Tuesday, March 16, 2010
ICOPA BELFAST 2010 ACCOMODATION
If you cannot afford accommodation please let us know as soon as possible by contacting Deaglan Coyle at d.p.coyle@qub.ac.uk so that we can try and accommodate you with friends.
Universities
Queen’s University, Elms Village, Malone Road
£41 per night Bed and Breakfast
accommodation@qub.ac.uk
Stranmillis University College
hospitality@stranmillis.ac.uk
Hotels
Express by Holiday Inn
106 University Street
1232 311909
Days Hotel
40 Hope Street
9024 2494
Travelodge
15 Brunswick Street
9033 3555
Ibis Queen’s Quarter
75 University Street
9033 3366
Madisons
59-63 Botanic Avenue
9050 9800
Renshaws Hotel
75 University Street
9033 3366
Malone Lodge Hotel
60 Eglantine Avenue
9038 8000
Guest Houses
Eglantine Guest House
21 Eglantine Avenue
9066 7585
Malone Guest House
79 Malone Road
9066 9565
Kate’s BandB
127 University Street
9028 2091
Camera House
44 Wellington Park
9066 0026
Tara Lodge
36 Cromwell Road, Off Botanic Road
9059 0900
Pearl Court Guest House
11 Malone Road
9066 6145
Marine Guest House
30 Eglantine Avenue
9038 1922
Avenue Guest House
23 Eglantine Avenue
9066 5904
Windermere House
6 Wellington Park
9066 2693
Titanic Apartments
66 Lisburn Road
9033 3367
Hostels
Paddy’s Palace
63 Lisburn Road
9033 3555
Belfast International Hostel
22-32 Donegal Road
9031 5435
Arnie’s Backpackers
63 Fitzwilliam Street
9024 2867
Lagan Backpackers
121 Fitzroy Street
9033 9965
Vagabonds
9 University Road
9543 8772
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
ICOPA History - Excerpt from "The Moving Targets of Penal Abolitionism: ICOPA, Past, Present, and Future"
ICOPA Meetings
ICOPA I (1983) – Toronto, Canada
How to Include All the Most Difficult Groups in the Community
ICOPA II (1985) – Amsterdam, Netherlands
Theoretical Directions in Abolitionism
ICOPA III (1987) – Montreal, Canada
From Prison Abolition to Penal Abolition
ICOPA IV (1989) – Kazimierz, Poland
Abolitionism in Eastern Europe
ICOPA V (1991) – Bloomington, Indiana, United States
Aboriginal Roots and Radical Empowerment
ICOPA VI (1993) – San Jose, Costa Rica
Challenging Third World Governments to Adopt Abolitionist Steps
ICOPA VII (1995) – Barcelona, Spain
Penal Abolition, A Real Utopia
ICOPA VIII (1997) – Auckland, New Zealand / Aotearoa
Pathways to Penal Abolition
ICOPA IX (2000) – Toronto, Canada
Transformative Justice: New Questions, New Answers
ICOPA X (2002) – Lagos, Nigeria
Tasmania, Australia
ICOPA XI (2006) – Tasmania, Australia
ICOPA XII (2008) – London, England
Creating a Scandal: Prison Abolition and the Policy Agenda
ICOPA XIII (2010) – Belfast, Northern Ireland
Abolition, Reform and the Politics of Global Incarceration
* adapted and updated from Morris (2000a).
“If there is an overall political issue around the prison, it is not therefore whether it is to be corrective or not; whether the judges, the psychiatrists or the sociologists are to exercise more power in it than the administrators or supervisors; it is not even whether we should have prison or something other than prison. At present, the problem lies rather in the steep rise in the use of these mechanisms of normalization and the wide-ranging powers which, through the proliferation of new disciplines, they bring with them” (1977: 306).
- Criminalization through other means: By this, we highlight the manner in which situations perceived as problematic can be treated as crime without technically being designated as such, by laying the foundations for the authorization of detention in other legal domains. These processes involve deeming individuals to be threatening and / or disposable through legally-codified mechanisms that structure-out evidentiary thresholds, procedural guidelines and accountability mechanisms contained within criminal law.
- Normalization of confinement: Once a mechanism of last resort in the sphere of criminal justice, the carceral is now entrenched in additional spheres of governance guided by precautionary logics. As a result, detention is becoming a more common experience amongst a growing number of individuals in a world in which confinement is presented as a normal response to a myriad of social and political issues.
- An increasingly multi-carceral society: Incarceration, confinement, detention, and, generally speaking, the deprivation of liberty, are not associated exclusively with the prison, criminal justice system, or disciplinary exercises of power. In the name of security, pre-emptive or precautionary forms of detention - aimed not a disciplining an individual, but at isolating and managing their potential threat - have become features of post-September 11 social control apparatuses. Additionally, the emergence and growth of public health agencies, coupled with the threats posed by communicable diseases or potential pandemics, have resulted in the development of new procedures for the involuntary confinement of individuals or groups considered to be infectious, recalcitrant in relation to treatment regimes, or otherwise risky. Confinement has also become a central tool for the management of immigration and the transnational flow of refugees and displaced persons. In this case, incarceration is related to the exercise of sovereign power and the policing of territory. As societies become increasingly open to flows of capital and increasingly closed to flows of people, the immigration detention centre has emerged as an important new institution of social control.
- Globalization of the carceral: In the contemporary context dominated by securitization, governing authorities share information with other nations in a stated effort to address shared security threats. This is resulting in a dual process in which previously-forbidden practices of detention - for example, extraordinary rendition and disappearances - become acknowledged as outsourced components of Western security apparatuses, while Western carceral practices are exported to developing nations through the training of criminal justice personnel, operating as a form of neo-colonialism.
- Continued expansion of carceral techniques into everyday life: Systems of surveillance that Foucault associates with disciplinary power and the carceral are becoming pervasive. As more and more aspects of our public and private lives become subjected to panoptic and synoptic techniques of observation, the boundaries between the prison and the social continue to blur. Schools are transforming into carceral spaces for the observation and management of youth; CCTV cameras and private security guards are becoming ubiquitous features of public and mass-private spaces; and the proliferation of intelligence-based systems of government - including a growing number of biometric databases - has facilitated the risk management of individuals and populations.
ICOPA 13 - Two Calls for Contributions
ICOPA 13
Abolition, Reform and the Politics of Global Incarceration
23-25 June 2010
CALL FOR PAPERS
The 13th International Conference on Penal Abolition will be held in Belfast at a defining moment regarding the devolution of Policing and Justice to the recently constituted Northern Ireland Assembly. A decade on from the release of political prisoners under the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement, Northern Ireland’s prisons are under continuing criticism. We invite international papers, art, film, policy proposals, reports and posters on any aspect of the generic theme from researchers, activists, prisoners and former prisoners on penal abolition at a time dominated by reformist discourses about ‘healthy prisons’ alongside global expansion of incarceration in prisons, special hospitals and other places of detention. Individuals and groups can offer sessions/ panels in diverse formats. Current and former prisoners unable to attend, please contact us to enable presentations by proxy.
The Conference will be held at the University and in the community. We will provide a range of options for people to book directly with local hotels and hostels and endeavour to accommodate former prisoners.
ICOPA 13 will also acknowledge the life and work of Louk Hulsman who died in 2009:
“Abolition of criminal justice is that you abolish that in yourself, in the same way we are doing with racism and in the same way we are doing that with gender differences …You abolish criminal justice in yourself … Abolishing means that you will not anymore talk that language. And if you do not talk that language anymore then you see other things.”
Submission of Abstracts
Deaglan Coyle
d.p.coyle@qub.ac.uk
The JPP Call for Papers:
Call for Contributions:
ICOPA XIII – Thirteenth International Conference on Penal Abolition
ICOPA International Organizing Committee
The expansion and normalization of imprisonment as a tool for dealing with a wide range of social problems has led to the entrenched perception of prisons as seemingly permanent fixtures of the modern landscape. In most academic and political circles, debates about prisons and penal policy are limited to discussions of ‘reform’, with little serious problematization of the underlying structure. Penal abolitionism – as a perspective, theory and international movement – presents a vital alternative to this penal inertia. Abolitionists reject the presumed inevitability of the prison, and actively seek to oppose and dismantle the prison industrial complex, while advancing community-based and non-punitive alternatives to imprisonment.
The voices of prisoners have been central to past abolitionist debates, and have helped to shape the theoretical and political terrain of the international abolitionist movement. The Journal of Prisons on Prisons (JPP) itself emerged out of the proceedings of the third International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA III), held in Montreal in 1987. Since that time, theJPP has dedicated two thematic issues – Volumes 1(1) and 17(2) – to the topic of abolition. Moving forward, we hope to reinvigorate abolitionist thought and action by once again placing the voices of those most affected by the system at the centre of the debate.
The JPP is seeking original submissions on the theme of penal abolitionism, for the purpose of preparing a special issue or Dialogues section. Papers on a wide range of topics related to abolitionism are welcome. In particular, we invite contributions that deal with:
- Theoretical engagements with penal abolitionism – engagements with classical abolitionist texts and discussions of new directions for abolitionist theory.
- Abolitionist practices and the penal abolitionist movement – discussions of the “how” of penal abolitionism, the scope and nature of the movement, and especially on the roles played by prisoners.
- Reflections on the goals of contemporary penal abolitionism – reconciling abolitionist goals (both short- and long-term) with the current state of the carceral, and engagements with the question “what is to be abolished?”.
- Why abolition, why now? – works that ground discussions of abolitionism in the experiences and accounts of prisoners.
Please provide us with a draft article by no later than April 15, 2010. Selected papers submitted by that time may be considered for presentation, read by the author or a delegate, at the thirteenth Annual International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA XIII) to take place in summer 2010 at Queen’s University – Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Submissions can be sent by email to jpp@uottawa.ca or by post to:
Journal of Prisoners on Prisons
c / o University of Ottawa Press
542 King Edward Avenue
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
K1N 6N5
Important Note:
If you are a current or former prisoner, you can submit your abstract / paper / paper outline to BOTH of these calls, but you should indicate that you are doing so at time of submission. Submissions to the JPP will be treated like publication submissions, and will go through the normal review process.
Please contact Mike or Justin at the JPP if you have any questions. We can be reached at jpp@uottawa.ca, or at the post address listed above.