Mary Bosworth

Jeanne Flavin

Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin bring together twelve original essays by prominent scholars to examine not only the discrimination that is evident, but also the structural and cultural forces that have influenced and continue to perpetuate the current situation. Contributors point to four major factors that have impacted public sentiment and criminal justice policy : colonialism, slavery, immigration, and globalization. In doing so they reveal how practices of punishment not only need particular ideas about race to exist, but they also legitimate them. The essays unearth troubling evidence that testifies to America's brutally racist past, and to White America's continued fear of and suspicion about racial and ethnic minorities. The legacy of slavery on punishment is considered, but also subjects that have received far less attention such as how colonizers' notions of cultural superiority shaped penal practices, the criminalization of reproductive rights, the link between citizenship and punishment, and the global export of crime control strategies.

From Colonialism to the War on Terror

Race, Gender, and Punishment

Exploring how power is negotiated in women's prisons, this book uses contemporary feminist theory to examine how women manage to resist the pains of imprisonment.

Agency and Power in Women's Prisons

Engendering Resistance

Are included. Annotation 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities

Alpa Parmar

Yolanda Vázquez

In an era of mass mobility, those who are permitted to migrate and those criminalised, controlled, and prohibited from migrating are heavily patterned by race. This volume places race at the centre of its analysis; 14 chapters examine, question, and explain the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control.

Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging

Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control

Agency and Power in Women's Prisons (Advances in Criminology)

As states around the globe detain foreigners in greater numbers, a critical, academic examination of the social and cultural world of immigration detention centres is long overdue. This groundbreaking study based on extensive fieldwork in the British system unveils the world of immigration detention - its culture, politics, and impact on detainees.

Inside Immigration Detention

The two-volume Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities aims to provide a critical overview of penal institutions within a historical and contemporary framework. Issues of race, gender, and class are fully integrated throughout in order to demonstrate the complexity of the implementation and intended results of incarceration. The Encyclopedia contains biographies, articles describing important legal statutes, and detailed and authoritative descriptions of the major prisons in the United States. Comparative data and examples are employed to analyze the American system within an international context. The Encyclopedia's 400 entries are written by recognized authorities. The appendix contains a comprehensive listing of every federal prison in the U.S., complete with facility details and service information.

On any given day nearly 3000 foreign national citizens are detained under immigration powers in UK detention centres alone. Around the world immigrants are routinely detained in similar conditions. The institutions charged with immigrant detention are volatile and contested sites. They are also places about which we know very little. What is their goal? How do they operate? How are they justified? Inside Immigration Detention lifts the lid on the hidden world of migrant detention, presenting the first national study of life in British immigration removal centres. Offering more than just a description of life behind bars of those men and women awaiting deportation, it uses staff and detainee testimonies to revisit key assumptions about state power and the legacies of colonialism under conditions of globalization. Based on fieldwork conducted in six immigration removal centres (IRCs) between 2009 and 2012, it draws together a large amount of empirical data including: detainee surveys and interviews, staff interviews, observation, and detailed field notes. From this, the book explores how immigration removal centres identify their inhabitants as strangers, constructing them as unfamiliar, ambiguous and uncertain. In this endeavour, the establishments are greatly assisted by their resemblance to prisons and by familiar racialized narratives about foreigners and nationality. However, as staff and detainee testimonies reveal, in their interactions and day-to-daylife women and men find many points of commonality. Such recognition of one another reveals the goal and effect of detention to be incomplete. Denial requires effort. In order to minimize the effort it must expend, the state governs at distance", via the contract. It also splits itself in two, deploying some immigration staff onsite, while keeping the actual decision-makers (the caseworkers) elsewhere, sequestered from the potentially destabilizing effects of facing up to those whom they wishto remove. Such distancing, while bureaucratically effective, contributes to the uncertainty of daily life in detention, and is often the source of considerable criticism and unease. Denial and familiarity are embodied and localized activities, whose pains and contradictions inhere in concrete relationships."

Carolyn Hoyle

Critically examining criminology's conceptual foundations, aims, methods, boundaries, and impact, this collection of specially-commissioned essays by leading international criminologists examines the current state of the discipline. It is essential reading for all academics and advanced students of criminology.

What is Criminology?

Criminology is a booming discipline, yet one which can appear divided and fractious. In this rich and diverse collection of 34 essays, some of the worlds leading criminologists respond to a series of questions designed to investigate the state, impact and future challenges of the discipline: What is criminology for? What is the impact of criminology? How should criminology be done? What are the key issues and debates in criminology today? What challenges does the discipline of criminology face? How has criminology as a discipline changed over the last few decades? The resulting essays identify a series of intellectual, methodological and ideological borders. Borders, in criminology as elsewhere, are policed, yet they are also frequently transgressed; criminologists can and do move across them to plunder, admire, or learn from other regions. While some boundaries may be more difficult or dangerous to cross than others it is rare to find an entirely secluded locale or community. In traversing ideological, political, geographical and disciplinary borders, criminologists bring training, tools and concepts, as well as key texts to share with foreigners. From such exchanges, over time, borders may break down, shift, or spring up, enriching those who take the journey and those who are visited. It is, in other words, in criminologys capacity for and commitment to reflexivity, on which the strength of the field depends.

This book explores how power is negotiated in women’s prisons. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in three penal establishments in England, it analyses how women manage the restrictions of imprisonment and the manner in which they attempt to resist institutional control. It is proposed that power is negotiated on a private, individual level, as women often resist the institution simply by trying to maintain an image of control over their own lives. However, their image of themselves as active, reasoning agents is undermined by institutional regimes which encourage traditional, passive, feminine behaviour at the same time as they deny the women their identities and responsibilities as mothers, wives, girlfriends and sisters. Femininity is, therefore, both the form and the goal of women’s imprisonment. Yet paradoxically, femininity also offers the possibility of resistance, because women manage to rebel by appropriating and changing aspects of it.

Mary Bosworth

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