The Dictionary of Human Geography

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of post-war development economics and, it

must be said, of statism – become the voice

oflaissez faire? How can we grasp the fact that

‘shock therapy’ in eastern Europe was more

the product of the enthusiastic Hungarian

reformers than of the more reticent American

neo-liberal apparatchiks? It is sometimes

noted that the 1991 World Development

Report (shaped by former US Secretary of

the Treasury Lawrence Summers) marked a

neo-liberal watershed in its refiguring of the

role of the state. But it wasafrica(notlatin

americaor eastern Europe) that proved to

be the first testing ground of neo-liberalism’s

assault on the over-extended public sector,

on physical capital formation and on the pro-

liferation of market distortions by government.

There is much that remains unclear in the rise

of neo-liberal hegemony as a particular force

of capitalism.

AsPolanyimighthaveanticipated,threedec-

ades of radical neo-liberalism culminated in the

autumn of 2008 with a spectacular and massive

implosion of the US financial sector, turning

quickly into a deeper and systemic crisis of cap-

italism itself. The catastrophic collapse of US

investment banks – which ramified globally

producingde factobank nationalizations in

much of western Europe – was triggered by a

classichousingbubble.Duringthe1990s,how-

ever, this bubble was, unlike the past, driven by

newanddubiousfinancialandmortgageinstru-

ments, and by the utter failure of the financial

regulatory institutions (the credit rating

agencies and the Securities and Exchange

Commission in particular). By late 2008, in

spite of a massive $700 billion bailout by the

US Treasury, credit and the banking sector

remained in effect frozen and the prospect of a

massive global recession loomed. The great

experiment in free market utopianism - the so-

called ‘neo-liberal grand slam’ - had put

Keynesianism back on the political agenda.

In the US and much of Europe, a Polanyian

counter-revolution - in the US there is talk of a

new New Deal – is now in the offing. mw

capture^recapture methods A sampling

technique that was developed inecologyto

estimate population size and vital rates

(including survival, movement and growth).

A search is made in a defined area and identi-

fiedanimals are captured and marked or

recorded in some way. Visits are made on

subsequent occasions and the proportion

of unmarked animals is recorded; this

allows, given assumptions, the estimation of

the total population. Model-based approaches

(Cormack, 1989) have been developed that

usecategorical data analysis to provide

confidence intervals for the estimates. With

human populations, the method uses the

extent to which the same individuals are to

be found in different data sources; thus

Hickman, Higgins, Hope et al. (2004) esti-

mated the total number of drug users by using

five data sources – community recruited

survey, specialist drug treatment, arrest refer-

ral, syringe exchange, and accident and

emergency kj

carceral geographies Spaces in which indi-

viduals are confined, subjected to surveil-

lance or otherwise deprived of essential

freedoms can be termed ‘carceral’. The most

obvious examples of these are jails and

prisons, which arestate-sponsored spaces of

detention, typically used to punish criminal

offenders. Prisons are relatively young, in his-

torical terms, first appearing in Western

Europe in the eighteenth century. These

spaces were designed to maximize surveil-

lance, and to encourage self-monitoring and

possible rehabilitation.

In geography, much interest in carceral

institutions flows from Michel Foucault’s

influential study,Discipline and punish: the birth

of the prison(1995 [1975]). There, Foucault

traced the logics that underlay early prison

designs, and sought to illustrate how these

logics were deployed by other social institu-

tions, such as schools and military organiza-

tions. Foucault’s description of power as

diffuse and capillary has influenced consider-

able work acrosshuman geography, much of

which demonstrates how social control is

mobilized through the construction and regu-

lation ofspace.

Such geographies of control are widespread.

From its birth ineurope, the use of incarcer-

ation as a punishment practice diffused widely

and quickly. Indeed, in some former colonial

states, prisons built decades ago by the colo-

nial powers are still in use (Stern, 1998).

Today, there is evidence that the harsh pun-

ishment practices common in the USA

are diffusing through much of the rest of the

world. Although prisons and their operative

conditions vary across the globe, certain char-

acteristics are common: their populations are

dominated by members of lower economic

classes and ostracized social groups; their

environments are commonly overcrowded,

dirty, disease-ridden and violent; and their

everyday realities make elusive personal secu-

rity, privacy and dignity.

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 64 31.3.2009 9:45pm

CAPTURE–RECAPTURE METHODS