Punishment in "This Hard Land": conceptualising the prison in Power, Crime and Mystification
This chapter focusses on Steven Box’s analysis of the prison in Power, Crime and Mystification and traces the continuities in the prison’s role in legitimating and maintaining a socially unjust, often barbaric and grossly unequal social order in the forty years since the book was published. Avoidabl...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2023
|
| In: |
Demystifying power, crime and social harm
Year: 2023, Pages: 507-530 |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Keywords: |
| Summary: | This chapter focusses on Steven Box’s analysis of the prison in Power, Crime and Mystification and traces the continuities in the prison’s role in legitimating and maintaining a socially unjust, often barbaric and grossly unequal social order in the forty years since the book was published. Avoidable deaths in prison, and the harms the institution generates, provide a case study of Box’s concept of mystification where the focus on the ‘abnormal’ characteristics of the deceased, and their families, has become the dominant state ‘truth’ about the dead thereby hiding, disavowing and marginalising the prison’s role in these deaths. Finally, the chapter considers Box’s demand for state institutions to be democratically accountable, a demand, which, forty years on, remains entirely relevant to thinking about delivering social justice in the twenty-first century. |
|---|---|
| Item Description: | Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 527-530 |
| ISBN: | 9783031462122 |