This paper examines the politics of punishment in contemporary Central Europe through a case study of the social construction of Roma crime. It explores how penal politics in the post-socialist period has devolved into a form of penal nationalism, premised on the nationalist criminalization of the other. I suggest that the treatment of the Roma is symptomatic of two central elements of popular discourses of punishment. First, the political use of Romani crime is a uniting force among these countries. Across the region, the Roma are presumed to commit all the crime; they are thought to reject common national values and norms; and they are said to be most transgressive. Second, I demonstrate how this penal nationalism evokes an extreme politics of inclusion and exclusiona politics that treats perceived differences through confinement, while insisting on a hierarchical version of social and cultural inclusion. In this way, the paper uses Roma crime to explore the form and focus, as well as the preoccupations and anxieties, of penal nationalism in East/Central Europe.
Lynne Haney is Professor of Sociology at New York University. She has conducted research on the welfare and penal systems in the United States and in Central Europe. She is the author of Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire (California 2009), Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (California 2002), and is co-editor of Families of a New World: Gender, Politics, and State Development in a Global Context (Routlege 2003). She was a Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2004, and she is currently a Senior Fellow at the CEU's Institute for Advanced Study where she is pursuing her new project on the politics of punishment in Central Europe.