Becoming a European prisoner: penal reforms and European belonging in Georgia and Estonia

Over the past three decades many former Soviet states introduced reforms to the penal systems they inherited from socialist regimes. In most countries of the post-Soviet space, these reforms have been depicted by policy-makers as projects of ‘Europeanization’. This article investigates the discursive construction of penal reform in Georgia and Estonia after these countries gained independence. We examine images and practices of punishment and answer two questions: how are post-Soviet penal reforms framed by policy-makers and experienced by prisoners? How is Europeanization of punishment understood in the post-Soviet space? We conduct an analysis of policy discourse and of narratives of people who witnessed these changes while serving prison sentences. We treat images of ‘Europe’ as a discursively produced ideational structure, and analyze how different understandings of punishment are linked to, or pitted against, ideas of Europeanness. We locate our study within the framework of critical approaches to European integration, and introduce the study of punishment to these debates. We show that punishment is not simply another case study of the relations between a European ‘centre’ and its ‘peripheries’, but argue rather that images and practices of ‘European punishment’ create new social hierarchies and fractures in post-Soviet societies.