criminal justice works differently across societies even in the face of shared social problems. The project will advance knowledge about how the criminal law is used to settle broader questions about national belonging and political power. It also intends to contribute new knowledge about the key role the democratic process and social trust play in both immigrant integration and penal order. It will contribute an original, empirically grounded, and comparative study to a highly charged public debate about immigration, crime, and punishment.
Broader Impacts Immigration is one the most important issues in Europe today. Without immigration, many European nation-states face an ever aging population and declining birth rates, demographic realities that will weaken economic productivity and undermine European prominence on the world stage. How Europeans adapt to changing conditions and integrate new members into their societies is critical to their social, economic, and political stability. This project calls attention to the exclusionary processes that are currently undermining the incorporation of new members into European societies. Specifically, it details how European states seek to contain and control mobility by relying increasingly on more punitive measures such as confinement and deportation. The controversial expulsion of Roma, EU citizens, from France in the summer of 2010 and the large scale detention of North African migrants in Lampedusa, Italy fleeing the Arab Spring of 2011, among other events, graphically illustrate how immigration itself has become criminalized. Moreover, this project documents the creation of vulnerable populations of noncitizens who are effectively losing their "right to have rights" as their human rights are routinely violated in favor of national interests. For example, the "return" of failed asylum seekers to their country of origin and the compulsory deportation of permanent residents who commit certain crimes indicate how easily noncitizens are cast out and denied recognition of their basic human rights to safety, security, family, and freedom of movement (UN Declaration of Human Rights). The quality and character of democracy has been degraded by the erosion of aliens/migrants’ human rights. By extension, this project challenges a conventional or even romantic view of Europe as a reservoir of mild penal sanctioning and human rights protections when in fact human rights violations are at the center of detention and deportation regimes. Intellectual Merit The intellectual merit of this project is based on its original and comparative account of how justice works differently in different political contexts even in the face of shared global pressures. It argues that penal sanctioning provides a strategic site to resolve disputes about national belonging and national sovereignty, but that nation-specific institutions like the democratic process and immigration incorporation shape the eventual penal outcomes. This project contributes to our understanding of punishment by treating penal sanctioning as a complex social institution by linking the forms, practices and expression of penal sanctioning, including the use of detention and deportation, to cultural, political and economic factors. It goes on to show that increased penal severity (internal and external) is more likely the result of a crisis in governance and conflicts over national belonging rather than labor market demands or existential insecurity as conventional accounts assert. This project also contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of state power and group membership. The criminalization process identifies, classifies, and claims those who belong while segregating and separating those who are questionable, "unworthy," or expendable. Criminal law and penal sanctioning play a key structuring role in this process, enabling EU member states to legitimately reassert sovereignty, control borders and regulate group membership, especially as the very authority of the nation-state is under threat.
