Prisons of the Past: The Politics of Punishment in Central Europe

This talk will explore the politics of punishment in contemporary Central Europe. It examines how penal politics take shape in a region with direct experience with the abuses of penal confinement. How do political calls for law and order get answered by populations withinsight into the other agendas so often masked by penal harshness? How are they translated into actual penal policies and institutions? I address these questions through a discussion of penal discourses, policies, and practices in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Czech Republic. Based on three years of fieldwork in Hungarian prisons, as well as comparative work on regional penal discourses and policies, this talk analyzes the layers of complexity and contradiction that characterize the post-socialist world of punishment. It also highlights the convergences and divergences in regional politics of punishment—while teasing out the intersecting influences of past and present, of global and local, and of ideology and practice on those politics.