Table Of ContentPUNISH AND EXPEL
CLARENDON STUDIES IN CRIMINOLOGY
Published under the auspices of the Institute of Criminology,
University of Cambridge; the Mannheim Centre, London School
of Economics; and the Centre for Criminology,
University of Oxford.
General Editor: Robert Reiner
(London School of Economics)
Editors: Manuel Eisner, Alison Liebling,
and Per-Olof Wikström
(University of Cambridge)
Jill Peay and Tim Newburn
(London School of Economics)
Ian Loader, Julian Roberts, and Lucia Zedner
(University of Oxford)
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Punish and Expel
Border Control, Nationalism,
and the New Purpose of the Prison
EMMA KAUFMAN
1
1
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General Editor’s Introduction
Clarendon Studies in Criminology aims to provide a forum for
outstanding empirical and theoretical work in all aspects of crimi-
nology and criminal justice, broadly understood. The Editors
welcome submissions from established scholars, as well as excel-
lent PhD work. The Series was inaugurated in 1994, with Roger
Hood as its first General Editor, following discussions between
Oxford University Press and three criminology centres. It is edited
under the auspices of these three centres: the Cambridge Institute
of Criminology, the Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the
London School of Economics, and the Centre for Criminology at
the University of Oxford. Each supplies members of the Editorial
Board and, in turn, the Series Editor or Editors.
Emma Kaufman’s book Punish and Expel: Border Control,
Nationalism, and the New Purpose of the Prison is light on the eye
but hard on the heart. It is a book based on a year of fieldwork in
and around five men’s prisons, including interviews with 200 pris-
oners and prison staff. It takes as its subject the 14 per cent of the
British prison population who are foreign nationals. This figure
alone testifies to one of Kaufman’s arguments that the British prison
has become a site for border control and is no longer exclusively
about punishment, deterrence, or rehabilitation; or indeed about
returning the reformed to the population at large. Rather prisons
have oriented themselves in important ways towards the goals of
nationalism and migration control. Foreign national prisoners can
only leave prison once immigration officers have approved their
release; and for many this means deportation. This further tier of
bureaucracy in turn leads to a category of people detained beyond
the terms of their punishment in some nether world of uncertainty,
anxiety, and intense sadness about their futures, prisoners who
can be neither readily removed nor released. Kaufman captures
their lived experiences through extensive reporting of their words
and through an analysis which is profound in its implications. Her
focus on how imprisonment feels is one from which all criminolo-
gists could learn and on which everyone involved in the debates on
migration and nationality should reflect.
vi General Editor’s Introduction
Definitions of nationality clearly lie at the centre of this book,
yet defining nationality is no easy task. Kaufman argues that the
new ‘hubs and spokes’ policy—introduced in 2006 as a response
to a political scandal that led to the resignation of Home Secretary
Charles Clarke—has resulted in a definition by exclusion from
citizenship. Stereotyping amongst prisoners, staff and, ironically,
foreign prisoners themselves infuse the analysis. But as Kaufman
powerfully illustrates the ‘hubs and spokes’ policy is as much
about race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender as it is about national-
ity. For how people define themselves almost defies explication.
Some born in this country associate themselves with the commu-
nities amongst whom they have lived, leading to a self-definition
that formally would classify them as foreign nationals; others
born in former colonial countries, holding British passports and
schooled in former colonial schools, think of themselves as British
and feel British, yet get defined otherwise; in short, as non-citizens.
The documenting of the fluidity of this process is one of the many
strengths of this book. Her work is, moreover, tellingly informed
by Stuart Hall’s concept of collective amnesia, a coordinated mech-
anism for forgetting our past, and by his notion that the concept
of a transcendent Britishness—of free speech, the welfare state,
and the NHS—has only emerged as a result of hard-won strug-
gles between different versions of what it is to be British. It is only
coherent with the benefit of hindsight. So if there have always been
many different ways of being British there is unlikely to be one
version that holds good: the version Kaufman documents, which
is deeply problematic, is that whether or not prisoners are foreign
nationals depends on whether the prison service counts them in
that way. Yet people’s lives hang on this determination.
The book also takes up Lucia Zedner’s argument that sociolo-
gists studying punishment have lost sight of the political implica-
tions of their writings. Kaufman’s stated goal is to pursue a more
normative and politically explicit account of punishment, framing
punishment as a political act and advancing this through a form
of political activism. As she says, she is less committed to outing
the state. Thus, one learns about punishment by asking how it
feels. And asking how it feels places a focus on people’s bodies
and their capacity both to experience pain and to be the site of
feelings of hope and empathy. Detailing how prisoners self-harm,
both intentionally and unintentionally, brings to these notions
of pain an acute reality. Her book will undoubtedly generate
General Editor’s Introduction vii
amongst its readers a shared capacity for feeling with respect to
this largely hidden population. It should also make criminologists
reflect on the coherence of their understanding of punishment
as going beyond concepts of rehabilitation, retribution, and the
nation state. As she asserts, and going back to Foucault’s famous
words that even ‘lenient’ methods of incarceration put the body at
issue, imprisonment is always about the body; or as she and Mary
Bosworth put it in 2012, ‘whether it is tarred and feathered, incar-
cerated, or electronically tagged’ it is about the body. Focusing
on the bodily aspects of penal practices explicitly revisits the core
of criminology’s methodological concerns and provides one way
into thinking about systemic claims relating to imprisonment and
how the notions of state power and sovereignty manifest them-
selves in practice. Focusing on testimonies thus demystifies the
realities of prisons.
Where 40 per cent of the black and ethnic minority prison
population is made up of foreign nationals, and some prisons
hold only prisoners facing deportation, the conception of what
imprisonment means in contemporary British society needs seri-
ous adjustment, and in particular for the most of us not subject to
imprisonment or privy to its organization. Emma Kaufman has
remarkably achieved the production of a vehicle for attaining this.
Her book is both accessible and transformative.
As Editors we commend this book as making significant
contributions to the fields of criminology and penology. It is a
book to be most warmly welcomed to the Clarendon Studies in
Criminology Series.
Jill Peay and Tim Newburn
London School of Economics
and Political Science
January 2015
For Eric
