Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the British Society of Criminology Book Award, 2013.Includes a new foreword by Professor Joe Sim, Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
Nation states around the globe are struggling with increasing concerns over human and global insecurity. Within this climate crime and criminal justice policies in many countries have become key areas of political focus, with the prison poised to play an important role in security strategies. This book problematises the persistent use of prisons and punishment and their role in pursuing higher levels of human security. Drawing on extensive, qualitative research in men's long-term, maximum-security prisons in England, questions are raised about the means by which security is pursued. The book argues against the use of severe sanctions as a means through which to calm public fears, achieve greater political legitimacy, and improve public security. By considering problems of security alongside those of long-term prisons, the book grapples with thorny and perennial problems associated with violence, vengeance and calls for punishment.This new paperback edition includes a new foreword by Joe Sim, and will be a valuable resource to all scholars of Penology and Criminal Justice.
Review
"Prisons, Punishment and the Pursuit of Security is a remarkable achievement. Confidently embracing an eclectic mix of the most exciting and influential scholarship of recent years, it is also a bold, brave and affecting empirical study of the very 'deepest' end of imprisonment at a time when security has risen to a level of prominence that eclipses every other consideration, including what it means to be human in such environments. With this study of all five men's maximum-security prisons in England, Deborah Drake has given us a beautifully written, impressively detailed and authoritative yet immensely readable book, which will undoubtedly make an enduring contribution to prison scholarship. Prisons, Punishment and the Pursuit of Security should reassure all those who have expressed concerns about the health of prison ethnography that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. This book already feels like a 'classic'." - Yvonne Jewkes, Professor of Criminology, University of Leicester
Review
"It is a research monograph that will undoubtedly make an enduring contribution to prison scholarship and which one could whole-heartedly recommend to students, anticipating that it will challenge and inspire them. Drake's great achievement is in shining light on the very 'deepest' end of the penal estate at a time when security has risen to a level of prominence that eclipses every other consideration, including what it means to be human." - British Journal of Criminology
"Prisons, Punishment and the Pursuit of Security is a remarkable achievement. Confidently embracing an eclectic mix of the most exciting and influential scholarship of recent years, it is also a bold, brave and affecting empirical study [...] With this study of all five men's maximum-security prisons in England, Deborah Drake has given us a beautifully written, impressively detailed and authoritative yet immensely readable book, which will undoubtedly make an enduring contribution to prison scholarship. Prisons, Punishment and the Pursuit of Security should reassure all those who have expressed concerns about the health of prison ethnography that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. This book already feels like a 'classic'." - Yvonne Jewkes, University of Leicester, UK
"This is an important contribution to critical criminology, prison ethnography, and the senselessness associated with pursuing security without care" - LSE Review of Books
"This important book draws on in-depth ethnographic research carried out at all five long-term maximum security prisons in England to problematize prison as a means for society to pursue the elusive goal of security. By giving a voice to prisoners,
it represents a significant contribution to the critical criminological literature, challenging the dominant security discourse which dehumanizes offenders, treating them as risks to be managed rather than as fully human, complex people capable of reconciliation". - Punishment and Society "Drake's book presents a historically-situated, theoretically-informed, policy-relevant and empirically-grounded critical analysis of prisons in general and maximum-security prisons in particular. It makes an important and welcome contribution to a burgeoning research literature that combines to critique the corrosive and counter-productive practices of imprisonment during a period of penal excess. - Critical Social Policy
Synopsis
Drawing on research in men's long-term, maximum-security prisons, this book examines three interconnected problems: the tendency of the prison to obscure other social problems and conceal its own failings, the pursuit of greater levels of human security through repressive and violent means and the persistence of the belief in the problem of 'evil'.
Synopsis
The essays in this volume take up colonial knowledge as an analytical category in South Asian history. They contribute to longstanding debates around agency and power, as well as newer issues-like the coherence of knowledge systems, architecture and materiality, and the dissemination and reception of knowledge-through detailed empirical and textual work. They demonstrate that historically situated analyses provide the most nuanced answers to such questions. Taken together, they show that no single theory of colonial knowledge is possible and that knowledge had diverse uses and receptions in South Asia's colonial past, just as it continues to have today.
About the Author
DEBORAH DRAKE Lecturer in Criminology at the Open University. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK,(2007), and her BA (2001) and MA (2003) in Sociology at the University of Saskatchewan.
Table of Contents
Foreword to Paperback Edition; Joe Sim Demy
1. Thologising the Prison and its Uses
2. The Growing Hegemony of Imprisonment
3. Establishing Long-Term, Maximum-Security Imprisonment in England
4. A State of Security in Maxmimum-Security Prisons
5. Long-Term, Maximum-Security Punishment
6. Constituting Security in the Penal and Social Realms
7. Duplicity, Violent Crime of Criminal 'Justice' and the Problem with Punishment
8. Making the Unthinkable Thinkable