Crime Control As Industry
Late in 1992, at the recommendation of Ivan Illich, I travelled north on the overnight train from Hamburg to Oslo to meet an old friend of Illich's, Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie. Through books like Limits to Pain, Christie had helped to create the climate in which prison rates in industrialized countries had consistently fallen between the 1950's and the 1980's. Then the rates made a U-turn and began to rise, in some cases catastrophically. Christie soon realized just how convenient these rising rates of imprisonment were for the new neo-liberal political regimes that were then emerging and consolidating themselves. He perceived the prison boom as an acute political emergency and, when I arrived in Oslo, he was about to publish a book called Crime Control As Industry: Towards Gulags Western Style? (In later editions of the book, the question mark disappeared.) We spent parts of several days in recorded conversation, not just about the new prison economy, but also about the origin and development of his approach to criminology and community. As it turned out, our collaboration would continue through several more Ideas series in the 90's and eventually result in my publishing a book of my own called The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives (House of Anansi, 1998.) This joint undertaking began with these three broadcasts in March of 1993...