A Criminological Imagination

Pat Carlen is Visiting Professor of Criminology at Kent University and Editor-in-Chief, British Journal of Criminology.

Contents: Introduction; Published writings; Part I Discourse/Ideology/Social Control: The staging of magistrates' justice; Magistrates courts: a game theoretic analysis; Remedial routines for the maintenance of control in magistrates' courts; Official discourse (with F. Burton); Controlling measures: the repackaging of common-sense opposition to women's imprisonment in England and Canada; Imaginary penalities and risk-crazed governance. Part II Women/Prisons/Punishment: Virginia, criminology and the anti-social control of women; Papa's discipline: an analysis of disciplinary modes in the Scottish women’s prison; Why study women's imprisonment? Or anyone else's?; On rights and powers: some notes on penal politics; Crime, inequality and sentencing; 'Underclass' crime and imprisonment: the continuing need for agendas of utopianism, abolitionism and socialism in criminology and criminal justice; Death and the triumph of governance? Lessons from the Scottish women's prison; Imprisonment and the penal body politic: the cancer of disciplinary governance; Analyzing women's imprisonment: abolition and its enemies. Part III Feminism/Criminology/Critique: Against the politics of sex discrimination: for the politics of difference and a women-wise approach to sentencing; Criminal women and criminal justice: the limits to, and potential of, feminist and left realist perspectives; Criminology Ltd: the search for a paradigm; Critical criminology? In praise of an oxymoron and its enemies; Official discourse, comic relief and the play of governance; Name Index.