Imaginary Penalities

This book is concerned to explore the idea of imaginary penalities and to understand why the management of criminal justice and criminal justice systems has so often reached crisis point. Its underlying theme is that when political strategies of punitive populism are combined with managerialist techniques of social auditing, a new all-encompassing form of governance has emerged- powerless to deliver what it promises but with a momentum of its own and increasingly removed from proper democratic accountability. A highly distinguished international group of contributors explores this set of themes in a variety of different contexts taken from the UK, N. America, Europe and Australia. It will be essential reading for anybody seeking to understand some of the root causes of increasing prison populations, social harms such as recidivism and domestic violence and the increasingly important role of criminal justice within systems of governance.

1. Imaginary penalities and risk-crazed governance, Pat Carlen 2. Imaginable insecurities: imagination, routinisation and the government of uncertainty post 9/11, Pat O'Malley and Philip D. Bougen3. The first casualty: evidence and governance in a war against crime, Tim Hope 4. Inventing community safety, Adam Edwards and Gordon Hughes 5. Telling sentencing stories, Jacqueline Tombs 6. The 'seemingness' of the 'seamless management' of offenders, Anne Worrall 7. Pain and punishment: the real and the imaginary in penal institutions, Joe Sim 8. Imaginary reform: changing the post-colonial prison, Andrew M. Jefferson 9. The imaginary constitution of wage labourers, Magnus Hörnqvist 10. Re-imagining gendered penalities: the myth of gender responsivity, Kelly Hannah-Moffat 11. Risking desistance: disrespect and dependency in custodial and post-release contexts, Mark Halsey 12. 'The best seven years I could'a done': the reconstruction of imprisonment as rehabilitation, Megan Comfort 13. Re-imagining justice: principles of justice for divided societies in a globalized world, Barbara Hudson

Pat Carlen is Visiting Professor at the Universities of Kent and Westminster, Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Criminology, founder of the Keele Criminology Department, co-founder of the campaigning group Women in Prison, and has published 17 books and many articles on criminal and social justice