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.
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.
