The Violence of Incarceration

Phil Scraton, Jude McCulloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415963138
• eBook ISBN: 9781135894337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Conceived in the immediate aftermath of the humiliations and killings of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, of the suicides and hunger strikes at Guantanamo Bay and of the disappearances of detainees through extraordinary rendition, this book explores the connections between these shameful events and the inhumanity and degradation of domestic prisons within the 'allied' states, including the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Ireland.

The central theme is that the revelations of extreme brutality perpetrated by allied soldiers represent the inevitable end-product of domestic incarceration predicated on the use of extreme violence including lethal force. Exposing as fiction the claim to the political moral high ground made by western liberal democracies is critical because such claims animate and legitimate global actions such as the 'war on terror' and the indefinite detention of tens of thousands of people by the United States which accompanies it. The myth of moral virtue works to hide, silence, minimize and deny the brutal continuing history of violence and incarceration both within western countries and undertaken on behalf of western states beyond their national borders.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Violence of Incarceration: An Introduction
• 2 An Afternoon in September 1983
• 3 Entombing Resistance: Institutional Power and Polarisation in the Jika Jika High-Security Unit
• 4 Protests and ‘Riots’ in the Violent Institution
• 5 Child Incarceration: Institutional Abuse, the Violent State and the Politics of Impunity
• 6 Naked Power: Strip Searching in Women’s Prisons
• 7 The Imprisonment of Women and Girls in the North of Ireland: A ‘Continuum of Violence’
• 8 Neither Kind Nor Gentle: The Perils of ‘Gender Responsive Justice’
• 9 The United States Military Prison: The Normalcy of Exceptional Brutality
• 10 A Reign of Penal Terror: United States Global Statecraft and the Technology of Punishment and Capture
• 11 Indigenous Incarceration: The Violence of Colonial Law and Justice
• 12 The Violence of Refugee Incarceration
• 13 Preventing Torture and Casual Cruelty in Prisons Through Independent Monitoring
• Contributors