Suchergebnisse

The "pains of imprisonment" is one of the most prominent concepts in the social study of incarceration. First introduced by Gresham Sykes in 1958, it has subsequently been taken up by generations of authors and applied to an increasingly diverse range of contexts, populations, and activities. This article details how the "pains of imprisonment" concept has evolved and expanded. It is based on an analysis of 50 academic works (books, articles, and chapters) that used some variation of the "pains of…" formulation. We identified four main trajectories in the literature that have contributed to this expansion, which we document in the first section through the use of illustrative examples. This is followed by a more critical series of reflections that seek to appreciate some of the organizational and political factors that might account for the appeal of this concept. Finally, we conclude by questioning whether the "pains" framing might paradoxically be a victim of its own success, with its analytical and political purchase potentially blunted through overuse and overextension.

Migration-related detention, the administrative incarceration of people lacking legal authorisation to remain, has become a standardised technique used by states to violently regulate and discipline undesired mobility. As carceral junctions, migration detention camps serve to identify, confine, symbolically punish and expel people deemed 'out of place' in the national order of things. As bordering mechanisms, they are techniques of sorting and controlling populations, and sites where we can observe the enforcement of state racism. These processes of racialisation and expulsion operate corporally and affectively. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with prison officers working inside Denmark's migration-related detention camp, and engaging with the literature on race, emotion and border criminology, the article traces the role of racial affect in forging the identities of people interacting inside the camp. It demonstrates how prison officers' racialised suspicion, compromised compassion, and passionate nationalism partake in making incarcerated migrants into expellable subjects, and in ordering them in accordance with matrices of racial differentiation. The officers' emotions, I argue, should be understood as part of the camp's infrastructure, and productive for the border regime.

This article analyses findings from the Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council (ESRC/AHRC)-funded 'Distant Voices – Coming Home' project (ES/POO2536/1), which uses creative methods to explore crime, punishment and reintegration. Focusing on songs co-written in Scottish prisons, we argue that the songs serve to complicate and substantiate our grasp of what state punishment does to people, as well as perhaps affording their prison-based co-writers both moments and modalities of resistance to dominant narratives within criminal justice. In doing so, they creatively express and explore affective and perhaps even unconscious aspects of the self. We argue that our work contributes to a more expansive and considered treatment of narrative in criminology; one that admits and engages with a more diverse and creative range of expressions of experience and selfhood, all of them partial and some of them contradictory. By attending to diverse kinds of narratives embodied in these songs, we learn more about what criminalisation, penalisation and incarceration do to people and to their stories.

Critical prison studies (CPS) is increasingly influential in scholarly discussions about decolonizing prisons. Proponents of CPS largely oppose the idea that cultural prison programs are decolonial, which include courses teaching Indigenous cultures and colonial history, prisons facilitating spirituality, involving Elders and communities in rehabilitation, and specialized prisons called "healing lodges." Most CPS scholars writing on the topic disparage these initiatives as assimilationist and thus a weapon of cultural genocide. For these scholars, decolonizing prisons is impossible. CPS arguments against Indigenized programming are premised on abolitionist theory rather than a discernible decolonial method centring the perspectives of Indigenous peoples affected by prisons. I explore the accuracy and utility of CPS scholars' arguments against Indigenized programming, drawing from 587 interviews with incarcerated men and women detained inside six prisons across Western Canada. Almost 40% of these participants identified as Indigenous. Indigenous interviewees nearly universally praised Indigenized programs for how they can help heal and empower those affected by colonial violence. Participants desired more cultural programming and easier access to such resources. More research is needed on how prisons develop and implement cultural programming, but existing empirical works suggest that these initiatives, while flawed, support the dignity of incarcerated Indigenous peoples. My critique is a call for criminologists writing on Indigenous issues to consider the ambiguity and tensions of decolonial processes and to premise their arguments foremost on methods centring Indigenous peoples affected by incarceration.

Abstract: This project takes a look at the Crack Epidemic and the response of the federal government during the mid-1980s. I examine the Anti-Drug laws of 1986 and 1988 and the strict guidelines it upheld. Then I examine the journey the reform of the mandatory minimum sentencing for crack and cocaine and explain the reluctances of Congress and other institutions for change the federal sentencing laws.

EE.UU. es una de las democracias con mayores tasas de encarcelamiento del mundo. No obstante, el problema no son sólo las dimensiones de su población penitenciaria -que, en 2010, superó los 7 millones de personas-, sino el enorme incremento de la que esta ha sido objeto en las últimas décadas y su concreto perfil. Según los estudios existentes, el denominado fenómeno de la encarcelación masiva ha recaído con especial virulencia sobre un sector de la población: los hombres jóvenes afroamericanos que residen en grandes ciudades. En este contexto, el objetivo del trabajo es ofrecer una visión actualizada de la política criminal estadounidense, examinando las causas y las consecuencias de la encarcelación masiva, a partir de las contribuciones de los más importantes representantes de la doctrina norteamericana. En este sentido, se examina el debate existente en EE.UU. acerca del papel del componente racial, que para algunos autores equipararía la encarcelación masiva a una nueva forma de segregacionismo. También se analizan con cierto detenimiento algunos problemas surgidos en la ejecución de las penas de prisión, como la violencia sexual en los centros penitenciarios o el abuso del cumplimiento en régimen de aislamiento. El interés de este trabajo en el contexto español es evidente, habida cuenta del rumbo netamente punitivista emprendido por el legislador nacional. Así, la conclusión alcanzada tras el estudio del caso estadounidense es precisamente que las consecuencias de una política criminal punitivista resultan difícilmente asumibles en democracia. ; The United States of America is one of the democracies, which has one of the highest prison populations in the world. The problem is not only a matter of sheer numbers of inmates, but the extreme speed in which the prison population has grown in the last decades, as well as the specific patterns it has followed. According to current studies, this phenomenon, referred to as mass incarceration, has resulted in the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population: young black males in large urban centers. In this context, the goal of this work is to provide an updated overview of American criminal policy, further examining the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, and studying the contributions of the most relevant scholars in the United States. Important topics that are examined include the role of race in mass incarceration; a debate that is highly relevant since, according to certain authors, mass incarceration constitutes a new form of segregation. Other issues addressed concern problems that arise during custody, such as prison rape and the abuse of solitary confinement. The relevance of this study in the Spanish context is obvious in view of the clear punitivist approach embraced by our national legislator. In fact, the conclusion reached on the basis of this case study is that the consequences of such punitivism can hardly be accepted in a democracy.