Overview
- Explores the relationship between penal reform and abolition praxis
- Creates a radical framework for understanding how reform processes can assist the abolitionist project of dismantling penal systems and punishment
- Generates a theory and method of feminist abolitionism that can inform activist scholarship and practice
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Carceral Violence and Official Responses
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Front Matter
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Anti-carceral Geographies of Resistance
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Front Matter
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Consolidation and Expansion
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book explores the dramatic evolution of a feminist movement that mobilised to challenge a women’s prison system in crisis. Through in-depth historical research conducted in the Australian state of Victoria that spans the 1980s and 1990s, the authors uncover how incarcerated women have worked productively with feminist activists and community coalitions to expose, critique and resist the conditions and harms of their confinement. Resisting Carceral Violence tells the story of how activists—through a combination of creative direct actions, reformist lobbying and legal challenges—forged an anti-carceral feminist movement that traversed the prison walls. This powerful history provides vital lessons for service providers, social justice advocates and campaigners, academics and students concerned with the violence of incarceration. It calls for a willingness to look beyond the prison and instead embrace creative solutions to broader structural inequalities and social harm.
Reviews
“This is a key text for those invested in worlds without prisons, drawing from oral histories that document anti-carceral feminist mobilizations that have built solidarity with people incarcerated in Australia’s Fairlea Women’s Prison. Contextualized within a brilliant critique of the political economy of ‘progressive reform’ in the Australian women’s correctional system in the 1980s and 1990s, this ground-breaking text lays out important feminist abolitionist genealogies. The book critically engages with multiple ‘on the ground’ tensions that those working against the global prison industrial complex frequently confront, such as reforms that might strengthen the carceral system and the pervasive trap of ‘gender-responsive’ logics. But perhaps most importantly this work illuminates the imaginaries and labour of fierce grassroots organizations that knit together powerful and temporal coalitions. Resisting Carceral Violence provides necessary and fertile terrain for our collective present and our future practice, and is a powerful ‘must read’ for all social movement scholars, organizers, and feminists.” (Erica R. Meiners, Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor, Northeastern Illinois University, USA)
“By offering a unique historical vantage point on resistance both within and outside Australia’s women’s prisons, Resisting Carceral Violence shows how activists have responded to a changing landscape of state carceral control and strategies of penal expansion. Through a close examination of archives, diaries, and interview data, the research reveals both the potential and the limitations of organizing on the ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ and the deep connections of women across these boundaries. The authors’ reflections on these struggles convey acute respect for activists’ commitments to real change and profound recognition of the costs of violence imposed on incarcerated women’s lives. This book is a ‘must-read’ for scholars who seek to better understand the broader structural constraints that limit prison reform.” (Kristin Bumiller, George Daniel Olds Professor of Economic and Social Institutions, Amherst College, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Bree Carlton is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University, Australia. Her research explores strategies for preventing and resisting against prison generated violence and harm. Bree authored Imprisoning Resistance (Federation Press 2007) and is co-editor of Women Exiting Prison (Routledge 2013).
Emma K. Russell is a Lecturer in Crime, Justice and Legal Studies in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University, Australia. Her work has been published in various journals, including Theoretical Criminology, Critical Criminology and Crime Media Culture.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Resisting Carceral Violence
Book Subtitle: Women's Imprisonment and the Politics of Abolition
Authors: Bree Carlton, Emma K. Russell
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01695-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Law and Criminology, Law and Criminology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-01694-4Published: 17 December 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-40388-1Published: 18 February 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-01695-1Published: 05 December 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XX, 268
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 24 illustrations in colour
Topics: Critical Criminology, Prison and Punishment, Criminological Theory, Feminism