Book review: Global lockdown: Race, gender, and the prison-industrial complex, Julia Sudbury (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2005. 323 pp. (including index). $27.95 (pbk). ISBN 0—415—95057—0
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474507080481 |
| Published date | 01 October 2007 |
| Author | Sarah Armstrong |
| Date | 01 October 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore.
www.sagepublications.com
1462-4745; Vol 9(4): 417–441
DOI: 10.1177/1462474507080481
PUNISHMENT
& SOCIETY
Book reviews
Global lockdown: Race, gender, and the prison-industrial complex, Julia Sudbury (ed.). New
York: Routledge, 2005. 323 pp. (including index). $27.95 (pbk). ISBN 0–415–95057–0.
‘What would prison studies look like if they were conducted by a philosopher, a
sociologist, an anthropologist, a political scientist, or a geographer?’ (p. xix). Add to this
prison activists and women writing about their experiences in prison and you begin to
have an idea of how ambitious and extensive is this collection edited by Julia Sudbury.
This volume brings together the work of 24 writers all writing in a feminist vein and,
with one exception, all women. The book sheds light on the particular injustices experi-
enced by women in national and local prison systems, and incrementally builds a picture
of the global processes of neoliberal capitalism, racism, sexism and economic exclusion
that shows these systems have much in common. This is a rare, though one hopes and
expects increasingly less so, contribution to the literature of imprisonment. As such, it
provides an opportunity to consider the potential impact of multi-disciplinary, multi-
perspective and above all feminist, work on imprisonment in the age of globalization.
Prison is just one of many sites in which women and girls are contained and abused,
but displays its own institutional patterns and links to a wider trend of criminalizing
people who are peripheral or perceived as threats to the State. The story of Lisa Neve
(Chapter 2), an Aboriginal woman who came to be designated ‘Canada’s most danger-
ous offender’ despite suffering a life of horrifying abuse and violence, makes vivid the
ways in which imprisonment is brutalizing. Significantly, though, it also reveals the basic
incoherence of punitive structures, the bureaucratic indifference...
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