Gender and Punishment

Abstract

Gender is strangely missing from studies of punishment and society. Outside the work of a few scholars (Bosworth, 1996; 1999; Daly, 1994; Hannah Moffat, 2001; Howe, 1996), all of whom are women writing about women, gender is usually ignored or relegated to the footnotes of this field of scholarship (see Garland, 1990; Liebling, 2004). To be sure there are some exceptions – Ben Crewe’s (2009) recent account of prison life in HMP Wellingborough contains a number of references to masculinity, as does Eamonn Carrabine’s (2006) genealogy of the Strangeways’ prison riot. Fifteen years ago, Joe Sim (1995) warned of the dangers of the ‘hypermasculinity’ that, he said, was endemic in prisons. In general, however, those authors most associated with the study of punishment and society – David Garland, Jonathan Simon, Dario Melossi, Loic Wacquant – have apparently seen little explanatory or analytic value in gender. This article sets out to explain why gender matters and how gender theory, in particular, might inform critical accounts of punishment.

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