Harm and governance of prisons’ systemic overcrowding

Overcrowding has been on the national policy agendas of many jurisdictions for decades. While many other aspects of punishment are largely investigated as penal policy-related issues, overcrowding has not received the same attention. This article investigates how we may best understand prison congestion by considering it as a widely accepted operational condition for many prison systems. Following a brief introduction on how overcrowding is a structural problem in many jurisdictions, the essay is developed into three independent, but related, parts: an analysis of overcrowding and its definitional issues that includes a discussion of the theoretical and epistemological challenges it poses; a discussion of the impact and legitimacy of congestion on incarceration experience via the notion of ‘harm’; and, finally, the discussion of the concept of ‘governance of systemic overcrowding’. By doing so the paper aims to challenge the current knowledge on prison overcrowding and wants to suggest a new analytical standpoint, which, however, is deserving of further research.