Brownbag: Is Southeastern Model of Punishment Too Harsh?

13:00 - 14:00 VeranstalterIn Zentrum für Südosteuropastudien, SOEGA & Südosteuropa-Gesellschaft Veranstaltungsort: HS 04. Universitätsplatz 4, EG - Teilnahme. Termin vormerken This research asks why the prison culture in the contemporary Western Balkans - a region of major significance for the EU - is so resistant to change after over two decades of endeavours on part of the EU and Council of Europe to reform the Balkan penitentiary establishments in line with the European humanitarian standards. Influential modernization theorists such as Max Weber predicted that democratization of society will lead to the democratization of prison culture. While in the Western European context democratization has indeed led to positive changes in prison culture, the political changes in the Balkans have not led to the abolition of the repressive penal practices of the totalitarian past. The NGOs working in the area report about the deplorable carceral conditions and ill-treatment of ethnic minority prisoners in the Balkan prisons - the practices that violate both the European human rights norms and the respective international standards to which the Balkan states earlier subscribed. The hypothesis behind this research is that the contemporary Balkan prison system inherited a dual penal culture modelled on both the fascist and communist forms of imprisonment, which makes it today a site of "harsh" treatment of inmates, despite the changes in the political system.