Description

Punishment and History
edited by Ashley T. Rubin

This special issue appraises the role of history in the study of punishment, illuminating its utility and limitations for understanding penal change. Rather than seeking the origins of mass incarceration, as others have done, this issue examines how penal history might provide lessons for understanding punishment as a social institution and its consequences for society, especially society’s most vulnerable members. Taken together, the individual contributions to the issue address the following questions: What is the role of history in interdisciplinary studies of punishment? How do conceptions of punishment change across time and space? And how does punishment’s impact on inequalities across class, race, gender, and sexuality change (or persist) in different spatio-temporal contexts?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editor’s Introduction: Punishment and History [free pdf download]
Ashley T. Rubin

Expansion, Crisis, and Transformation: Changing Economies of Punishment in England, 1780–1850
J.M. Moore

The Same Old Arguments: Tropes of Race and Class in the History of Prostitution from the Progressive Era to the Present
Terry G. Lilley, Chrysanthi S. Leon, and Anne E. Bowler

Marked Men: Masculinity, Mobility, and Convict Tattoos, 1919–1940
Alex Tepperman

Governors and Prisoners: The Death of Clemency and the Making of Life Sentences without Release in Pennsylvania
Christopher Seeds

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Commentaries [free pdf download]

Policing the People’s University: The Precarity of Sanctuary in the California State University System
Akhila L. Ananth and Priscilla Leiva

Passive Revolution and the Movement against Mass Incarceration: From Prison Abolition to Redemption Script
William I. Robinson and Oscar Fabian Soto

Book Reviews [free pdf download]

Review of Robert J. Duran, The Gang Paradox: Inequalities and Miracles on the US-Mexico Border
Amy A. Martinez

Review of David Correia and Tyler Wall, Policing: A Field Guide
Jarrod Shanahan

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