Perverse Penalities: Towards a Penology of the Military

This chapter explores the concept of penality in the context of the United States (US) military and particularly since the beginning of the US involvement in Iraq. It focuses specifically on the overlap between two major ‘sectors’—the military industrial complex (MIC) and the prison industrial complex (PIC). Our central argument is that there is a problematic—more specifically, perverse—alliance between these sectors and that the nature of this alliance is central to understanding how the practice of penality unfolds in times of war and military conflict. We are especially interested in continuities as well as discontinuities with penal practice in domestic settings. In contrast to David Garland’s (2013: 494) contention that ‘The state’s military power … [is] unlikely to be directly relevant to penal policy’, we argue that military power has at its core a retributive element, notwithstanding its involvements also include nation building and/or peacekeeping operations. This can most starkly be seen in the abhorrent events occurring in Iraq at Abu Ghraib, but also in the mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and historically in the ferocity of the actions of American soldiers involved in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968.