The Arts of Imprisonment Control, Resistance and Empowerment [Hardcover]

The arts - spanning the visual, design, performing, media, musical, and literary genres - constitute an alternative lens through which to understand state-sanctioned punishment and its place in public consciousness. Perhaps this is especially so in the case of imprisonment: its nature, its functions, and the ways in which these register in public perceptions and desires, have historically and to some extent inherently been intertwined with the arts. But the products of this intertwinement have by no means been constant or uniform. Indeed, just as exploring imprisonment and its public meanings through the lens of the arts may reveal hitherto obscured instances of social control within or outside prisons, so too it may uncover a rich and possibly inspirational archive of resistance to them. This edited collection sheds light both on state use of the arts for the purposes of controlling prisoners and the broader public, and the use made of the arts by prisoners and portions of the broader public as tools of resistance to penal states. The book also includes a number of chapters that address arts-in-prisons programmes, making distinctive contributions to the literature on their philosophy, formation, operation, effectiveness, and research evaluation, as well as taking care to explore the politics surrounding and underpinning these multiple themes.Contents: The arts of imprisonment: an introduction, Leonidas K. Cheliotis; Aesthetics and an-aesthetics: the architecture of incarceration, Yvonne Jewkes; Telling prison stories: the spectacle of punishment and the criminological imagination, Eamonn Carrabine; Victor Hugo and Octave Mirbeau: a sociological analysis of imprisonment in fiction, Vincenzo Ruggiero; Masculinity, violence, and art in Tennessee Williams' Not About Nightingales, Thomas Fahy; Social documentary in prison: the art of catching the state in the act of punishment, Michelle Brown; Thug life: Hip Hop's curious relationship with criminal justice, andr? dougllc.