Introduction to Corrections
SAGE Journal Articles
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Journal Article 1: Curtis, A. (2014). “You have to cut it off at the knee”: Dangerous masculinity and security inside a men’s prison. Men and Masculinities, 17, 120–146.
Abstract: This article focuses on the prison as a gendered organization and examines the consequences for treating the male prisoner as the generic prisoner. In order to simplify security protocols and manage outsiders, prison staff and correctional officers use a “commonsense” approach that draws on long-standing and structurally embedded assumptions about the uncontrollable masculinity of minority men. In a “postracial” and “color-blind” modern America, however, the assumption that prisoners are hyperviolent, hypersexual, and dangerously masculine is applied to all prisoners regardless of race. Drawing on two-and-a-half years of ethnographic fieldwork inside a high-security prison, this article discusses the ways that the assumed dangerous masculinity of prisoners facilitates security protocols and isolates male prisoners from their children and families.
Journal Article 2: Grant, E., & Jewkes Y. (2015). Finally fit for purpose: The evolution of Australian prison architecture. The Prison Journal, 95, 223–243.
Abstract: This article argues that Australian prisons have uncritically emulated American penitentiaries in their architecture and structure. We suggest that simply transporting physical design models from one geographic and politico-cultural setting to another, with little commitment to understanding the context-bound philosophies and conditions that underpin such models, has been highly problematic. The result has been an Australian penal estate that for decades was incompatible with its aims and purpose. Finally, we discuss the eventual introduction of unique, innovative styles of penal architecture in Australia, which are not only appropriate to their culture and context, but represent world-class developments in penal design.