"Ethnographically rich, thick with gritty details and original insights, Rhodes's revelatory book about US prisons--those who are incarcerated in them and those who run them--should be read by everyone who cares about social justice and the nature of power."—Emily Martin, author of Flexible Bodies "Thank you, Lorna Rhodes, for taking us to where the 'worst of the worst' are kept out of sight and out of mind in the new millennium. This powerful ethnography of the correctional high tech machine reveals how institutional power suffocates individual agency and redefines rationality and insanity. Good, bad and evil fall by the wayside."—Philippe Bourgois, author of In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio "A truly remarkable book. The inside look at supermax confinement alone is worth the price of admission, and the prose sometimes verges on poetry. This is meticulous scholarship."—Hans Toch, author of Living in Prison
In three parts, this volume in the AP-LS series explores the phenomena of captivity and risk management, guided and informed by the theory, method, and policy of psychological jurisprudence. The authors present a controversial thesis that demonstrates how the forces of captivity and risk management are sustained by several interdependent "conditions of control." These conditions impose barriers to justice and set limits on citizenship for one and all. Situated at the nexus of political/social theory, mental health law and jurisprudential ethics, the book examines and critiques constructs such as offenders and victims; self and society; therapeutic and restorative; health; harm; and community. So, too, are three "total confinement" case law data sets on which this analysis is based. The volume stands alone in its efforts to systematically "diagnose" the moral reasoning lodged within prevailing judicial opinions that sustain captivity and risk management practices impacting: (1) the rights of juveniles found competent to stand criminal trial, the mentally ill placed in long-term disciplinary isolation, and sex offenders subjected to civil detention and community re-entry monitoring; (2) the often unmet needs of victims; and (3) the demands of an ordered society. Carefully balancing sophisticated insights with concrete and cutting-edge applications, the book concludes with a series of provocative, yet practical, recommendations for future research and meaningful reform within institutional practice, programming, and policy. The Ethics of Total Confinement is a thought-provoking and timely must-read for anyone interested in the ethical and legal issues regarding madness, citizenship, and social justice. "It has become clear that there is no criminological exit from embrace of degrading punishments and practices to which our increasingly distorted risk perception commits us. Instead, the path forward must run through a return to the ethical and psychological roots of security and justice. The Ethics of Total Confinement is a quantum step forward in defining and advancing that path."--Jonathan Simon , Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, UC Berkeley School of Law "This book boldly calls for a total transformation in the way the law deals with people who are confined because of their perceived depravity or dangerousness. It focuses on three outcast groups--juveniles tried as adults, people with mental illness subjected to hospitalization, and sex offenders committed as dangerous--and, based on an innovative analysis of the relevant caselaw and empirics, shows why current practices not only visit substantial harm on these people but also brutalize those who deprive them of liberty and damage the rest of us by feeding our basest, most uninformed fears. Relying on Aristotelian philosophy, therapeutic and restorative principles, and commonsense justice, the book persuasively argues that we must reorient the training and thinking of all major players in the system if our goal is to promote the maximum amount of human flourishing."--Christopher Slobogin, Milton Underwood Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School "The Ethics of Total Confinement: A Critique of Madness, Citizenship, and Social Justice deepens our understanding of how our legal system justifies its treatment of those it confines. By bridging gaps among relevant disciplines, the book clarifies to an interdisciplinary audience just how inadequate those justifications turn out to be when measured by psychological, ethical, or justice-based standards. The book's provocative conclusions and recommendations offer much food for thought and suggest potential directions for action."--Dennis Fox, Emeritus Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Psychology, University of Illinois at Springfield "The Ethics of Total Confinement shows how captivity diminishes the keepers and the kept. It is a book that synthesises in creative new ways reformist visions of justice, virtue and the cultivation of habits of character. This is profound work that opens new paths to dignity, healing and social justice."--John Braithwaite, Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, Australian National University "The Ethics of Total Confinement offers a useful and wide-ranging perspective grounded in psychological jurisprudence. With its emphasis on the harm done to those most vulnerable to extremes of risk-management, this volume makes a welcome addition to the literature on confinement."--Lorna Rhodes, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington "The provocative thesis of this book develops psychological jurisprudence to conceptualize the ethics of existing total confinement practices, aspiring to greater justice and human flourishing for all. A timely intervention of this kind is most welcome."--George Pavlich, Associate Vice-President (Research), Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Alberta
In three parts, this volume in the AP-LS series explores the phenomena of captivity and risk management, guided and informed by the theory, method, and policy of psychological jurisprudence. The authors present a controversial thesis that demonstrates how the forces of captivity and risk management are sustained by several interdependent "conditions of control." These conditions impose barriers to justice and set limits on citizenship for one and all. Situated at the nexus of political/social theory, mental health law and jurisprudential ethics, the book examines and critiques constructs such as offenders and victims; self and society; therapeutic and restorative; health; harm; and community. So, too, are three "total confinement" case law data sets on which this analysis is based.The volume stands alone in its efforts to systematically "diagnose" the moral reasoning lodged within prevailing judicial opinions that sustain captivity and risk management practices impacting: (1) the rights of juveniles found competent to stand criminal trial, the mentally ill placed in long-term disciplinary isolation, and sex offenders subjected to civil detention and community re-entry monitoring; (2) the often unmet needs of victims; and (3) the demands of an ordered society. Carefully balancing sophisticated insights with concrete and cutting-edge applications, the book concludes with a series of provocative, yet practical, recommendations for future research and meaningful reform within institutional practice, programming, and policy. The Ethics of Total Confinement is a thought-provoking and timely must-read for anyone interested in the ethical and legal issues regarding madness, citizenship, and social justice."It has become clear that there is no criminological exit from embrace of degrading punishments and practices to which our increasingly distorted risk perception commits us. Instead, the path forward must run through a return to the ethical and psychological roots of security and justice. The Ethics of Total Confinement is a quantum step forward in defining and advancing that path."--Jonathan Simon , Adrian A. Kragen Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, UC Berkeley School of Law"This book boldly calls for a total transformation in the way the law deals with people who are confined because of their perceived depravity or dangerousness. It focuses on three outcast groups--juveniles tried as adults, people with mental illness subjected to hospitalization, and sex offenders committed as dangerous--and, based on an innovative analysis of the relevant caselaw and empirics, shows why current practices not only visit substantial harm on these people but also brutalize those who deprive them of liberty and damage the rest of us by feeding our basest, most uninformed fears. Relying on Aristotelian philosophy, therapeutic and restorative principles, and commonsense justice, the book persuasively argues that we must reorient the training and thinking of all major players in the system if our goal is to promote the maximum amount of human flourishing."--Christopher Slobogin, Milton Underwood Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School"The Ethics of Total Confinement: A Critique of Madness, Citizenship, and Social Justice deepens our understanding of how our legal system justifies its treatment of those it confines. By bridging gaps among relevant disciplines, the book clarifies to an interdisciplinary audience just how inadequate those justifications turn out to be when measured by psychological, ethical, or justice-based standards. The book's provocative conclusions and recommendations offer much food for thought and suggest potential directions for action."--Dennis Fox, Emeritus Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Psychology, University of Illinois at Springfield"The Ethics of Total Confinement shows how captivity diminishes the keepers and the kept. It is a book that synthesises in creative new ways reformist visions of justice, virtue and the cultivation of habits of character. This is profound work that opens new paths to dignity, healing and social justice."--John Braithwaite, Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, Australian National University"The Ethics of Total Confinement offers a useful and wide-ranging perspective grounded in psychological jurisprudence. With its emphasis on the harm done to those most vulnerable to extremes of risk-management, this volume makes a welcome addition to the literature on confinement."--Lorna Rhodes, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington"The provocative thesis of this book develops psychological jurisprudence to conceptualize the ethics of existing total confinement practices, aspiring to greater justice and human flourishing for all. A timely intervention of this kind is most welcome."--George Pavlich, Associate Vice-President (Research), Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Alberta
Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. A searing and unforgettable indictment, Solitary Confinement reveals what the devastation wrought by the torture of solitary confinement tells us about what it means to be human—and why humanity is so often destroyed when we separate prisoners from all other people.
The United States has the highest incarceration and execution rate in the industrialized world. Due to bias in policing and sentencing, seventy percent of the nearly two million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and immigration detention centers are people of color. Statistics like these, and the often unsafe conditions under which people are imprisoned, make an analysis of incarceration urgent and timely. Using a broad multicultural approach, States of Confinement uncovers the political, social, and economic biases in our policing and punishment systems. The distinguished authors of this collection - such as Angela Y. Davis, Manning Marable, Gary Marx, Robert Meeropol (the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), Julie Su (an attorney for immigrants' rights), and Judi Bari (a founder of Earthfirst!) - use their diverse experiences and expertise to discuss troubling abuses of police powers in our society. The issues they expose include racial profiling and sentencing disparities that target African Americans and Latinos, the sexual exploitation of women in prison and police custody, racist and homophobic violence, the policing of Asian Americans and Arabs, the adverse conditions of HIV-positive prisoners, and the use of the Grand Jury and police to undermine political activity. These twenty-seven cogent and accessible essays will appeal to students and educators, as well as anyone concerned about the erosion of democracy and equality in this era of increasing incarceration and police powers.
An innovative account of prisoners of war and internment camps around the Pacific basin during the Second World War. In this comparative and global study, Anoma Pieris and Lynne Horiuchi offer an architectural and urban understanding of the Pacific War approached through spatial, physical and material analyses of incarceration camp environments.
During the age of dictatorships, Latin American prisons became a symbol for the vanquishing of political opponents, many of whom were never seen again. In the postdictatorship era of the 1990s, a number of these prisons were repurposed into shopping malls, museums, and memorials. Susana Draper uses the phenomenon of the "opening" of prisons and detention centers to begin a dialog on conceptualizations of democracy and freedom in post-dictatorship Latin America. Focusing on the Southern Cone nations of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, Draper examines key works in architecture, film, and literature to peel away the veiled continuity of dictatorial power structures in ensuing consumer cultures. The afterlife of prisons became an important tool in the "forgetting" of past politics, while also serving as a reminder to citizens of the liberties they now enjoyed. In Draper's analysis, these symbols led the populace to believe they had attained freedom, although they had only witnessed the veneer of democracy—in the ability to vote and consume. In selected literary works by Roberto Bola–o, Eleuterio Fernandez Huidoboro, and Diamela Eltit and films by Alejandro Agresti and Marco Bechis, Draper finds further evidence of the emptiness and melancholy of underachieved goals in the afterlife of dictatorships. The social changes that did not occur, the inability to effectively mourn the losses of a now-hidden past, the homogenizing effects of market economies, and a yearning for the promises of true freedom are thematic currents underlying much of these texts. Draper's study of the manipulation of culture and consumerism under the guise of democracy will have powerful implications not only for Latin Americanists but also for those studying neoliberal transformations globally.
“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews
This self-confessed introduction provides technical administrators and managers with a broad, practical overview of the subject and gives researchers working in different areas an appreciation of developments in nanotechnology outside their own fields of expertise.
