Anastasia Chamberlen - Böcker

Within the discipline of criminology and criminal justice, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between criminal law, punishment, and imperialism, or the contours and exercise of penal power in the Global South. Decolonizing the Criminal Question is the first work of its kind to comprehensively place colonialism and its legacies at the heart of criminological enquiry.By examining the reverberations of colonial history and logics in the operation of penal power, this volume explores the uneasy relationship between criminal justice and colonialism, bringing relevance of these legacies in criminological enquiries to the forefront of the discussion. It invites and pursues a better understanding of the links between imperialism and colonialism on the one hand, and nationalism and globalization on the other, by exposing the imprints of these links on processes of marginalization, racialization, and exclusion that are central to contemporary criminal justice practices. Covering a range of jurisdictions and themes, Decolonizing the Criminal Question details how colonial and imperial domination relied on the internalization of hierarchies and identities — for example, racial, geographical, and geopolitical — of both the colonized and the colonizer, and shaped their subjectivity through imageries, discourses, and technologies.Offering innovative, conceptual, and methodological approaches to the study of the criminal question, this work is an essential read for scholars not only focused on criminology and criminal justice, but also for scholars in law, anthropology, sociology, politics, history, and a range of other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.Decolonizing the Criminal Question is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Embodying Punishment offers a theoretical and empirical exploration of women's lived experiences of imprisonment in England. It puts forward a feminist critique of the prison, arguing that prisoner bodies are central to our understanding of modern punishment, and particularly of women's survival and resistance during and after prison. Drawing on a feminist phenomenological framework informed by a serious engagement with scholars such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Erwin Goffman, Michel Foucault, Sandra Lee Bartky and Tori Moi, Embodying Punishment revisits and expands the literature on the pains of imprisonment, and offers an interdisciplinary examination of the embodiment and identities of prisoners and former prisoners, pressing the need for a body-aware approach to criminology and penology. The book develops this argument through a qualitative study with prisoners and former prisoners, discussing themes such as: the perception of the prison through time, space, smells and sounds; the change of prisoner bodies; the presentation of self in and after prison, including the centrality of appearance and prison dress in the management of prisoner and ex-prisoner identities; and a range of coping strategies adopted during and after imprisonment, including prison food, drug misuse, and a case study on women's self-injuring practices. Embodying Punishment brings to the fore and critically analyses longstanding and urgent problems surrounding women's multifaceted oppression through imprisonment, including matters of discriminatory and gendered treatment as well as issues around penal harm, and argues for an experientially grounded critique of punishment.

This book questions punishment as concept, social phenomenon and contemporary practice. It unpacks punishment’s nature and the assumptions that underpin it, examines its targets, objectives and implications, locates punishment and punitivity within their social contexts, and aims to unsettle the idea that there is something common-sensical, necessary and unavoidable about punitive justice.Questioning Punishment develops its argument through an innovative structure organised around five central questions: what punishment is; who punishment’s targets and subjects are; how punishment is perpetuated and experienced; when and where punishment unfolds and why we punish. It ends by considering the implications of this enquiry to understandings of punishment and broader pursuits of justice.This book is essential reading for all those engaged with the sociology of punishment and prisons, criminal justice and theoretical criminology.

This book questions punishment as concept, social phenomenon and contemporary practice. It unpacks punishment’s nature and the assumptions that underpin it, examines its targets, objectives and implications, locates punishment and punitivity within their social contexts, and aims to unsettle the idea that there is something common-sensical, necessary and unavoidable about punitive justice.Questioning Punishment develops its argument through an innovative structure organised around five central questions: what punishment is; who punishment’s targets and subjects are; how punishment is perpetuated and experienced; when and where punishment unfolds and why we punish. It ends by considering the implications of this enquiry to understandings of punishment and broader pursuits of justice.This book is essential reading for all those engaged with the sociology of punishment and prisons, criminal justice and theoretical criminology.

This edited collection advances a reconceptualisation of state power through emotions. Methodologically, it rethinks the study of the state from the bottom up, by seeking contributions that engage with performances and enactments of state power at the ground level, by frontline staff in direct contact with marginalised populations, and those that reflect on encounters with symbols and practices of state power. Conceptually, it advances a new theory of state power which places values and affects at the heart of its analysis.In doing so, it seeks to make a crucial intellectual intervention in the study of the people, images and processes involved in the governance of social marginality in various institutional settings – criminal justice, immigration and asylum bureaucracies, the welfare system, the care sector, etc. – to explore how emotions are mobilised, how their expression in contemporary institutional settings of state power connects to broader moral and affective economies, the contradictions, and dilemmas they embody and reproduce, and the implications of these emotionalised forms of governance for state praxis and theory.The Embodied State will therefore appeal to students and scholars of critical criminology, political sociology, anthropology, migration and border studies, and penology. It will also be of interest to policymakers and professionals involved in these fields.

This edited collection advances a reconceptualisation of state power through emotions. Methodologically, it rethinks the study of the state from the bottom up, by seeking contributions that engage with performances and enactments of state power at the ground level, by frontline staff in direct contact with marginalised populations, and those that reflect on encounters with symbols and practices of state power. Conceptually, it advances a new theory of state power which places values and affects at the heart of its analysis.In doing so, it seeks to make a crucial intellectual intervention in the study of the people, images and processes involved in the governance of social marginality in various institutional settings – criminal justice, immigration and asylum bureaucracies, the welfare system, the care sector, etc. – to explore how emotions are mobilised, how their expression in contemporary institutional settings of state power connects to broader moral and affective economies, the contradictions, and dilemmas they embody and reproduce, and the implications of these emotionalised forms of governance for state praxis and theory.The Embodied State will therefore appeal to students and scholars of critical criminology, political sociology, anthropology, migration and border studies, and penology. It will also be of interest to policymakers and professionals involved in these fields.

This edited book ​explores new and enduring themes in the gendered experience of incarceration across the world. Capturing global debates and research on women’s treatment, their coping and resistances in penal settings, the collection promotes a feminist agenda that is attuned to the inherently patriarchal and intersectionally oppressive structures of contemporary punishment. It seeks to map policies and campaigns around women’s criminalisation across the world and offers one of the most comprehensive overviews of women’s imprisonment experiences across the Global North and Global South. Each chapter focusses on a different geographic context and theme and aims to provide the intellectual groundwork for a critical, world-wide movement advocating for women’s decarceration. As a whole, the collection offers a robust empirical understanding of women’s punishment in non-western, Global South contexts and also revisits ongoing debates in feminist accounts of punishment in the Global North.In doing so, the collection examines hierarchical geopolitical relations between privileged and underprivileged nations, reflecting global inequalities and structural violence rooted in legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Overall, the edited collection shows how centering women’s peripheralized experiences can radically reshape our understanding of punishment and offers a new intellectual, methodological, and political means through which to think about gendered identity and imprisonment in the 21st Century.