The ‘pains of imprisonment’ have been a longstanding concern within prison sociology. This article revisits the topic, suggesting that modern penal practices have created some new burdens and frust...

Depth, weight, tightness: Revisiting the pains of imprisonment

1. The prison and the gallows: the construction of the carceral state in America 2. Law, order, and alternative explanations 3. Unlocking the past: the nationalization and politicization of law and order 4. The carceral state and the welfare state: the comparative politics of victims 5. Not the usual suspects: feminists, women's groups, and the anti-rape movement 6. The battered women's movement and the development of penal policy 7. From rights to revolution: prison activism and penal policy 8. Capital punishment, the courts, and the early origins of the carceral state, 1920s-60s 9. The power to punish: the political development of capital punishment, 1972 to today 10. Conclusion: whither the carceral state.

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The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America

▪ Abstract The late twentieth century saw an intense expansion of the prison system in the United States during the same period in which Foucault's Discipline and Punish influenced academic approaches to power and subjection. This article reviews the history, sociology, and anthropology of the prison, as well as some recent popular critiques of the current situation. It highlights critical perspectives on modern forms of punishment and reform and suggests areas in which an anthropology of prisons might take up questions of modernity, subjection, classification, social suffering, and ethnographic possibility in the context of an increasingly politicized and racialized system of incarceration.

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Toward an Anthropology of Prisons

In recent decades, the nature of criminal punishment has undergone change in the United States. This case study of women serving time in California in the 1960s and 1990s examines key points in this recent history. In this 2005 book, the authors begin with a look at imprisonment at the California Institution for Women in the early 1960s, when the rehabilitative model dominated official discourse. They compare women's experiences in the 1990s, at the California Institution for Women and the Valley State Prison, when the recent 'get tough' era was near its peak. Drawing on archival data, interviews, and surveys, their analysis considers the relationships among official philosophies and practices of imprisonment, women's responses to the prison regime, and relations between women prisoners. The experiences of women prisoners reflected the transformations Americans have witnessed in punishment over recent decades, but they also mirrored the deprivations and restrictions of imprisonment.

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Marking Time in the Golden State: Women's Imprisonment in California

In this article I examine how prison conditions litigation in the 1970s, as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, inadvertently contributed to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. Using Florida as a case study, I detail how prison conditions litigation that aimed to reduce incarceration was translated in the political arena as a court order to build prisons. Drawing on insights from historical institutionalist scholarship, I argue that this paradox can be explained by considering the different historical and political contexts of the initial legal framing and the final compliance with the court order. In addition, I demonstrate how the choices made by policy makers around court compliance created policy feedback effects that further expanded the coercive capacity of the state and transformed political calculations around crime control. The findings suggest how "successful" court challenges for institutional change can have long‐term outcomes that are contrary to social justice goals. The paradox of prison litigation is especially compelling because inmates' lawyers were specifically concerned about racial injustice, yet mass incarceration is arguably the greatest obstacle to racial equality in the twenty‐first century.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40926316.pdf

Eric Cummins

Papers

The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement