Imprisonment in United Kingdom

Imprisonment and Medieval Law

Imprisonment and Legal History

Resources

See Also

• Nuisance (in this legal Encyclopedia)
• Concubinage (in this legal Encyclopedia)
• Religious Law (in this legal Encyclopedia)
• Medieval Roman Law (in this legal Encyclopedia)

Bibliographies of English Law History

• Maxwell, William H. A Legal Bibliography of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Volume 1: English Law to 1800. London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1955-
• Beale, Joseph H. A Bibliography of Early English Law Books. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926.
• Winfield, Percy H. The Chief Sources of English Legal History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925.

Punishing Evil: the Performative Role of Imprisonment

Yvonne Jewkes, from the University of Leicester, made a contribution to the 2012 Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, in the category “Punishment and its alternatives,” under the title “Punishing Evil: the Performative Role of Imprisonment”. Here is the abstract: Using examples from the UK and US, this paper explores the extent to which cultural narratives manipulate public morality and policy regarding prisoners. In literature, art and cinematography, prisons have always been associated with the concept of Hell and vice versa but it is only relatively recently that offending ‘folk devils’ have been recast as ‘evil monsters’. These metaphorical links between penal hell-holes and evil ‘others’ – have been conveyed via textual and visual discourses that conjure up deeply embedded cultural images from, among others, Dante’s Inferno, Pirandello’s Carceri and Hieronymus Bosch’s hellscape in The Garden of Earthly Delights. In these artistic and literary representations, notions of good and evil underpin the universe; a dualism that finds modern form in the popular media. Prisons have thus become part of the ritualized ‘performance’ of justice, mobilizing active consent towards excessively punitive practices for a public infatuated with incarceration yet ignorant of its effects.[rtbs name=”criminology”]

Resources

See Also

Further Reading

• “Punishing Evil: the Performative Role of Imprisonment”, by Yvonne Jewkes (Proceedings)