Gaining access to a number of penal colonies to interview prisoners, the authors show that much in the Russian prison system today is a direct inheritance from the Soviet period with the result that, despite wide-ranging the reforms since 1991, the Russian penal experience for women is still uniquely painful.

The perennially controversial issue of capital punishment has generated especially passionate debate in recent years. In this book, two noted experts on crime provide a geo-historical perspective on capital punishment, showing vividly the incoherencies and contradictions in policies and practices across the country. Going back to the earliest U.S. executions, the authors challenge the belief that capital punishment serves as a deterrent. Using state-of-the-art methods drawn from geographic information systems (GIS), they illustrate the culture of capital punishment and its impact on selected groups, mapping the execution of women, for example, and the origin and diffusion of electrocution, the gas chamber, and lethal injection. This book will be indispensable to anyone--scholar, policy maker, or lay person--who must be informed on the issue of capital punishment.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women's brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners' acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life. A landmark history of black women's imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.

A spatial view of punishment -- The urban model -- Small cities and mass incarceration -- Social services beyond the city : isolation and regional inequity -- Race and communities of pervasive incarceration -- Punishing places -- Beyond punishing places : a research and reform agenda -- Appendix : data and methodology.

The Russian Federation has one of the largest prison populations in the world. Women in particular are profoundly affected by the imprisonment of a family member. Families and Punishment in Russia details the experiences of these women-be they wives, mothers, girlfriends, daughters-who, as relatives of Russia's three-quarters of a million prisoners, are the "invisible victims" of the country's harsh penal policy. A pioneering work that offers a unique lens through which various aspects of life in twenty-first century Russia can be observed: the workings of criminal sub-cultures; societal attitudes to parenthood, marriage and marital fidelity; young women's quests for a husband; nostalgia for the Soviet period; state strategies towards dealing with political opponents; and the social construction of gender roles.

This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the twentieth century. The Women's House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women's imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City's Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some of these inmates--Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur--were famous, but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women's prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher. Historian Hugh Ryan explores the roots of this crisis and reconstructs the little-known lives of incarcerated New Yorkers, making a uniquely queer case for prison abolition--and demonstrating that by queering the Village, the House of D helped defined queerness for the rest of America. From the lesbian communities forged through the Women's House of Detention to the turbulent prison riots that presaged Stonewall, this is the story of one building and much more: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired.