How is it that the car, a symbol of freedom for the American people, leads them into a cycle of debt and imprisonment?
Every year in the United States around 650,000 people are released from prison, many of them destined to return. Bruce Western and his research team followed 122 released prisoners over a one-year period.
All over the world, from India, Sierra Leone and Mexico to 1970s France and revolutionary Tunisia, people have tried to escape from prison. How is a prison break conceived, how it is planned and what does it signify to those who experience it and those who dream of it?
Between August 21 and September 9, 2018, American prisoners were called to strike by several of their organizations. It is not the first time that such a mobilization takes place. A socio-historical approach allows to put it into perspective, and illustrates the contradictions between the prison system and collective action.
Can journalism advance knowledge in the field of social science? Two investigations published by the New York Times have highlighted racial inequalities and their links to prison. By contrast, these rigorous investigations emphasize the lack of knowledge of this situation in the French context.
While ideal Victorian women were supposed to be “angels in the house”, female criminals were seen as “demons in the jailhouse”. As such, they were a disruptive force and had to be dealt with. Deconstructing and reconstructing these deviants to make them more “womanly” became a major issue in the late 19th century.
After the war on poverty, the United States declared a war on crime. This history of penal policy since 1960 looks at the intellectual and political roots of the punitive treatment often reserved for minorities.
In La Prison des Pauvres, Jacques Carré considers the history of poverty and poor relief in England between the 17th and early 20th centuries, focusing in particular on the complex evolution of the workhouse system. Often dreaded by paupers for its harsh discipline, it dominated English responses to poverty for several centuries, and was not abolished until after World War Two.
There are currently two million prisoners in the USA, and the use of high security solitary confinement is on the increase. The violence of this procedure and its dramatic effects, in particular on the youngest inmates or those suffering from psychiatric conditions, has now sparked a public debate.
How do commodities and monies circulate in prison where trade, whether monetary or not, is forbidden? Drawing from a collective ethnographic research, this essay discusses the social mechanisms that lead to the ranking of people and objects that money objec-tivizes, thus casting light on the social dynamics at play in the carceral system.
There was a time when a criminal judged to be ‘insane at the time of committing an offence’ was neither to be punished nor imprisoned. Since the 1980’s, the number of those judged to be criminally insane has been on the increase in French prisons. Is this because prison exacerbates pre-existing pathologies? Or perhaps that psychiatry is increasingly struggling to deal with difficult patients.
