José A. Brandariz’s research while affiliated with Universidade da Coruña and other places

This conceptual article offers new ways to map and understand the role of transparency in carceral governance. Mobilizing our expertise in our respective fields of study, we comparatively reflect on case studies of carceral transparency in Argentina, Canada, and Spain. In each, we decentre forms of transparency favoured by carceral authorities by considering the range of mechanisms and actors at play in the production of transparency. Taken together, our accounts of cultures of transparency in prisons and migrant detention facilities in the global north and south highlight absences and presences of different means of generating transparency across carceral sites and denaturalize northern and state-centric ideas about carceral transparency. Ultimately, our juxtaposition of three cultures of transparency reveals the range of means of generating carceral knowledge and the potential scope for its dissemination. Amidst persistent human rights violations, this work underlines the need for further southernized research on transparency to shape possibilities of carceral governance.

Against the backdrop of the economic and political crises affecting Europe in the late 2000s and early 2010s, incarceration rates began to shrink in many European countries, ushering in a decarceration period that continues to this day—albeit with cross-border divergences. In fact, Europe was the world region with the greatest decline in incarceration rates in the 2010s. Evidently, this unexpected shift stands in stark contrast to the penal populism policies characterising penality in global north regions in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as to the mass incarceration path still followed by many global south jurisdictions in the 2020s. Spain is a suitable national case to examine this recent turn, since Spanish incarceration rates increased almost eightfold in just three decades, before an intriguing and steady decline began that is almost unparalleled in western Europe. This paper focuses on the Spanish case, exploring the background and proximate causes that have enabled the current decarceration scenario. In addition, it scrutinises if and to what extent the changes witnessed in the Spanish case reverberate across wider European regions. In so doing, the paper attempts to grasp the climate change impacting the penal field in many global north jurisdictions.

Stop and search measures, and policing practices more generally, have rarely made their way into public and political conversations in Spain. However, three phenomena placed policing strategies in the political arena, raising genuine public controversies. Initially, some non-state actors successfully challenged political guidelines targeting potential irregular migrants for intensive stop and search interventions in the late 2000s. The leak of internal documents detailing these police practices and the action of local networks of activists resulted in regulatory changes banning racial profiling in 2012. Subsequently, a broad range of grassroots organisations raised public awareness over the widespread use of stop and search interventions as a low-profile tool to curb increasing political protests in the early to mid-2010s. In 2015, new public order legislation was enacted to expand police powers. Finally, the heavy-handed strategies used by the Spanish administration to counter Catalan dissent since the mid-2010s have paved the way for the widespread politicisation of a variety of policing practices, stop and search measures among them. This paper scrutinises these three events of politicisation of policing interventions, considering the political scenarios, narratives, and actors, as well as the strengths and shortcomings of political campaigns challenging police powers.

Studies on immigration enforcement and bordered penality frequently depict immigration detention as a system of confinement enforced in closed, relatively opaque facilities geared towards the expeditious deportation of non-citizens. This notion is actually a synecdoche of the diverse forms of containment and the varying, more or less dispensable roles played by detention practices within immigration enforcement systems. This paper challenges this perspective by considering prominent changes taking place in the detention field across Europe, which can be seen as signals of a gradual detention crisis. In this respect, it explores the versatility of detention practices, which have made the detention system particularly resilient. Despite this resilience, though, the paper unveils and maps the obsolescence of detention centric models of immigration enforcement, which manifests itself in the jurisdictions in which detention systems either are largely irrelevant or have been shrinking in the recent past. Additionally, the paper examines the consolidation of the hotspot archipelago in Mediterranean Europe, which has expanded the containment capacity of the border control apparatus and made it increasingly plastic. Yet the hotspot system is in itself an additional manifestation of the obsolescence of detention-centric models of enforcement. After having scrutinised these different dimensions, the paper concludes by exploring the promises and pitfalls of a changing detention landscape and suggesting directions for future research.

Non-state actors are playing a variety of roles in the governance of police stops. Civil society groups monitoring police practices are emerging across Europe, giving shape to new forms of civil oversight. This chapter scrutinises these advocacy groups, which show significant cross-national differences in terms of its composition, impact and strategies. There are also differences with regard to the specific, over-policed population groups that are actively participating in these oversight developments. These changes are taking place in the framework of a policing scenario characterised by the ‘high visibility’ of police practices. The chapter also explores the proliferating forms of informal oversight carried out by lay people recording police stops, scrutinising if and to what extent these DIY oversight practices are reinforcing police accountability.