Prison and Community Penalties

Abstract

Prison and Community PenaltiesSocial control in the form of enacting punishment is one of the primary emblems of state power. As well as affecting the individuals who experience it, punishment sends a message to the wider community and demonstrates the authority of the state. 'Grand theorising' about the role punishment, particularly imprisonment, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has emphasised the connection between the political and economic order and the way social control is enacted. Frequently, this grand theorising has ignored or underplayed the significance of gender (Bosworth & Kaufman, 2012). Race has been better integrated into 'grand theories', although its intersections with gender have not (Baldry & Cunneen, 2014). Gender is central to understanding punishment in two ways: the politics that underpin punishment are gendered; and the practice of punishment is a form of gendered governance.Strategies of punishment based on control and containment exemplify a masculinist vision of 'tough' state power, which dismisses alternative approaches as soft and effeminate (Kohler-Hausmann, 2017). Kohler-Hausmann argues that in the context of the United States, this gendered politics has drawn on racialised and gendered tropes of dangerous Black