ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2023-24
ISRF Political Economy Fellow 2023-24
Jon Burnett is a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Hull, joining from Swansea University in 2022. His research focuses on and interrogates carcerality, political economies of work and punishment, and state violence. He has published extensively in a range of academic and non-academic fora, and he is the author of Work and the Carceral State (2022, Pluto Press).
Jon has previously worked in research-based roles at Positive Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers (PAFRAS), Medical Justice and the Institute of Race Relations. He has been a witness at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on the Human Rights of Migrant and Refugee Peoples, and he is the co-editor of the journal Justice, Power and Resistance.
This project examines the forms of expropriation and accumulation which are generated and circulated through an expansive carceral state in England and Wales (E&W). This expansion is clear: pledges to increase the prison population by 20,000 people by the mid-2020s have been matched by moves to recruit 20,000 more police officers, strengthen sentencing powers, eradicate some forms of accountability and increase prison capacity. Meanwhile, over the last few decades new forms of confinement, control and surveillance have been fostered through, for example, punitive immigration policies and the war on terror, and many welfare services have been hardened under rubrics of reform and conditionality. However, while notions of carcerality have been deployed as powerful conceptual tools in mobilising against repressive forms of punishment in recent decades, within E&W there has been no substantive study exploring the regimes of accumulation sustained by a carceral state – their roles and functions – bringing these together into a single analytical frame. This project, therefore, seeks to do something innovative. First, expanding on a trajectory of my previous work (e.g. Applicant, 2020; 2022a) across multiple sites it seeks to: examine carceral sites as labour control regimes; understand the role of monetary sanctions and the utilisation of fees and charging regimes as forms of extraction; foreground the role of economic arguments in rationalising carceral expansion and map the interlocking economic interests invested in securing the carceral state’s reproduction. In doing so, its unique methodological approach brings together interviews with those who have directly experienced accumulation regimes, freedom of information (FOI) requests, analysis of contracts and critical discourse analysis of economic rationalisations for carceral expansion. Second, it is envisaged the project will help bring new understandings to the distinct contours of the carceral state in E&W, and support movements resisting carceral expansion and building equitable, fairer societies.
If you would like to contact any of our Fellows to discuss their ISRF-funded work, please contact Dr Lars Cornelissen (Academic Editor) in the first instance, at [email protected].