Theorizing Race and Imprisonment: Towards a New Penality

This article compares historical and contemporary notions of race in France, England and Wales, and the United States, in order to explain each nation's prison population. It seeks to demonstrate how the distinct interpretations and ways of documenting race in each place correspond with an over-representation of specific populations in that nation's prison system. After describing the prison population in each country, the paper analyzes the historical and cultural construction of ideas of race in France. Of particular importance is the Enlightenment and the 19th century love of taxonomy that articulated, mapped and reified Otherness and which is also considered to be the birth of prison and criminology. Thus, the genealogical approach may provide a new understanding of the conceptual and practical interdependence of race and imprisonment, which is then applied to the U.S. and England. This paper aims to help criminologists move beyond merely documenting the over-representation of minorities to critiquing the structures of race and punishment, grounded in colonialism and slavery, that serve to legitimate strategies of social control. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A: Reviews: general

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Rome and its Histories: a View from Australia

In this paper I trace the many debates about the past, and its relationship with the present and the future, that have eddied around Rome over the last two centuries. I spend quite a bit of time illustrating the Catholic line on the “eternal city” and on its contestation from, first, Italian nationalist and then more imperialist and Fascist expositions of “sites of memory” there. After “liberation” in 1944, there were new approaches to elucidating the city's meaning, headed by the “myth of Anti‐Fascism” and extending to a left terrorist reading by the Red Brigades. In recent years, “post‐fascism” has grown in importance in Italy's capital, especially as embodied by the mayor since 2008, Gianni Alemanno. These ideological and politically inspired reckonings of history have squared uneasily with the more popular comprehension of the place of the past, all the more given that Rome has been in rapid growth, first from within Italy and nowadays from across the globe. Specific urban groups, notably the city's Jews, have also read history in their own manner. In sum, Rome has not been a venue for a simple, two sided, “culture war”, as cliché assures us is our fate in Australia. Rather, as is also true here, Rome has proved a site of constant and multi‐fronted arguments about the meaning of history, as should be true of any serious democracy.