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Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? By Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith (eds) (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018, 336 pp. $85, hardcover. ISBN: 9780198810087)
A bpok review
McKay, T. (2019). Prisons, Punishment, and the Family: Towards a New Sociology of Punishment? By Rachel Condry and Peter Scharff Smith (eds) (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018, 336 pp. $85, hardcover. ISBN: 9780198810087): A bpok review. British Journal of Criminology, 59(4), 1002-1005. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azz013
‘Penal philosophy’s strongly individualistic presuppositions about the nature of human beings and social relations’, Nicola Lacey has written, ‘are open to challenge’ (Lacey 2003: p. 178). This sparing statement crystallizes a simple but searing philosophical challenge posed to penal systems—and the criminologists, sociologists and legal scholars who theorize them—by the family relationships of criminalized individuals. For much of the two centuries in which imprisonment has been routinely imposed as punishment for crime, the systems of thought and governance on which it rests have ‘focus[ed] on the individual offender and his or her relationship with the state’ (Lacey 2003...