The Society of Captives, first published in 1958, is a classic of modern criminology and one of the most important books ever written about prison.Gresham Sykes wrote the book at the height of the ...Cold War, motivated by the world's experience of fascism and communism to study the closest thing to a totalitarian system in American life: a maximum security prison. His analysis calls into question the extent to which prisons can succeed in their attempts to control every facet of life--or whether the strong bonds between prisoners make it impossible to run a prison without finding ways of "accommodating" the prisoners.Re-released now with a new introduction by Bruce Western and a new epilogue by the author, The Society of Captives will continue to serve as an indispensable text for coming to terms with the nature of modern power.
In this rare firsthand account, Lorna Rhodes takes us into a hidden world that lies at the heart of the maximum security prison. Focusing on the "supermaximums"-and the mental health units that ...complement them-Rhodes conveys the internal contradictions of a system mandated to both punish and treat. Her often harrowing, sometimes poignant, exploration of maximum security confinement includes vivid testimony from prisoners and prison workers, describes routines and practices inside prison walls, and takes a hard look at the prison industry. More than an exposé,Total Confinementis a theoretically sophisticated meditation on what incarceration tells us about who we are as a society. Rhodes tackles difficult questions about the extreme conditions of confinement, the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, and an ever-advancing technology of isolation and surveillance. Using her superb interview skills and powers of observation, she documents how prisoners, workers, and administrators all struggle to retain dignity and a sense of self within maximum security institutions. In settings that place in question the very humanity of those who live and work in them, Rhodes discovers complex interactions-from the violent to the tender-among prisoners and staff.Total Confinementoffers an indispensable close-up of the implications of our dependence on prisons to solve long-standing problems of crime and injustice in the United States.
The Multicultural Prison presents a unique sociological analysis of the daily negotiation of ethnic difference within the closed world of the male prison. The political economy of racialized ...incarceration together with penal expansion has seen the disproportionate incarceration of diverse British national, foreign and migrant populations, brought into close proximity within the confines of the prison. The impact of broad social changes - globalised migration, the deepening of North-South economic inequalities, and the assertion of minority groups' claims for social and political recognition and equality — are considered at a time when issues of race, multiculture, and racialization inside the prison have been somewhat neglected. Recognising also the significance of religion, age, masculinity, national and local identifications, it considers how multiple identities configure social interactions among prisoners in late modern prisoner society. Using rich empirical material drawn from extensive qualitative research in Rochester Young Offenders' Institution and Maidstone prison, the negotiation and tensions of ‘doing multiculturalism’ in prison form the central part of this book. Prisoners' vivid accounts of economically and socially marginalised lives outside, some in multicultural, some in monocultural settings, provides a backdrop to the interior world of the prison where ethnicity shapes social relations but in a contingent fashion. Ethnic, faith, and masculine identities may be deeply invested in, disavowed, constituted through loose solidarities based on 'postcode identities', even providing a means for cultural hybridity in prison cultures, yet they can also act as a familiar fault line creating wary, unstable, and antagonistic relations among prisoners. The Multicultural Prison provides a unique insight into how race is written into prison social relations using stories from both white and minority ethnic prisoners. It considers challenging issues of discrimination, inequality, entitlement, and preferential treatment from the perspective of diverse groups of prisoners.
In search of safety Owen, Barbara; Wells, James; Pollock, Joycelyn
2017., 20170131, 2017, 2017-01-24, Volume:
3
eBook
In Search of Safetytakes a close look at the sources of gendered violence and conflict in women's prisons. The authors examine how intersectional inequalities and cumulative disadvantages are at the ...root of prison conflict and violence and mirror the women's pathways to prison. Women must negotiate these inequities by developing forms of prison capital-social, human, cultural, emotional, and economic-to ensure their safety while inside. The authors also analyze how conflict and subsequent violence result from human-rights violations inside the prison that occur within the gendered context of substandard prison conditions, inequalities of capital among those imprisoned, and relationships with correctional staff.In Search of Safetyproposes a way forward-the implementation of international human-rights standards for U.S. prisons.
Death and redemption Barnes, Steven A
2011., 20110404, 2011, c2011., 2011-04-04, 20110101
eBook
Death and Redemption offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag--the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons--in Soviet society. Soviet ...authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. In this provocative book, Steven Barnes argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed "reeducated" through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who "failed" never got out alive.
Jiang discusses her zine More Than This: Meditations on Abolition, Presence, and Staying Soft, which dwells on the roles that presence and experimentation play in abolition and transformative ...justice. The zine is anchored by the two quotes which appear on page two: Ruth Wilson Gilmore's assertion that "abolition is about presence, not absence" and Mariame Kaba's framing of abolition as "building a million different little experiments." She notes that she wanted to convey through this zine there is nothing natural or inevitable about the expansion of prisons across the American landscape--and that their contingency provides an opening toward transformation. The space the prison takes up could have been (indeed, can be) filled instead with places which support and sustain communities.
When most people think of prisons, they imagine chaos, violence, and fundamentally, an atmosphere of overwhelming brute masculinity. But real prisons rarely fit the Big House stereotype of popular ...film and literature. One fifth of all correctional officers are women, and the rate at which women are imprisoned is growing faster than that of men. Yet, despite increasing numbers of women prisoners and officers, ideas about prison life and prison work are sill dominated by an exaggerated image of men's prisons where inmates supposedly struggle for physical dominance.In a rare comparative analysis of men's and women's prisons, Dana Britton identifies the factors that influence the gendering of the American workplace, a process that often leaves women in lower-paying jobs with less prestige and responsibility.In interviews with dozens of male and female officers in five prisons, Britton explains how gender shapes their day-to-day work experiences. Combining criminology, penology, and feminist theory, she offers a radical new argument for the persistence of gender inequality in prisons and other organizations. At Work in the Iron Cage demonstrates the importance of the prison as a site of gender relations as well as social control.
