Results by title
70 books match the query 'Prisons' and 7 start with i
Identity Complex
Making the Case for MultiplicityMichael Hames-García
University of Minnesota Press, 2011
In seemingly exhaustive arguments about identity as a category of analysis, we have made a critical error—one that Michael Hames-García sets out to correct in this revisionary look at the making and meaning of social identities. We have asked how separate identities—of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—come to intersect. Instead, Hames-García proposes, we should begin by understanding such social identities as mutually constituting one another.
Grounded in both theoretical and political practices—in the lived realities of people’s experience—Identity Complex reinvigorates identity as a key concept and as a tool for the pursuit of social justice. Hames-García draws on a wide range of examples to show that social identities are central to how exploitation works, such as debates about the desirability of sexual minority identities in postcolonial contexts, questions about the reality of race, and the nature of the U.S. prison crisis.
Unless we understand precisely how identities take shape in relation to each other and within contexts of oppression, he contends, we will never be able to eradicate discrimination and social inequality. By analyzing the social interdependence of identities, Hames-García seeks to enable the creation of deep connections of solidarity across differences.
If You Don't Laugh You'll Cry
The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison WorkersClaire Schmidt
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
In a state that locks up a disproportionate number of men and women of color, white prison workers occupy a complicated social position as representatives of institutional authority and bearers of social stigma. The job, by turns dangerous, dull, or dehumanizing, is aided by a quick wit, comedic timing, and verbal agility. The men and women who do this work rely on storytelling, practical jokes, and sarcasm to bond with each other, build flexible relationships with inmates, and create personal identities that work in and out of prison. Schmidt shows how this humorous occupational culture both upholds and undermines prisons as social institutions.
Issues of power and race, as well as sex and gender, infuse Schmidt's groundbreaking analysis, and she also engages with current scholarship about identity, occupational folklore, and family narrative. This eye-opening, provocative book reveals the invisible culture, beliefs, and aesthetics embedded in workplace humor.
Imagining the Penitentiary
Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century EnglandJohn Bender
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Impermissible Punishments
How Prison Became a Problem for DemocracyJudith Resnik
University of Chicago Press, 2025
An original transatlantic history of the invention of the corrections profession and of ensuing debates about punishment’s purposes and prisoners’ rights.
Impermissible Punishments explores the history of punishment inside prisons and how governments grappled with obligations to justify the punishments they impose. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the creation of the corrections profession and weaves together the stories of people who made rules for prisons and the stories of those living under the resulting regimes.
Resnik maps three centuries of shifting ideas, norms, and legal standards aiming to draw lines between permissible and impermissible punishments. Her account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the US Civil Rights movement, and the pioneering prisoners who insisted that law should protect their individual dignity. Taking us to the present, Resnik analyzes the expansion of imprisonment, the inability of public and private prisons to provide safe housing, and the impact of abolition politics.
Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Impermissible Punishments examines what governments committed to equality owe to the people they detain and argues that many contemporary forms of punishment need to end.
Imprisonment in America
Choosing the FutureMichael Sherman and Gordon J. Hawkins
University of Chicago Press, 1983
"This is a serious and enlightened and concerned attempt to fuse liberal and conservative attitudes and values to achieve a breakthrough in American penal policy."—Congressional Staff Journal
Incarceration Games
A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons, and PerformanceStephen Scott-Bottoms
University of Michigan Press, 2024
Intolerable
Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980)Michel Foucault
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
A groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France’s inhumane treatment of prisoners
Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970–71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet.
These archival documents—public announcements, manifestos, reports, pamphlets, interventions, press conference statements, interviews, and round table discussions—trace the GIP’s establishment in post-1968 political turmoil, the new models of social activism it pioneered, the prison revolts it supported across France, and the retrospective assessments that followed its denouement. At the same time, Intolerable offers a rich, concrete exploration of Foucault’s concept of resistance, providing a new understanding of the arc of his intellectual development and the genesis of his most influential book, Discipline and Punish.
Presenting the account of France’s most vibrant prison resistance movement in its own words and on its own terms, this significant and relevant collection also connects the approach and activities of the GIP to radical prison resistance movements today.