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Call for Papers: 2012 AAG Annual Meeting – New York, February 24-28, 2012 Session title: Court Geographies Organizer: Joaquín Villanueva – Syracuse University
Session Description:
The police, geographers have forcefully demonstrated, effectively exercise territoriality (Herbert, 1997). Yet geographers have been shy to regard the courts as institutions that exercise territoriality. The inability to see courts as territorial institutions stems from two factors. First, judges are seldom present on the terrain and are rather situated in courthouses where they regularly pronounce sentences and interpret the law. Second, when taken into consideration by legal scholars, courts’ territoriality is explained through the judges’ pronouncement of a sentence wherein the geographic mobility of the accused can be temporarily or permanently curtailed. The new culture of social control that has emerged in North American and European countries has paradoxically combined harsher sentences against the accused, predominantly from minority backgrounds, and progressive forms of conflict resolution (Garland, 2001). Whereas geographers have been attentive to the rise of the “penal state,” in response to the countervailing effects of neoliberalism, the crisis of welfare states, the rise of fears of crime, and the emergence of the prison economy (Gilmore, 1998; Peck, 2003; Wacquant, 2001), little attention has been paid to the new judicial geographies. The new court geographies, partly informed by the restorative justice movement, have “brought” judges to the terrain as a measure to better resolve conflicts in society. In North America and Europe the restorative justice movement has generated new judicial spaces at the neighborhood scale where victims, offenders, and “community” members can come together to collectively solve a wide range of conflicts (Dickson-Gilmore et al., 2005; Galway et al., 1996). The emergence of drug courts, community justice, problem-solving courts, and victim-offender mediation techniques has the peculiarity that judges are highly visible on the terrain in an effort to strengthen community bonds and closely monitor the progression of offenders (Berman et al., 2005). These measures are presented as “alternatives” to the prison since they are less costly and potentially provide long-term solutions to the problem of crime (Strang et al., 2001). This session brings together papers within the sub-field of court geographies. Subsumed within the larger body of work of “penal geographies,” court geographies look at the specific ways in which the judiciary is present in the spaces of everyday life. The session seeks theoretical and empirical papers that would help answer the following questions: What are the theoretical connections, or disconnections, between penal geographies and court geographies? How exactly courts’ territoriality differ from police territoriality, if so? What are the implications of the rescaling of the judiciary to state authority? To what extent these new ventures represent a more just option against the rise of the “penal state”? What can geographers contribute to the restorative justice movement? Other possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:
• The role of judges in practices of “banishment” or “area bans” (Beckett and Herbert, 2010; Bernd, 2007) • Role of prosecutors and attorneys in exercising territoriality • Therapeutic jurisprudence • Local governance of crime (Crawford, 1997) • Role of judges in community policing • Police-justice relationships • New state spaces (Brenner, 2004) • Critical theorizations of courts and the penal state
Beckett, K. and Herbert, S., 2010, Banished: The new social control in urban America. New York: Oxford University Press
Berman, G., Feinblatt, J., and Glazer, S., 2005, Good Courts: The case for problem-solving justice. New York: Free Press
Bernd, B., 2007, “From disciplining to dislocation: Area bans in recent urban policing in Germany,” European Urban and Regional Studies 14: 321-336
Brenner, N., 2004, New State Spaces: Urban governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. New York: Oxford University Press.
Crawford, A., 1997, The local governance of crime: Appeals to community and partnership. Oxford: Clarendon Press
Dickson-Gilmore, J. and La Prairie, C., 2005, Will the circle be unbroken: Aboriginal communities, restorative justice, and the challenges of conflict and change. Toronto: University of Toronto Press
Galway, B. and Hudson, J., 1996, Restorative Justice: International perspectives. Monsey: Criminal Justice Press
Garland, D., 2001, The culture of control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Gilmore, R.W., 1998, “Globalization and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism,” Race and Class 40:171-88
Herbert, S., 1997, Policing space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Peck, J., 2003, “Geography and public policy: Mapping the penal state,” Progress in Human Geography 27 (2): 222-32
Strang, H. and Braithwaite, J., 2001, Restorative justice and civil society. Cambridge University Press
Wacquant, L., 2001, “The penalization of poverty and the rise of Neo-Liberalism,” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 9 (4): 401-12
