Editors:
- Brings a refreshingly international and interdisciplinary approach to the under-studied area of prison escapes
- Investigates escapes from a theoretically informed and empirically grounded perspective
- Includes truly global case studies from India, Tunisia, Canada, the UK, France, Uganda, Italy, Sierra Leone, and Mexico
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology (PSIPP)
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Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Politics and Transition
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Front Matter
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Law and Bureaucracy
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Front Matter
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Escape Imaginaries and Popular Culture
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This edited collection analyses the prison through the most fundamental challenge it faces: escapes. The chapters comprise original research from established prison scholars who develop the contours of a sociology of prison escapes. Drawing on firm empirical evidence from places like India, Tunisia, Canada, the UK, France, Uganda, Italy, Sierra Leone, and Mexico, the authors show how escapes not only break the prison, but are also fundamental to the existence of such institutions: how they are imagined, designed, organized, justified, reproduced and transformed. The chapters are organised in four interconnected themes: resistance and everyday life; politics and transition; imaginaries and popular culture; and law and bureaucracy, which reflect how escapes are productive, local, historical, and equivocal social practices, and integral to the mysterious intransigence of the prison. The result is a critical and theoretically informed understanding of prison escapes – which has sofar been absent in prison scholarship – and which will hold broad appeal to academics and students of prisons and penology, as well as practitioners.
Reviews
“Prison Breaks fills a significant gap in punishment literature and sociological analysis: treating escapes as more than isolated incidents to be narrated and counted in correctional discourse. Instead, in the hands of the ethnographers, sociologists, and criminologists contributing to this collection, prison escapes become an important tool for analyzing prisons as institutions of socialcontrol and reflections of both broader social structures and broader social experiences. By incorporating lived experiences from across the globe, from Africa to Asia to Europe to Central America, this book also provides an important entrée into comparative prison studies.” (Keramet Reiter, Assistant Professor, University of California, Irvine, USA)
“This smart and alert volume uses prison escapes in reality, fiction, and popular cultures in a dozen countries as an inverted analyzer of the carceral institution. This deep dent into the 'mysterious intransigence of the prison' will intrigue and stimulate readers, not just in criminology and penology, but across the social sciences and humanities.” (Professor Loïc Wacquant, author of Prisons of Poverty and Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, University of California, Berkeley, USA)
“Prison Breaks is an impressive and thought provoking achievement. It brings together a formidable collection of scholars examining both the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ dynamics of prison escape. By shedding fresh light on manifestations of coercion and transformation, it is destined to become a classic in the field. Both critical and generous, the book will encourage all of its readers to rethink basic assumptions about the relations between prison, society and culture.” (Professor Eamonn Carrabine, University of Essex, UK)
Editors and Affiliations
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DIGNITY—Danish institute Against Torture, Copenhagen Ø, Denmark
Tomas Max Martin
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Centre Lillois d’Etudes et de Recherches Sociologiques et Economiques, CNRS / Université de Lille, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France
Gilles Chantraine
About the editors
Tomas Max Martin is a Researcher at DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture.
Gilles Chantraine is a sociologist and Permanent Researcher at CLERSE – CNRS, France.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Prison Breaks
Book Subtitle: Toward a Sociology of Escape
Editors: Tomas Max Martin, Gilles Chantraine
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64358-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Law and Criminology, Law and Criminology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-64357-1Published: 20 February 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87775-4Published: 06 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-64358-8Published: 12 February 2018
Series ISSN: 2753-0604
Series E-ISSN: 2753-0612
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 351
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations
Topics: Prison and Punishment, Youth Offending and Juvenile Justice, Human Rights and Crime , Criminal Justice, Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Crime