CRM 4302 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Prison Abolition Movement, Solitary Confinement, Debt Bondage

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Criminology
• Course: CRM 4302
• Professor: Vajmeh Tabibi

Document Summary

Punishment is used to establish the cultural norms of a society. And law is thus deployed for the creation of cultural norms. The existential dimension of prisons in general: an existential examination of prison is necessary in order to go beneath the political rhetoric by which it legitimizes itself, to its underlying structure, prison is a form of violence. It has the same structure as a number of different criminal acts. A person is forcibly removed from social space and social relationships, immobilized spatially, and made to suffer thereby. Judicial process claims to punish criminals as a means of making them pay for what they have done saying that kidnapping and torture are not impermissible. It signifies that violence itself may be illegal, but is not impermissible. Imprisonment, however, is considered paying a debt to society. The political dimension of prisons in the us: racialization is always accompanied by a degree of sadism.