Race, Gender, and Punishment

"A superb book on the treatment of race, gender, and punishment."- Susan L. Miller, professor of sociology and criminal justice, University of Delaware "This volume stands as first-rate evidence that the sociological imagination is alive and well. The contributors move the discussion of race, gender, and social control beyond the statistical morass with their historically-situated analyses that simultaneously demonstrate the diversity of socially constructed categories."-Claire M. Renzetti, University of Dayton The disproportionate representation of black Americans in the U.S. criminal justice system is well documented. Far less well-documented are the entrenched systems and beliefs that shape punishment and other official forms of social control today. In this book, Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin bring together twelve original essays by prominent scholars to examine not only the discrimination that is evident, but also the structural and cultural forces that have influenced and continue to perpetuate the current situation. Contributors point to four major factors that have impacted public sentiment and criminal justice policy: colonialism, slavery, immigration, and globalization. In doing so they reveal how practices of punishment not only need particular ideas about race to exist, but they also legitimate them. The essays unearth troubling evidence that testifies to the nation's brutally racist past, and to white Americans' continued fear of and suspicion about racial and ethnic minorities. The legacy of slavery on punishment is considered, but also subjects that have received far less attention such as how colonizers' notions of cultural superiority shaped penal practices, the criminalization of reproductive rights, the link between citizenship and punishment, and the global export of crime control strategies. Mary Bosworth is University Lecturer in criminology and fellow of St. Cross College at the University of Oxford. Jeanne Flavin is an associate professor in the sociology and anthropology department at Fordham University.