Focusing on three key stages of the criminal justice process, discipline, punishment and desistance, and incorporating case studies from Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa and Australia, the thirteen chapters in this collection are based on exciting new research that explores the evolution and adaptation of criminal justice and penal systems, largely from the early nineteenth century to the present. They range across the disciplinary boundaries of History, Criminology, Law and Penology.
Journeying into and unlocking different national and international penal archives, and drawing on diverse analytical approaches, the chapters forge new connections between historical and contemporary issues in crime, prisons, policing and penal cultures, and challenge traditional Western democratic historiographies of crime and punishment and categorisations of offenders, police and ex-offenders.
The individual chapters provide new perspectives on race, gender, class, urban space, surveillance, policing, prisonisation and defiance, and will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of criminal justice, law, police, transportation, slavery, offenders and desistance from crime.
About the Author: Vivien Miller is Associate Professor of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida's 'Sunshine Prison' and Chain Gangs (2012) and Crime, Violence and Sexual Clemency: Florida's Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era (2000), and co-editor of Cross-Cultural Connections in Crime Fictions (2012). She is currently working on capital punishment in the pre-1972 United States.
James Campbell is Lecturer in American History at the University of Leicester. He is the author of Slavery on Trial: Race, Class and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia (2007) and Crime and Punishment in African American History (2012). He is currently working on a study of the death penalty in twentieth-century Jamaica.
