From the Punitive City to the Gated Community: Security and Segregation across the Social and Penal Landscape

Abstract

Just over 20 years ago, criminologist Stanley Cohen put forth his vision of a newly evolving penal world which he called, “The Punitive City." He formulated his imagined punitive city based what appeared to him at the time to be emerging patterns of a novel form of social control that were distinguished by, among other things, the dispersal and penetration of control beyond prison walls, the blurring of spatial boundaries which mark the differences between inside and outside, freedom and captivity, imprisoned and released, and guilty and innocent, the emergence of corrections a continuum where intervention and control is finely graded to fit individual "need", and the widening of the controllable population resulting from fuzzier definitions of deviancy and normalcy. Yet the movement Cohen idenitifed in no way lessened the reliance on prison as a central form of social control. Indeed, the explosion in the sheer numbers of people being imprisoned in this country, and in the rate at which people are imprisoned actually began its upswing right around the time Cohen's piece on the Punitive City was published and the prison’s credibility was being so overtly challenged. In this paper, I explore a potential (if partial) explanation for this somewhat ironic prison explosion by looking beyond the machinery of criminal justice, and analytically resituating the prison as a social institution within the broader socio-cultural landscape.

Keywords: prison, gated communities, mass incarceration