Using the Future to Predict the Past: Prison Population Projections and the Colonisation of Penal Imagination

Abstract

At one point while writing this chapter, a police helicopter hovered outside my office window, while several police vans surrounded a building just up the hill. Local cops had joined with university security staff to physically remove the students who were occupying it (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-12819114). The occupation was most immediately over the future use of what had been a graduate students’ social club, but more generally, it was driven by a proposed restructuring of the university in which several modern languages, anthropology, adult education courses and the whole nursing school were at risk of being reorganised out of existence. The case for such significant cuts was made on the basis of a statistical forecast, the topic of this chapter. The university projected that in five years there would be a budget shortfall of £35 million, and consequently proposed an aggressive strategy of cuts to teaching subjects (and graduate amenities). This statistical forecast led to new communities forming (an active email list across subjects for circulating information with updates on the planned cuts and the graduate club occupation), organisational contraction and expansion (I joined a union while too distracted by helicopter noise to work on this chapter, the subjects under threat scrambled to reorganise and develop links with more secure subjects) and, ultimately, physical force. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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