Imaginary Penalities (review)

This edited collection offers readers substantive explorations of Pat Carlen’s concept of “imaginary penalities.” As Carlen describes them, imaginary penalities arise in the policies and programs designed to satisfy the public’s demand to reduce crime and risk and to increase security. Officials operate “as if” they can actually meet these expectations while knowing full well that the demands outstrip the government’s ability to meet them. Imaginary penalities contain elements of both substantive penalities (e.g., rehabilitation) and symbolic ones (e.g., “tough on crime” rhetoric) and therefore reproduce an “ever-encroaching and totalizing criminal governance” (p. 1). They are characterized by self-referential standards and by the tendency to evaluate procedures rather than outcomes (p. 19). By revealing imaginary penalities at work, Carlen hopes to uncover the “almost hidden structures of cultural and penal governance” (p. xv).

Building on the conceptual distinction between imaginative and imaginary, the central argument of this book is that we need more of the former and less of the latter. Not only do imaginary penalities erode and undermine the potential for the justice system to achieve justice (as is well argued in the culminating essay by Barbara Hudson), they are also, quite simply, ineffective—they do not achieve what they purport to achieve, and in some cases they have the opposite effect. This may seem to suggest that they are simply ideological, or just bad policy, but Carlen argues that the current context of “risk crazed governance” makes them even more insidious than earlier examples of ideologically driven criminal justice policies. Indeed, imaginary penalities help to reinforce the “totalizing grip of law and order discourse on public knowledges” (p. xx). Carlen does not provide a clear definition of “imaginative” policies, but the essays in the collection suggest that they are not grounded in pre-existing governmental rationalities and take as their premise the promotion of social justice, diversity, and equity.

Each chapter of the book takes up the concept of imaginary penalities in various contexts, with a focus on New Labour’s crime-control policies in the United Kingdom. Most of the chapters develop concepts that complement Carlen’s “imaginary penalities,” exploring the tensions between imaginative and imaginary penalities. Other chapters explore more directly the consequences of the “epistemic contest” being played out in the justice system and within the discipline of criminology itself. The range of policies explored in these chapters is broad and includes sentencing, anti-terrorism, community safety, crime reduction, rehabilitation, prison training, and prisoner management.

Several chapters deploy the book’s conceptual metaphor in order to build new analyses. For example, Kelly Hannah-Moffat uses the concept as a tool to explain the apparently irrational blending of gender-responsive programs with gender-neutral models. Likewise, Jacqueline Tombs adopts the notion of “sentencing imaginaries” to explain how policies aimed at reducing judicial discretion have produced sentencing decisions that are becoming increasingly devoid of context or meaning. In other cases, it seemed to me that the concept of “imaginative penalties” does not particularly enrich the analyses. Tim Hope’s chapter, for example, tells an interesting insider story of how officials rejected and tried to suppress his research evaluating parts of the government’s Crime Reduction Programme; Anne Worrall’s chapter also provides substantial insight into how efforts to develop seamless management of offenders can never be fully successful. In my view, these chapters did not need the conceptual theme of the book to strengthen their already well taken points.

I have become quite interested in how the distinction between imaginary and imaginative penalities could apply to my own work, but I remain unsure whether it would open up new analytic paths or simply provide me with another set of neologisms. I would have liked to read more about how to harness the imaginative. While some chapters gesture toward this issue, most do not venture down this road. Carlen does lay out some concrete suggestions in her chapter, and Hudson offers ways to strategize the political project ahead. The other chapters start from the assumption that it is possible to...