Mary Bosworth

Reassessing Resistance Race, Gender and Sexuality in Prison

The relationship between power and resistance behind prison walls has long animated sociological discussions of imprisonment. In this article we advance a fresh understanding of resistance that recognizes the multi-faceted dimensions of prisoner agency while acknowledging the dangers in simply valorizing the strategies of the confined to subvert penal power. For us the importance of resistance is that it makes explicit the connections between everyday actions and broader inequalities. Nevertheless we identify three limitations in conventional characterizations of resistance. First it is understood as a privileged quality in the human spirit. Second, is the assumption that those who do not challenge authority accept the legitimacy of the institution. Third is the equation of resistance with rudimentary political action. Though drawing on our empirical research conducted in male and female prisons in the UK we refine the concept to overcome these limitations. In particular we indicate how social identities mediate prisoner agency and are crucially implicated in acts of contestation. Our more general ambition is to place at the centre of prison sociology the still marginalized issues of gender, race and sexuality.

Doing Prison Research: Views From Inside

This article is coauthored by four prisoners and a prison-researcher. In it, the authors discuss the differing aims and aspirations of research participants and scholars and their implications for doing prison research. Unlike most other accounts of prison research, the authors stress the experience of those being interviewed rather than that of the interviewer. The authors pay particular attention to the emotional nature of being part of a study and how a researcher gains participants’ trust. The authors also consider the utility of academic research and how inmate voices might be effectively harnessed to build a sustained critique of the U.S. prison system.

The borders of punishment : migration, citizenship, and social exclusion

The Criminology of Mobility Introduction. Humanizing Migration Control and Detention PART I: CRIMINALIZATION The Ordered and the Bordered Society: Migration Control, Citizenship, and the Northern Penal State Is the Criminal Law only for Citizens? A Problem at the Borders of Punishment The Process is the Punishment in Crimmigration Law The Troublesome Intersections of Refugee Law and Criminal Law PART II: POLICING Policing Transversal Borders The Criminalization of Human Mobility: A Case Study of Law Enforcement in South Africa Human Trafficking and Border Control in the Global South PART III: IMPRISONMENT Can Immigration Detention Centres be Legitimate? Understanding Confinement in a Global World Hubs and Spokes: The Transformation of the British Prison Seeing like a Welfare State: Immigration Control, Statecraft, and a Prison with Double Vision PART IV: DEPORTATION The Social Bulimia of Forced Repatriation: A Case Study of Dominican Deportees Deportation, Crime, and the Changing Character of Membership in the United Kingdom Democracy & Deportation: Why Membership Matters Most PART V: SOCIAL EXCLUSION Governing the Funnel of Expulsion: Agamben, the Dynamics of Force, and Minimalist Biopolitics People on the Move: From the Countryside to the Factory / Prison Epilogue. The Borders of Punishment: Towards a Criminology of Mobility

Subjectivity and identity in detention: Punishment and society in a global age:

This article draws on ethnographic research that I conducted in five British immigration removal centres from November 2009 to June 2011, and considers the challenges these institutions pose to our understanding of penal power. These centres contain a complex mix of foreign national citizens including former and current asylum seekers, those without visas, visa over-stayers and post-sentence foreign national prisoners. For many non-British offenders, a period of confinement in an immigration detention centre is now, effectively, part of their punishment. What are the implications of this dual confinement and (how) can we understand it within the intellectual framework of punishment and society?

Labelling the Victims of Sex Trafficking: Exploring the Borderland between Rhetoric and Reality

In this article we discuss findings from a small scoping study into the experiences of victims of trafficking and those who work with them. We use testimonies from our interviews to examine issues of choice, slavery and escape. We challenge some of the current language and terminology in the literature on trafficking and call for a more nuanced appreciation of the relationship between agency and victimization.

Creating the responsible prisoner Federal admission and orientation packs

This article examines official management practices and rhetoric in the US federal prison system as they are set out in admission handbooks that are distributed to inmates on arrival. Using concrete examples from contemporary and historical admission manuals I examine the changing language and style of prison governance. Concentrating in particular on the contemporary documents, I show how many of the ideas articulated in the literature on risk and governmentality form the backdrop of everyday prison life as penal administrators attempt to encourage prisoners to govern themselves. In this endeavour, the handbooks rely on a language of managerialism that presents inmates as just another ‘client group’ or customer base. This rhetorical shift implicitly denies the particularity of penal institutions, while simultaneously placing all the responsibility on the prisoners for their self-improvement and good order. The handbooks also reveal womens behaviour and sexuality to be more strictly monitored and regulated than that of men, suggesting that, despite the minimal security risk they pose, women are considered in need of greater control.

Confining Femininity: A History of Gender, Power and Imprisonment

In this article, the author suggests that criminological accounts of the birth of the prison have been characterised by an unacknowledged chronological and gender bias. Rather than being the result of a global transformation in the ideology of punishment, as most authors have suggested with regard to men, the imprisonment of women was marked by significant continuities in forms and ideologies of punishment from the early modern period. To show this continuity, the author analyses the history of womens imprisonment in Hôpital de la Salpêtrière in Paris from 1684 to 1916. Despite the radical changes it underwent in different historical and political context, archival documents from the institution reveal that women throughout this period were brought to the prison on similar grounds and subjected to similar regimes. This article suggests that placing gender at the centre of the criminological enterprise transforms understanding of the development and legitimacy of imprisonment today and in the past.

Resistance and compliance in women’s prisons: Towards a critique of legitimacy

This article explores how power is negotiated in women’s prisons. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in three penal establishments in England, the author analyses the ways by which women negotiate restrictions of imprisonment and the manner in which they attempt to resist institutional control. It is proposed that power is negotiated on a private, internalised level, as women often resist the institution simply by trying to maintain an image of control over their own lives. However, this image of themselves as active, reasoning agents is undermined by institutional constraints that encourage them to exhibit traditional, passive, feminine behaviour at the same time as they deny them their identities and responsibilities as mothers, wives, girlfriends, and sisters. The author concludes that women’s modes of resistance indicate that imprisonment is contested and embattled in ways reflecting broader, social norms of behaviour and identity, and thus, that the ‘legitimacy’ of imprisonment rests, at least in part, upon gender.

Researching Trafficked Women: On Institutional Resistance and the Limits to Feminist Reflexivity

This article exposes methodological barriers we encountered in a small research project on women trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation and our attempts, drawing on feminist and emergent methods, to resolve them. It critically assesses the role of institutional gatekeepers and the practical challenges faced in obtaining data directly from trafficking victims. Such difficulties, it suggests, spring at least in part from lingering disagreements within the feminist academic, legal, and advocacy communities regarding the nature, extent, and definition of trafficking. They also reveal concerns from policy makers and practitioners over the relevance and utility of academic research. Although feminist researchers have focused on building trust with vulnerable research participants, there has been far less discussion about how to persuade institutional elites to cooperate. Our experiences in this project, we suggest, reveal limitations in the emphasis on reflexivity in feminist methods, and point to the need for more strategic engagement with policy makers about the utility of academic research in general.

Globalization, ethnicity and racism: An introduction

There is a troubling relationship between human difference—visualized through the tropes of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’—and the study of crime and punishment. This relationship is manifest in myriad ways from studies of ‘ethnic differences’ in the demographic characteristics of arrestees and penal populations to persistent allegations that racism is institutionalized in the courts, policing and prisons. It is also evident in public fears about ‘visible’ ethnic minorities and those regarded as non-citizens who are often assumed to be more crime prone than the natives. Most recently, the importance of ‘difference’ has been invoked to explain criminal acts perpetrated against the State as well as in the State’s reaction to these events in the prosecution of a ‘war on terror’ or the pursuit of ‘national security’. Indeed, the ‘globalization of fear’ after 11 September 2001 heightened anxieties about the new ‘globally mobile’ dangerous classes (terrorists, traffickers, immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, ‘illegal aliens’ and so on) and this has been coterminous with increased securitization of societies both within and without the borders of the State. The ‘new’ security agenda—focusing on ethnic conflict, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, drug trafficking and human smuggling—which supplanted Cold War ideology, has become seen as the ‘dark side’ of globalization linking migration to crime, smuggling, terrorism and the policy issues of ‘law and order’ across the globe. Despite the importance of racism and ethnicity in shaping patterns of crime and victimization, in media representations and in criminal justice policy, academic criminology has had little to contribute to our understanding of this complex field. While there have been a few attempts to provide a synthesis of theory and research in this field these are exceptions to a general indifference to the study of difference (Tonry, 1995, 1997; Bowling and Phillips, 2002; Theoretical Criminology