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Fear Suffused Hell-holes: The Architecture of Extreme Punishment

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Extreme Punishment

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology ((PSIPP))

Abstract

Prisons tend to reflect the society that oversees them; they are physical manifestations of a state’s aims and approaches for dealing with offenders (Johnston 2000; Wener 2012). In recent years, the prison has been analogously compared to transportation and slavery (Davis 2000; Alexander 2010) and the urban ghetto (Wacquant 2002) and used as a means of understanding state power and security apparatuses in post-9/11 societies (Drake 2012). in these analyses, imprisonment is explicitly linked to wider processes of racial discrimination, criminalization, and extreme punishment. A further analogous framework by which prisons might be viewed and understood, both structurally and experientially, is that of Hell.1 This chapter draws on images of Heîî from Dante’s Inferno, the cultural purchase of which, it is suggested, remains undiminished 700 years after it was written.

Is Hook at last heading for Heil? Abu Hamza to be moved to top security jail.... ‘’Hell’ is what they call the fearsome jail where the soul-destroying isolation has driven some of America’s toughest prisoners to suicide (Leonard 2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Leicester, UK

    Yvonne Jewkes

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  1. Yvonne Jewkes
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Irvine, USA

    Keramet Reiter

  2. University of California, Berkeley, USA

    Alexa Koenig

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© 2015 Yvonne Jewkes

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Jewkes, Y. (2015). Fear Suffused Hell-holes: The Architecture of Extreme Punishment. In: Reiter, K., Koenig, A. (eds) Extreme Punishment. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137441157_2

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