The attention devoted to the unprecedented levels of imprisonment in the United States obscure an obvious but understudied aspect of criminal justice: there is no consistent punishment policy across the U.S. It is up to individual states to administer their criminal justice systems, and the differences among them are vast. For example, while some states enforce mandatory minimum sentencing, some even implementing harsh and degrading practices, others rely on community sanctions. What accounts for these differences?The Politics of Imprisonment seeks to document and explain variation in American penal sanctioning, drawing out the larger lessons for America's overreliance on imprisonment. Grounding her study in a comparison of how California, Washington, and New York each developed distinctive penal regimes in the late 1960s and early 1970s--a critical period in the history of crime control policy and a time of unsettling social change--Vanessa Barker concretely demonstrates that subtle but crucial differences in political institutions, democratic traditions, and social trust shape the way American states punish offenders. Barker argues that the apparent link between public participation, punitiveness, and harsh justice is not universal but dependent upon the varying institutional contexts and patterns of civic engagement within the U.S. and across liberal democracies.A bracing examination of the relationship between punishment and democracy, The Politics of Imprisonment not only suggests that increased public participation in the political process can support and sustain less coercive penal regimes, but also warns that it is precisely a lack of civic engagement that may underpin mass incarceration in the United States.

The Politics of Prison Crowding investigates recent transformations in Italy’s penal system to make the key analytical observation that conditions of overcrowding have become the ‘new normal’ under which the modern prison system continues to operate and deliver punishment. Engaging with the politics of crowding thus entails a direct and pertinent engagement with the modern state’s politics of criminal justice and social control. Worldwide, over the last decades, a growing number of jurisdictions have prison systems operating above or to the limit of their capacity, yet little attention has been paid to these elements in the analysis of prison politics and day-to-day functions. By exploring the crowding issue, this book offers an original and interesting insight into the politics and dynamics characterising contemporary prison systems. The hypothesis of this book is that the politics of prison crowding have become the template for the daily administration of the prison system, which incorporates not just policy and rules but day-to-day functions and practices regulating life behind bars. Through interviews in modern Italian prisons, the book brings to light a radical redefinition of a carceral system that harshens the delivery of punishment while justifying this exacerbation of pain by adding new bureaucratic logic to the administration of the penal system within a narrative of compliance to human rights standards. By shedding new light on prison politics to open new critical perspectives and research paths, The Politics of Prison Crowding offers a fundamental tool to scholars, students, and all professional policymakers and practitioners dealing with prison policies and the politics of justice.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the role of the prison as a source of political ideas and site of political engagement, as well as in the prisoner’s quest for citizenship. The rising number of prisoners has increased fiscal burdens, which has meant that imprisonment has become a more important political issue. There is also greater interest in the prison as a site of political activism and in the generation of radical political ideas within the prison context and the formation of political networks within prison which extend beyond the prison walls. This book considers the prison as a site of political protest, discusses the quest for citizenship and the denial or negation of citizenship in prison, examines the discovery of politics in prison and the role of the prison in increasing political awareness, explores the treatment of political prisoners and reflects on the prisoner as a political problem for politicians negotiating pressures from the media and the public when addressing prisoners’ demands. Drawing on a range of contemporary and historical topics such as prison riots, radicalisation and the denial of voting rights, and including discussion of cases from the UK, US and Russia, this book examines the prison as a political institution and as a site of both politicisation and political protest. This book will be of interest to students and academics engaged with prisons, penology, punishment and corrections.

Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy has long been taken as one of the seminal works of the Middle Ages, yet despite the study of many aspects of the Consolation's influence, the legacy of the figure of the writer in prison has not been explored. A group of late-medieval authors, Thomas Usk, James I of Scotland, Charles d'Orléans, George Ashby, William Thorpe, Richard Wyche, and Sir Thomas Malory, demonstrate the ways in which the imprisoned writer is presented, both within and outside the Boethian tradition. The presentation of an imprisoned autobiographical identity in each of these authors' texts, and the political motives behind such self-presentation are examined in this study, which also questions whether the texts should be considered to from a genre of early autobiographical prison literature.

Prisons are everywhere. Yet they are not everywhere alike. How can we explain the differences in cross-national uses of incarceration? The Politics of Punishment explores this question by undertaking a comparative sociological analysis of penal politics and imprisonment in Ireland and Scotland. Using archives and oral history, this book shows that divergences in the uses of imprisonment result from the distinctive features of a nation’s political culture: the different political ideas, cultural values and social anxieties that shape prison policymaking. Political culture thus connects large-scale social phenomena to actual carceral outcomes, illuminating the forces that support and perpetuate cross-national penal differences. The work therefore offers a new framework for the comparative study of penality. This is also an important work of sociology and history. By closely tracking how and why the politics of punishment evolved and adapted over time, we also yield rich and compelling new accounts of both Irish and Scottish penal cultures from 1970 to the 1990s. The Politics of Punishment will be essential reading for students and academics interested in the sociology of punishment, comparative penology, criminology, penal policymaking, law and social history.

First published in 1990, The Politics of Redress is a product of and commentary on significant developments in critical criminology. It shifts the emphasis from the criminologist as a police agent to a fighter for social justice. The author focuses on the role of punishment in society, in general, and in criminology, in particular, urging the reader to reimagine the concept of punishment, especially penal punishment. The arguments addressed in this book range from a comparative analysis of penal policies in various countries to philosophical debates about whether punishment is compatible with a just social order. With the Black Lives Matter movement, the topic of prison abolition has, once again, gripped society’s conscience making this text a vital read for students of law, criminology, sociology, philosophy, and history.

This book examines the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories of the dictatorship in the aftermath of the two first decades since the Uruguayan dictatorship of 1973-1984 in the broader context of public policies of denial and institutionalized impunity. Transitional justice studies have tended to focus on countries like Argentina or Chile in the Southern Cone of Latin America. However, not much research has been conducted on the "silent" cases of transitions as a result of negotiated pacts. The literature on memory trauma and impunity has much to offer to studies of transition and post-authoritarianism. This book situates the human and cultural experience of state terrorism from the perspective of the experiences of Uruguayan families, through an in-depth ethnographic, cultural, psycho-social, and political interdisciplinary study. It will be a valuable resource to students, scholars, and practitioners who are interested in substantive questions of memory, democratization, and transitional justice, set in Uruguay's scenario, as well as to human rights policy-makers, advocates and educators and social and political scientists, cultural analysts, politicians, social psychologists, psychotherapists, and activists. It will also appeal to the general public who are interested in the problem of how to transmit the stories and meaning of traumatic experiences as a result of gross human rights violations, the cultural and generational effects of state terror, and the politics of impunity. This book is essential for collections in Latin American studies, political science, and sociology.

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the British press began a campaign of critical abuse against Leigh Hunt, caricaturing the radical journalist as an upstart "Cockney" author whose literary talents were as disreputable as his politics. Lord Byron, on the other hand, was revered as a peer and a poetical genius who, the conservative press argued, would never befriend and collaborate with a writer like Hunt. Yet Byron did just that. Byron, Hunt, and the Politics of Literary Engagement is the first full-length study of the friendship and literary relationship of two of the most important second-generation Romantic authors. Challenging long-held critical attitudes, this study shows that Byron and Hunt engaged in a creative and meaningful dialogue at each major stage in their careers, from their earliest published volumes of juvenile poetry and verse satire to their most celebrated contributions to Romantic literature: The Story of Rimini and Don Juan. Drawing upon newly recovered letters and unpublished manuscript material, this book illuminates the surprisingly durable and artistically significant friendship of Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt.

This book explores and tests different theories of how governments respond to dissent and how dissidents respond to repression using extensive empirical data and detailed studies on Latin America and Africa.

Learning behind Bars is an oral history of former Irish republican prisoners in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland between 1971, the year internment was introduced, and 2000, when the high-security Long Kesh Detention Centre/HM Prison Maze closed. Dieter Reinisch outlines the role of politically motivated prisoners in ending armed conflicts as well as the personal and political development of these radical activists during their imprisonment. Based on extensive life-story interviews with Irish Republican Army (IRA) ex-prisoners, the book examines how political prisoners developed their intellectual positions through the interplay of political education and resistance. It sheds light on how prisoners used this experience to initiate the debates that eventually led to acceptance of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Politically relevant and instructive, Learning behind Bars illuminates the value of education, politics, and resistance in the harshest of social environments.