The Crime, Justice & Society Seminar Series presents
Progressive Penality as Performance
Jamie Buchan, Edinburgh Napier University
Abut the speaker
Jamie Buchan is a Lecturer in Criminology at Edinburgh Napier University. His research focuses on the sociology of punishment and penal policy, local partnership working arrangements, community penalties and the development of restorative justice, with a particular focus on Scotland. He is a member of the Edinburgh branch committee of SASO and of the Academic Advisory Group of Community Justice Scotland.
About the event
Scotland's prison population remains stubbornly high despite reforms to sentencing and community penalties (most recently in 2016). Seeking to advance the debate on punishment in Scotland, we use empirical data to support a novel theoretical synthesis of the ‘agonistic framework’ and ‘performative regulation’. We argue that these reforms appear oriented towards decarceration, without substantively engaging with the drivers of imprisonment, and hence exemplify the ‘performative’ nature of much Scottish penal policy. The ‘performance’ is shaped by countervailing political constraints on the Scottish Nationalist government, amid continued debate over independence – but truly progressive penal policy requires radical and substantive responses to the problems that punishment seeks to address.