Penal Culture and Hyperincarceration

Penal Culture and Hyperincarceration
Author: Chris Cunneen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2016-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317082664

What are the various forces influencing the role of the prison in late modern societies? What changes have there been in penality and use of the prison over the past 40 years that have led to the re-valorization of the prison? Using penal culture as a conceptual and theoretical vehicle, and Australia as a case study, this book analyses international developments in penality and imprisonment. Authored by some of Australia’s leading penal theorists, the book examines the historical and contemporary influences on the use of the prison, with analyses of colonialism, post colonialism, race, and what they term the ’penal/colonial complex,’ in the construction of imprisonment rates and on the development of the phenomenon of hyperincarceration. The authors develop penal culture as an explanatory framework for continuity, change and difference in prisons and the nature of contested penal expansionism. The influence of transformative concepts such as ’risk management’, ’the therapeutic prison’, and ’preventative detention’ are explored as aspects of penal culture. Processes of normalization, transmission and reproduction of penal culture are seen throughout the social realm. Comparative, contemporary and historical in its approach, the book provides a new analysis of penality in the 21st century.

The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture

The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture
Author: Marcus Harmes
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 785
Release: 2020-02-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030360598

The Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture will be an essential reference point, providing international coverage and thematic richness. The chapters examine the real and imagined spaces of the prison and, perhaps more importantly, dwell in the uncertain space between them. The modern fixation with ‘seeing inside’ prison from the outside has prompted a proliferation of media visions of incarceration, from high-minded and worthy to voyeuristic and unrealistic. In this handbook, the editors bring together a huge breadth of disparate issues including women in prison, the view from ‘inside’, prisons as a source of entertainment, the real worlds of prison, and issues of race and gender. The handbook will inform students and lecturers of media, film, popular culture, gender, and cultural studies, as well as scholars of criminology and justice.

The Culture of Punishment

The Culture of Punishment
Author: Michelle Brown
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2009-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 081479145X

America is the most punitive nation in the world, incarcerating more than 2.3 million people—or one in 136 of its residents. Against the backdrop of this unprecedented mass imprisonment, punishment permeates everyday life, carrying with it complex cultural meanings. In The Culture of Punishment, Michelle Brown goes beyond prison gates and into the routine and popular engagements of everyday life, showing that those of us most distanced from the practice of punishment tend to be particularly harsh in our judgments. The Culture of Punishment takes readers on a tour of the sites where culture and punishment meet—television shows, movies, prison tourism, and post 9/11 new war prisons—demonstrating that because incarceration affects people along distinct race and class lines, it is only a privileged group of citizens who are removed from the experience of incarceration. These penal spectators, who often sanction the infliction of pain from a distance, risk overlooking the reasons for democratic oversight of the project of punishment and, more broadly, justifications for the prohibition of pain.

Thinking about Crime

Thinking about Crime
Author: Michael H. Tonry
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: Crime prevention
ISBN: 9780197720882

In this wide-ranging analysis, Michael Tonry argues that those responsible for crafting America's criminal justice policy have lost their way in a forest of good intentions, political cynicism and public anxieties.

Mass Imprisonment

Mass Imprisonment
Author: David Garland
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2001-05-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780761973249

This major new volume of papers by leading criminologists, sociologists and historians, sets out what is known about the political and penological causes of the phenomenon of mass imprisonment. Mass imprisonment, American-style, involves the penal segregation of large numbers of the poor and minorities. Imprisonment has become a central institution for the social control of the urban poor. Other countries are now looking to the USA to see what should be learned from this massive and controversial social experiment. This book describes mass imprisonment's impact upon crime, upon the minority communities most affected, upon social policy and, more broadly upon national culture. This is a book that all penologists and poli

A Country Called Prison

A Country Called Prison
Author: Mary D. Looman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2015
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0190211032

Weaving together sociological and psychological principles, theories of political reform, and real-life stories from experiences working in prison and with at-risk families, Looman and Carl form a foundation of understanding to demonstrate that prison is a culture, not purely an institution made up of fences, building, and policies.

Big Prisons, Big Dreams

Big Prisons, Big Dreams
Author: Michael Lynch
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2007-08-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813541409

The American prison system has grown tenfold since the 1970s, but crime rates in the United States have not decreased. This doesn't surprise Michael J. Lynch, a critical criminologist, who argues that our oversized prison system is a product of our consumer culture, the public's inaccurate beliefs about controlling crime, and the government's criminalizing of the poor. While deterrence and incapacitation theories suggest that imprisoning more criminals and punishing them leads to a reduction in crime, case studies, such as one focusing on the New York City jail system between 1993 and 2003, show that a reduction in crime is unrelated to the size of jail populations. Although we are locking away more people, Lynch explains that we are not targeting the worst offenders. Prison populations are comprised of the poor, and many are incarcerated for relatively minor robberies and violence. America's prison expansion focused on this group to the exclusion of corporate and white collar offenders who create hazardous workplace and environmental conditions that lead to deaths and injuries, and enormous economic crimes. If America truly wants to reduce crime, Lynch urges readers to rethink cultural values that equate bigger with better.

A Plague of Prisons

A Plague of Prisons
Author: Ernest Drucker
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2013-05-28
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1595588795

When Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Ernest Drucker’s A Plague of Prisons takes the same concepts and tools of public health that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS to make the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic. Drucker passionately argues that imprisonment—originally conceived as a response to the crimes of individuals—has become mass incarceration: a destabilizing force, a plague upon our body politic, that undermines families and communities, damaging the very social structures that prevent crime. Described as a “towering achievement” (Ira Glasser) and “the clearest and most intelligible case for a reevaluation of how we view incarceration” (Spectrum Culture), A Plague of Prisons offers a cutting-edge perspective on criminal justice in twenty-first-century America that “could help to shame the U.S. public into demanding remedial action” (The Lancet).

Prison Life in Popular Culture

Prison Life in Popular Culture
Author: Dawn K. Cecil
Publisher:
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2015
Genre: Criminal justice, Administration of
ISBN: 9781626372795

¿Engaging and revealing.... With authority and clarity, Cecil provides a sensitive analysis of the popular spectacle of prisons in US culture today.¿ ¿Mathieu Deflem, University of South Carolina ¿Should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand why society thinks the way it does about prisons, prisoners, guards, and punishment.¿ ¿Ray Surette, University of Central Florida Through the centuries, prisons were closed institutions, full of secrets and shrouded in mystery. But modern media culture has opened the gates. Dawn Cecil explores decades of popular culture¿from Golden Age Hollywood films to YouTube videos, from newspapers to beer labels, hip-hop music, and children¿s books¿to reveal how prison imagery shapes our understanding of who commits crimes, why, and how the criminal justice system should respond. Dawn K. Cecil is associate professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg.

Until We Reckon

Until We Reckon
Author: Danielle Sered
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1620974800

The award-winning “radically original” (The Atlantic) restorative justice leader, whose work the Washington Post has called “totally sensible and totally revolutionary,” grapples with the problem of violent crime in the movement for prison abolition A National Book Foundation Literature for Justice honoree A Kirkus “Best Book of 2019 to Fight Racism and Xenophobia” Winner of the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice Journalism Award Finalist for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice In a book Democracy Now! calls a “complete overhaul of the way we’ve been taught to think about crime, punishment, and justice,” Danielle Sered, the executive director of Common Justice and renowned expert on violence, offers pragmatic solutions that take the place of prison, meeting the needs of survivors and creating pathways for people who have committed violence to repair harm. Critically, Sered argues that reckoning is owed not only on the part of individuals who have caused violence, but also by our nation for its overreliance on incarceration to produce safety—at a great cost to communities, survivors, racial equity, and the very fabric of our democracy. Although over half the people incarcerated in America today have committed violent offenses, the focus of reformers has been almost entirely on nonviolent and drug offenses. Called “innovative” and “truly remarkable” by The Atlantic and “a top-notch entry into the burgeoning incarceration debate” by Kirkus Reviews, Sered’s Until We Reckon argues with searing force and clarity that our communities are safer the less we rely on prisons and jails as a solution for wrongdoing. Sered asks us to reconsider the purposes of incarceration and argues persuasively that the needs of survivors of violent crime are better met by asking people who commit violence to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends in ways that are meaningful to those they have hurt—none of which happens in the context of a criminal trial or a prison sentence.