XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

530

Penal State-Making and Security: Institutionalizations and Effects of Security Policies

RC29 Deviance and Social Control (host committee)

Language: English and Spanish

The political problem of crime control constitutes not only a central issue in today’s political arenas, but has impacted the contemporary state architecture in very different ways. The political problem of crime insecurity got translated into institutional penal state-making in a variety of contexts, with a multiplicity of contents and with distinct effects. 
In this regular session we will discuss empirically-based and theoretically informed papers addressing how the new political and administrative category of “security” impacted the penal sectors of the state, from the local to the national and throughout different regions of the world. We will dissect the ways in which the category of security gave new meaning to the traditional crime control function and how it reordered penal administrative acts and practices, integrating distinct elements – penal or other – with distinct hierarchies, and how it expanded beyond the traditional penal bureaucracies and generated new methods and objects of state interventions, from city design to militarized urban control. 
We will discuss historical, comparative or case studies that address, among other issues, the incorporation of the specific categories of security (citizen, urban, crime, public security, etc.), the discoursive frames, the agents and interests involved, the institutional designs, as well as their material and symbolic effects in political, administrative and urban contexts across the world.