Agonism, Palimpsests, and Thinking About Penal Change

Philip Goodman, University of Toronto and Katie Quinn, University of Missouri-St Louis

In this presentation we examine the curious stability of outdoor penal labour in California in the 20th century against a shifting social and penal field. Analysing state archival data on prison highway and forestry camps between 1915 and 2000, we frame the persistence of these practices as evidence of a penal labour palimpsest.

We demonstrate how the agency and interpretive innovation of penal administrators – as the architects and interpreters of this palimpsest – served as a stabilising mechanism akin to, but distinct from, existing theories of path dependence. Zooming out from the intricacies of the historical record, we position this case as revealing some of the limits of strict theories of path dependence and, instead, as offering a more dynamic understanding of the complex, intersecting and malleable ways in which history matters.

Phil and Katie's article 'The palimpsest of outdoor penal labour in California, 1915–2000' which was published in the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12503 will be sent to attendees ahead of the presentation for background reading.

Katie’s Bio:

Kaitlyn (Katie) Quinn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Prior to joining the faculty at UMSL, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and a Research Associate at the University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on how non-profit organizations and adjacent community actors participate in criminal justice processes and contend with criminal justice problems, especially as they relate to gender and crime. Her current projects draw on qualitative research methods to advance scholarly understandings of how punishment operates in and through communities, demonstrate how and why helping relationships can reproduce and/or contest existing social inequalities, and account for variegation and contestation beneath the veneers of penal stability and consensus. She received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Toronto in 2021.

Phil’s Bio:

Philip (Phil) Goodman is Associate Professor and Department Chair at the University of Toronto Mississauga. He uses prisons and punishment—and crime and law, more generally—as lenses through which to consider questions of race, inequality, penal politics, labour, rehabilitation, and the micro-dynamics of everyday life. At the heart of his scholarship is an attempt to ask how and why punishment changes over time, why it varies across place, how it produces inequality, and how it is experienced today. In 2017, he published Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press) with Joshua Page and Michelle Phelps, theorizing penal change in the United States. His articles have been published in a variety of journals, including American Journal of Sociology; Social Problems; British Journal of Criminology; Theoretical Criminology; Law & Social Inquiry; Punishment & Society; Law & Society Review; and the Canadian Review of Sociology.

This event is part of the Social Analysis of Penality across Boundaries Workshop Series organised by Professor Richard Sparks, Scottish Centre for Crime & Justice Research, and Professor Máximo Sozzo, Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Argentina.

A Zoom link to the event will be sent to you via Eventbrite. Contact enquiries@sccjr.ac.uk if you have any trouble accessing the workshop.