Against Hibernian Exceptionalism

Abstract

First paragraph: During the early stages of my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, in a moment of flippant chit chat, I suggested to a fellow student that I was toying with the idea of writing my entire dissertation on comparative sociology of punishment without reference to David Garland. This obviously sounds like the ludicrous or crude act of a provocateur. My friend was reasonably alarmed – not least because writing a thesis situated within the sociology of punishment that didn’t acknowledge, let alone mention, David Garland defied the basic logic of a literature review. Embarrassed, I desperately tried to clarify, though not successfully, that I was speaking in jest, but that there was a serious note underlying this statement. I had been wondering how one would write and think about punishment and penal politics in my two comparator states of Ireland and Scotland if David Garland’s theses on penal-welfarism and the culture of control had not become so landmark. How differently would we perceive penality in those places?