Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pjpqr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-06T07:30:29.741Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Penal Boundaries: Banishment and the Expansion of Punishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Katherine Beckett  and
Steve Herbert
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We use this article to argue for greater recognition of legally imposed spatial exclusion—banishment—as a (re)emerging and consequential social control practice. Although the new social control techniques that entail banishment are buttressed by a blend of civil, administrative, and criminal law, they are best understood as punitive in nature. This argument is supported by two empirical findings. First, interviews with the banished indicate that spatial exclusion often has significant negative consequences akin to those identified by Sykes (1958) in his seminal account of the pains of imprisonment. Second, court data show that the growing use of civil and administrative banishment has increased the number of criminal cases involving allegations of noncompliance. These findings suggest that analysts of punishment might usefully broaden their focus to include phenomena that combine civil, criminal, and legal authority, and are not defined as punishment by their advocates.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , Winter 2010 , pp. 1 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Adame, Jaime. 2004. Operation Safe Housing. Gotham Gazette, August 17.Google Scholar
American Heritage Dictionary. 1969. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
American Prosecutors Research Institute. 2004. Unwelcome Guests: A Community Prosecution Approach to Street Level Drug Dealing and Prostitution. Alexandria, VA: American Prosecutors Research Institute.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Michael F. 1963. Banishment: Cruel and Unusual Punishment. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 111 (6): 758–86.Google Scholar
Associated Press. 2002. High Court Refuses to Review Cincinnati's Anti‐Trespass Law. Associated Press, April 29.Google Scholar
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Social Issues of Law and Order. British Journal of Criminology 40:205–21.Google Scholar
Beckett, Katherine, and Herbert, Steve. 2008. Dealing with Disorder: Social Control in the Post‐Industrial City. Theoretical Criminology 12 (5): 5–30.Google Scholar
Belina, Bernd. 2007. From Disciplining to Dislocation: Area Bans in Recent Urban Policing in Germany. European Urban and Regional Studies 14:321–36.Google Scholar
Black, Henry Campbell. 1951. Black's Law Dictionary, 4th ed. St. Paul, MN: West.Google Scholar
Body‐Gendrot, Sophie. 2000. The Social Control of Cities: A Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Borrelli, Matthew D. 20022003. Banishment: The Constitutional and Public Policy Arguments Against this Revived Ancient Punishment. Suffolk University Law Review 470:469–86.Google Scholar
Braithewaite, John. 2003. What's Wrong with the Sociology of Punishment? Theoretical Criminology 7 (1): 5–28.Google Scholar
Caldeira, Teresa. 2000. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Cheh, Mary M. 1991. Constitutional Limits on Using Civil Remedies to Achieve Criminal Law Objectives. Hastings Law Journal 42:1325–48.Google Scholar
Crawford, Adam. 2008. From the Shopping Mall to the Street Corner: Dynamics of Exclusion in the Governance of Public Space. Paper presented at the Worldwide Universities Network Colloquium, International and Comparative Criminal Justice and Urban Governance, University of Leeds, England, June 26–28.Google Scholar
Davis, Mike. 1992. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Dikec, Mustafa. 2006. Two Decades of French Urban Policy: From Social Development of Neighborhoods to the Republican Penal State. Antipode 38:59–81.Google Scholar
Duneier, Mitchell. 1999. Sidewalk. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.Google Scholar
Ellickson, Robert C. 1996. Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces: Of Panhandlers, Skid Rows, and Public‐Space Zoning. Yale Law Journal 105 (5): 1165–213.Google Scholar
Emery, Julie. 1991. Drug Infested Areas off Limits to Offenders. Seattle Times, September 16, B5.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia. 1998. Punishment, Power and Justice. In Justice and Power in Sociolegal Studies, ed. Garth, Bryant and Sarat, Austin, 36–54. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Feldman, Leonard C. 2004. Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Fernandez, Manny. 2007. Barred from Public Housing, Even to See Family. New York Times, October 1, A1.Google Scholar
Flanagan, Peter M. 2003. Trespass‐Zoning: Ensuring Neighborhoods a Safer Future by Excluding Those with a Criminal Past. Notre Dame Law Review 79:327–79.Google Scholar
Flint, John, and Nixon, Judy. 2006. Governing Neighbours: Anti‐social Behaviour Orders and New Forms of Regulating Conduct in the UK. Urban Studies 43:939–56.Google Scholar
Foote, Caleb. 1956. Vagrancy‐Type Law and Its Administration. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 104:603–44.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Freiberg, Arie. 1987. Reconceptualizing Sanctions. Criminology 25 (2): 223–54.Google Scholar
Freiberg, Arie, and O'Malley, Pat. 1984. State Intervention and the Civil Offense. Law and Society Review 18 (3): 373–94.Google Scholar
Garland, David 1990. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gibson, Timothy A. 2004. Securing the Spectacular City: The Politics of Revitalization and Homelessness in Downtown Seattle. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.Google Scholar
Godoy, Angelina. 2006. Popular Injustice: Violence, Community and Law in Latin America. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Greenspan, Rosann. 1994. Criminal Due Process in the Administrative State. Studies in Law, Politics & Society 14:169–211.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Elena. 2003. Kept Out: Responding to Public Housing No‐Trespass Policies. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Journal 38:215–45.Google Scholar
Gowan, Teresa. 2002. The Nexus: Homelessness and Incarceration in Two American Cities. Ethnography 3 (4): 500–34.Google Scholar
Harcourt, Bernard E. 2001. Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Harcourt, Bernard E. 2005. Policing L.A.'s Skid Row: Crime and Real Estate Development [An Experiment in Real Time. University of Chicago Legal Forum 2005:325–404.Google Scholar
Herbert, Steve. 1997. Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Herbert, Steve. 2001. Policing the Contemporary City: Fixing Broken Windows or Shoring up Neo‐liberalism? Theoretical Criminology 5:445–67.Google Scholar
Herbert, Steve, and Brown, Elizabeth. 2006. Conceptions of Space and Crime in the Punitive Neoliberal City. Antipode 38:755–77.Google Scholar
Hermer, Joe. 2002. Regulating Eden: The Nature of Order in North American Parks. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Hermer, Joe, and Mosher, Janet. 2002. Disorderly People: Law and the Politics of Exclusion in Ontario. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.Google Scholar
Hill, Gordon. 2005. The Use of Pre‐existing Exclusionary Zones as Probationary Conditions for Prostitution Offenses: A Call for the Sincere Application of Heightened Scrutiny. Seattle University Law Review 28:2173–208.Google Scholar
Kedar, Benjamin Z. 1996. Expulsion as an Issue of World History. Journal of World History 7 (2): 165–80.Google Scholar
Kelling, George L., and Coles, Catherine M. 1996. Fixing Broken Windows. New York: Martin Kessler Books.Google Scholar
Lynch, Mona. 2001. From the Punitive City to the Gated Community: Security and Segregation across the Social and Penal Landscape. University of Miami Law Review 56:89–112.Google Scholar
Maxson, Cheryl L., Hennigan, Karen M., and Sloane, David C. 2005. It's Getting Crazy Out There: Can a Civil Gang Injunction Change a Community? Criminology & Public Policy 4 (3): 577–606.Google Scholar
Millie, Andrew. 2008. Anti‐social Behaviour, Behavioural Expectations and an Urban Aesthetic. British Journal of Criminology 48:379–94.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Don. 2003. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York: Guillford Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Don. 2005. Property Rights, the First Amendment, and Judicial Anti‐Urbanism: The Strange Case of Hicks v. Virginia . Urban Geography 26 (7): 565–86.Google Scholar
National Coalition for the Homeless. 2006. A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in US Cities, January. http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/crimreport/report.pdf (accessed August 7, 2009).Google Scholar
Parascandola, Rocco. 2007. Trespass Arrests under Attack. Newsday, April 13.Google Scholar
Raco, Mike. 2003. Remaking Place and Securitizing Space: Urban Regeneration and the Strategies, Tactics and Practices of Policing in the UK. Urban Studies 40:1869–87.Google Scholar
Ramsay, Peter. 2008. The Theory of Vulnerable Autonomy and the Legitimacy of the Civil Preventative Order. London School of Economics, Law, Society and Economy Working Papers 1/2008. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/241186/1/WPS2008‐01_Ramsay.pdf (accessed August 7, 2009).Google Scholar
Rhodes, Lorna. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Unit. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sanchez, Lisa. 1997. Enclosure Acts and Exclusionary Practices: Neighborhood Associations, Community Police, and the Expulsion of the Sexual Outlaw. In Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies, ed. Goldberg, David Theo, Musheno, Michael, and Bower, Lisa C., 122–40. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Sanchez, Lisa. 2001. Boundaries of Legitimacy: Sex, Violence, Citizenship and Community. Law & Social Inquiry 22 (3): 543–80.Google Scholar
Schellinger, Lisa. 1990. Drug War Now Has Borders. Seattle Post Intelligencer, December, 12, B1.Google Scholar
Sewell, Abby. 2005. How Well Do Drug‐Free Zones Really Work? The Portland Alliance, November 2005.Google Scholar
Scheingold, Stuart A., Olson, Toska, and Pershing, Jana. 1994. Republican Criminology and Victim Advocacy. Law & Society Review 28 (4): 729–66.Google Scholar
Simon, Jonathan. 1993. Poor Discipline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Snider, William Garth. 1998. Banishment: The History of Its Use and a Proposal for Its Abolition Under the First Amendment. New England Journal on Criminal and Civil Confinement 24:455–83.Google Scholar
Snow, David A., and Mulcahy, Michael. 2001. Space, Politics, and the Survival Strategies of the Homeless. The American Behavioral Scientist 45 (1): 149–69.Google Scholar
Stewart, Gary. 1998. Black Codes and Broken Windows: The Legacy of Racial Hegemony in Anti‐Gang Civil Injunctions. The Yale Law Journal 107 (7): 2249–80.Google Scholar
Suk, Jeannie. 2006. Criminal Law Comes Home. The Yale Law Journal 116 (2): 2–70.Google Scholar
Sykes, Gresham M. 1958. The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tabachnick, Cara. 2007. Jump in Trespassing Arrests Draws Anger. Newsday, April 10.Google Scholar
Taylor, Ralph. 2000. Breaking Away from Broken Windows: Baltimore Neighborhoods and the Nationwide Fight Against Crime, Grime, Fear, and Decline. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Von Mahs, Jurgen. 2005. The Sociospatial Exclusion of Homeless People in Berlin and Los Angeles. American Behavioral Scientist 48:928–60.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Papachristou v. Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 (1972).Google Scholar
Powell v. Texas, 392 U.S. 514 (1968).Google Scholar
Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660 (1962).Google Scholar

Statutes Cited

Seattle Municipal Code 18.12.278, Parks Enhanced Code Enforcement Ordinance, 1997. http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us/~scripts/nph‐brs.exe?d=CODE&s1=18.12.278.snum.&Sect5=CODE1&Sect6=HITOFF&l=20&p=1&u=/~public/code1.htm&r=1&f=G (accessed July 30, 2009).Google Scholar

Archival Documents

Ferguson, Harry. 1998. Letter from Assistant Chief Harry Ferguson to Councilmember Nick Licata. September 29. Seattle Municipal Archives, City Hall, Seattle, Washington.Google Scholar
Sidran, Mark. 1997. Proposed Parks Code Enhanced Enforcement Ordinance. Seattle City Attorney, May 8. Seattle Municipal Archives, City Hall, Seattle, Washington.Google Scholar
Sidran, Mark 1999. Letter from Mark Sidran, Seattle City Attorney, to “concerned citizens,” May 7. Seattle Municipal Archives, City Hall, Seattle, Washington.Google Scholar