Narratives of self and identity in women's prisons: stigma and the struggle for self-definition in penal regimes

A concern with questions of selfhood and identity has been central to penal practices in women's prisons, and to the sociology of women's imprisonment. Studies of women's prisons have remained preoccupied with women prisoners’ social identities, and their apparent tendency to adapt to imprisonment through relationships. This article explores the narratives of women in two English prisons to demonstrate the importance of the self as a site of meaning for prisoners and the central place of identity in micro-level power negotiations in prisons

Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

This article examines how the UK’s Troubled Families Programme (TFP) works as a strategy of domestication which produces and delimits certain forms of ‘family life’. Drawing upon critical geographies of home and empire, the article explores how the TFP works to manage the troubled family as part of a longer history of regulating unruly households in the name of national health and civilisation. Viewing the TFP as part of the production of heteronormative order, highlights how the policy remobilises and reconfigures older forms of colonial rule which work to demarcate between civility/savagery, the developable/undevelopable. In examining the postcolonial dimension of neoliberal social policy, the article stresses how the TFP relies on racializing and sexualised logics of socio-biological control borrowed from imperial eugenics. Reading the TFP in this way contributes to our understanding of neoliberal rule. That the troubled family can be either domesticated or destroyed (through benefit sanctions and eviction) equally reveals the extent to which domesticity works as a key site for the production of both ‘worthy’ and ‘surplus’ life

Creating the Back Ward: The Triumph of Custodialism and the Uses of Therapeutic Failure in Nineteenth Century Idiot Asylums

My focus in this chapter is on the origin of the back ward rather than its demise. Where did the “back wards” that [Burton] Blatt and [Senator Robert] Kennedy witnessed come from in the first place? What 3 exactly were those “antecedents of the problems observed” that Blatt cited? This chapter reviews that history and argues that, in fact, there is a specific narrative to the evolution of the institutional “back ward” as an identifiable place where people with the most significant intellectual disabilities were to be incarcerated and largely forgotten.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/education_books/1006/thumbnail.jp