Crime, Prisons and Viscous Culture

Crime, Prisons and Viscous Culture PDF Author: Finola Farrant
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137490101
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
This unique book explores criminalized identities and the idea of 'viscous culture' to provide new understandings of crime, punishment and justice. It shows that viscous culture encourages some of us to become outlaws, monsters or shapeshifters who challenge systems of domination and forces of control. Crime, Prisons and Viscous Culture interweaves analyses of popular culture with extensive empirical research to explore both the glamorous and grotesque nature of crime, control and containment. Through encounters with numerous popular and mythological archetypes the book explores the boundaries of the criminological discipline. Criminology itself is presented as fragmented, distorted and fascinating, and the important transdisciplinary potential of criminology is highlighted. In doing so, this book will be of great interest to scholars of criminology, cultural studies, popular culture and sociological theory.

The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture

The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture PDF Author: Marcus Harmes
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030360598
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 785

Book Description
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 PDF Author: Michelle Brown
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081479999X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Against the backdrop of unprecedented mass imprisonment, punishment permeates everyday American life, carrying with it complex cultural meanings. This study shows how racial & class distinctions have become entwined with the distinctions between the punished & those who sanction, but do not suffer punishment.

The Cultural Prison

The Cultural Prison PDF Author: John M. Sloop
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 081735333X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
The Cultural Prison brings a new dimension to the study of prisoners and punishment by focusing on how the punishment of American offenders is represented and shaped in the mass media through public arguments.

American Furies

American Furies PDF Author: Sasha Abramsky
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807042229
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
In this dramatic expose of U.S. penitentiaries and the communities around them, Sasha Abramsky finds that prisons have dumped their age-old goal of rehabilitation, often for political reasons. The new "ideal," unknown to most Americans, is a punitive mandate marked by a drive toward vengeance. Surveying this state of affairs--life sentences for nonviolent crimes, appalling conditions, the growth of private prisons, the treatment of juveniles--Abramsky asks: Does the vengeful impulse ennoble our culture or demean it? What can become of people who are quarantined for years in a violent subculture? California's Three Strikes law typifies the politics that exploit the grief of victims' families and our fears of violent crime. Brilliantly researched and compellingly told, American Furies shows that the ethos of "lock 'em up and throw away the key" has enormous social costs. "The most urgent book of the season. Sasha Abramsky provides us with an invaluable, if harrowing, audit of the cataclysmic damage inflicted upon American values by American prisons. The lack of compassion in our national life and the gangrened hearts of our politicians pose greater threats to our childrens' futures than any overseas terrorist conspiracy." --Mike Davis, professor of history at University of California-Irvine and author of seven books including Planet of Slums and The Monster At Our Door "A smart, compassionate and tough-minded look at the rise and impact of the tough-on-crime culture that has made America the world's foremost jailer. By showing us how we got into this mess, this revelatory book also holds out hope that we might find our way out." --Nell Bernstein, former Soros Justice Media Fellow and author of All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated "This is by far the most intelligent and haunting indictment of the American prison system that I have ever read. Sasha Abramsky has shone an incandescent lamp on a shadowy underground universe that holds and in all too many cases brutalizes the lives of more than two million Americans. He should be commended for doing so, and his book made required reading for every legislator in the land, bar none." --Simon Winchester, author of A Crack in the Edge of the World and The Professor and the Madman "It is with an exemplary and multifaceted grasp of the history and modern-day reality of incarceration that Abramsky is able to grasp the full context of why callous negligence and brutality so abound in the American prison system . . . American Furies is a brilliantly crafted piece of creative non-fiction replete with non-dogmatic, accessible, and lyrical prose . . . In the difficult realm of prison reporting, Abramsky is unquestionably among the best and brightest, and American Furies is clear evidence of such." --The American Prospect Praise for Conned: "Timely and important. Instead of preaching democracy to the world, the United States should start practicing it at home." --Eric Schlosser "The war on drugs, the disenfranchisement of convicted felons, a series of dodgy electoral Republican victories . . . someone had to connect the dots, and Sasha Abramsky has done so with passion, precision, and artistry." --Barbara Ehrenreich Sasha Abramsky has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. The author of Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House and Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation, he has also reported on U.S. prisons for Human Rights Watch. He lives in Sacramento, California.

Cultures of Confinement

Cultures of Confinement PDF Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.

Prisoners on Criminology

Prisoners on Criminology PDF Author: William S. Tregea
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739145894
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Book Description
Drawing on thirty years of prison college courses and volunteer classes in eleven Michigan and California prisons, Prisoners on Criminology: Convict Life Stories and Crime Prevention makes criminology theories come alive through the use of the prisoners’ voices. The book features policy background and textbook-like chapters that review major criminological theories and present prisoner essays that apply criminology insights to the prisoners’ lives. Each chapter has helpful exercises and discussion and review questions for classroom use. Introductory informational chapters present an historical review of how the United States came to have the world’s largest prison system. A chapter on prisoners’ educational background presents information from prisoner surveys and the author’s extensive background in postsecondary correctional education. Over eighty prisoner essays show how prisoners connect criminology theories to their lives growing up, with insights on individual, family, and community levels of crime causation. A chapter on social structure, social process and alternative criminologies is followed by additional information on in-prison criminological issues with several prisoner essays. The conclusion emphasizes the main argument of the book—that the jobless ghetto is a major reason for much of the criminality now in the large correctional apparatus of the United States. Prisoners on Criminology will be of great value to scholars and students interested in criminology, social deviance, sociology, urban studies, political science, anthropology, counseling, and social work.

The Routledge Handbook of Service User Involvement in Human Services Research and Education

The Routledge Handbook of Service User Involvement in Human Services Research and Education PDF Author: Hugh McLaughlin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042978158X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 654

Book Description
Worldwide, there has been a growth in service user involvement in education and research in recent years. This handbook is the first book which identifies what is happening in different regions of the world to provide different countries and client groups with the opportunity to learn from each other. The book is divided into five sections: Section One examines service user involvement in context exploring theoretical issues which underpin service user involvement. In Section Two we focus on the state of service user involvement in human services education and research across the globe including examples of innovative practice, but also identifying examples of where it is not happening and why. Section Three offers more detailed examination of such involvement in a wide range of professional education learning settings. Section Four focuses on the involvement of service users in research involving a wide range of service user groups and situations. Lastly, Section Five explores future challenges for education and research to ensure involvement remains meaningful. The book includes forty-eight chapters, including seventeen case-studies, from all regions of the world, this is the first book to both highlight the subject’s methodological and theoretical issues and give practical examples in education and research for those wishing to engage in this field. It will be of interest to all service users, scholars and students of social work, nursing, occupational therapy, and other human service subjects.

Prison Life in Popular Culture

Prison Life in Popular Culture PDF Author: Dawn K. Cecil
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781626372795
Category : Criminal justice, Administration of
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
¿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.

Big Prisons, Big Dreams

Big Prisons, Big Dreams PDF Author: Michael Lynch
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813541409
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
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.