Contesting Carceral Logic provides an innovative and cutting-edge analysis of how carceral logic is embedded within contemporary society, emphasizing international perspectives, the harms and critiques of using carceral logic to respond to human wrongdoing, and exploring penal abolition thought.
With chapters from scholars across many disciplines, people in prison, as well as penal abolition activists, the book explores what a future without carceral logic would look like, as well as how such a future is to be developed. The book is also an exploration of penal abolition thought as it is developing in the twenty-first century. Diverse geographical, cultural, identity and experiential frames inform the book’s themes of analysing carceral logic as it harms disparate people in disparate places, creating anti-carceral knowledge, exploring case studies pointing to radical alternatives, and to contesting carceral logic from below. Ultimately, Contesting Carceral Logic provides the reader with an alternative and critical perspective from which to reflect on carceral logic, the punitive state and the criminalizing systems that almost exclusively dominate across the world. Finally, it raises the questions of how we are to build communities as well as transform our response to human wrongdoing in ways that are not defined by racism/ethnocentrism, class war and heteropatriarchy.
Contesting Carceral Logic will be of great interest to not only scholars and activists, but also provides an introduction to key carceral issues and debates for students of penology, criminology, social policy, geography, politics, philosophy, social work and social history programmes in countries all around the world.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Penal Abolitionism as a Challenge to Carceral Logic
Michael J. Coyle and Mechthild Nagel
PART 1: The Harms of Carceral Logic: People and Places
1 Prison Provokes People into Being More Aggressive, Hyper Sexualized and Prone to Crime
Joseph (Dont’e) Williams
2 If I Weren’t White I’d Be Dead
Gabriella
3 Reader
Emanuel Eoz
4 Carceral Other and Severing of People, Place and Land: Redefining the Politics of Abolition through an Anti-Colonial Framework
Vicki Chartrand and Niko Rougier
5 The Lawlessness of Law: Outlaw Nation, Settler Colonialism, and a Possessive Investment in Whiteness
Mechthild Nagel
6 Not Behind Bars: The Rippling of Carceral Habitus and Corrective Violence on the Family and Community Life of Prison Guards
S.M. Rodriguez and Brittany Clark
PART 2: Creating Anti-Carceral Knowledge
7 Start
Emanuel Eoz
8 The Only Advice I Got is ‘Stay Out of Trouble’
David Head
9 Designed to Bury You in a Mental Grave
Adrian Outten
10 The Courtroom
Philip Johnson
11 Generating Abolitionist Affect: Decarceral Feminist Methodologies and the Closure of Holloway Prison
Carly Guest and Rachel Seoighe
12 ‘There is no Justice, There is Just Us!’ Towards a Postcolonial Feminist Critique of Policing Using the Example of Racial Profiling in Europe
Vanessa E. Thompson
13 Humanism and Penal Justice: A Foucauldian Critique
Clécio Lemos
PART 3: Case Studies Pointing to Radical Alternatives
14 Feet on the Ground
Emanuel Eoz
15 The System is Designed for Me to Fail
Douglas Knakmuhs
16 Incarceration as the Worst Possible Treatment for Mental Illness
Richard Sean Gross
17 The Rhetoric of Dehumanization: Japanese American Concentration Camps and the US Criminalizing System
Michael J. Coyle and Stephen T. Young
18 RAP’s Significance to the Formation of the British Abolitionist Movement
Marc Jacobs
19 The Struggle Over the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre: Challenging Neutralization Techniques, Fighting State Inertia
Aaron Doyle, Justin Piché, and Kelsey Sutton
PART 4: Resisting Carceral Logic
20 Something From Here
Emanuel Eoz
21 Disenthrall
Jamine Emmanual Felton
22 Contesting the Collateral Damages of Imprisonment from Below
Valeria Vegh Weis and Julieta Sosa
23 Land, Race and State: Situating the Carceral State and the Mass Imprisonment of Māori in Aotearoa within the Settler-Colonial Landscape
Verena Tan
24 Extreme Hazards
Emanuel Eoz
Index
