Explaining U.S. Imprisonment examines women in prison, minorities, the historical path to the modern prison, a wide range of contemporary issues, and social influences on prison reform. While focusing on prisons, this one-of-a-kind book is written within the context of the sociology of punishment and covers cutting-edge topics such as detaining immigrants, the War on Terror, and prison in the 21st century.
Features
- Uses a historical and social framework to place U.S. corrections and imprisonment policies in context
- Includes first-hand accounts from inmates, as well as primary source documents written by early prison reformers
- Integrates research on women, men, and minorities throughout, rather than separating each topic into a stand-alone chapter
- Begins chapters with thought-provoking quotes to set the stage for the content that follows
Explaining U.S. Imprisonment is ideal for use as a supplementary text in undergraduate and graduate courses on corrections, imprisonment, and theories of punishment. It is also appropriate for use in courses on criminal justice, incarceration, minority issues in law, sociology of law, and the study of the modern prison system.
Inhoudsopgave
INTRODUCTION
1: THE ORIGINS OF U.S. IMPRISONMENT: BEYOND THE PENITENTIARY
Colonial Justice
The War of Independence (1775-1783)
Prisons, Slavery and the Antebellum South
Religious Reform in the North
The Civil War
Reconstruction
Women’s Prison
Debating Imprisonment
Conclusion
2: PENAL REFORM AND PRISON SCIENCE: ENGINEERING ORDER AND BUILDING AMERICA
Penal Reformism: The National Prison Association
‘Prison Science’: Reformism and Social Engineering
The First World War: Conscientious Objectors and Prison
The Federal Bureau of Prisons
The Depression: Prisons, Labour and Social Structure
World War II: Questions of National Security
Women’s Reformatories
Reform, Science and Nation-Building
Conclusion
3: PRISON CULTURE: SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL CHANGE
The Prison Community
Importation vs. Deprivation
Gender
Race
Sexuality
Research Methods, Governance and Social Control
Conclusion: Contextualizing Sociological Accounts of Imprisonment
4: AN ERA OF UNCERTAINTY: RIOTS, REFORM AND REPRESSION
Attica
Activism Before and After Attica
The Administration of Justice
The Demise of Rehabilitation
Penal Revisionism and Prisoners’ Rights: Theory v. Practice
Conclusion
5: THE PUNITIVE TURN: LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR MASS IMPRISONMENT
The Reagan Years
Legislating Punishment
Private Prisons
Prison Building and Supermax
Challenging Imprisonment in an Era of Punitivism
Conclusion
6: A CULTURE OF CONTROL
Prisons and Politics in the 1990s
Punishment and Modern Society: Explaining the Culture of Control
Neo-conservatives, the Culture Wars and Prison
Managing Prisons
Experiencing Incarceration and Challenging the Culture of Control
Conclusion
7: CHALLENGING THE CULTURE OF CONTROL?
Prisons in the Twenty-first Century
The Costs of Imprisonment: An Emerging Critique
Prison Conditions and Public Safety
The Courts: An Alternative Source of Critique
Hurricane Katrina
Governing Through Crime
Opening the Prison: Convict Voices
Conclusion: Governing Through Imprisonment?
8: THE NEW DETENTION: SECURING THE BORDER
Context
The Law
Detaining Immigrants
The War on Terror
Scholarly Accounts of the War on Terror: A Failure of the Criminological Imagination?
Conclusion
CONCLUSION
Over de auteur
Mary Bosworth is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University. Her research interests include prisons, race, and gender. She is the author of Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons (1999).