Projects per year
Abstract
This article presents findings from research conducted in a penal colony for young women in Russia. Russia's penal system remains under-researched in socio-legal and criminological scholarship. This contribution is the first multi-disciplinary study of Russian imprisonment to be conducted in the post-Soviet period, bringing together criminology, human geography and law. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a landmark moment in Russia's penal trajectory due to the excessive scale and use of imprisonment as a political and cultural corrective. Our findings reveal the punishment of young women in Russia to be exceptional and exclusionary. Personnel play a crucial role in shaping penal strategies that encourage young women to adopt blame and shame sensibilities. We develop a conceptualization of Russian penality as it relates to young women prisoners. We argue that the prisoner transport is the first stage in a penal continuum where gender, penal order and culture come together to create a specific penological place identity, which we conceptualize as Malaya Rodina (Little Homeland). We conclude that Russia's penal geography, and its attendant penological imagination, is a vestige of the Soviet penal monolith.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 523-542 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Social and Legal Studies |
Volume | 18 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2009 |
Keywords
- prisons
- distance
- L'govo
- gender
- transportation
- Russia
- women
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Dive into the research topics of 'Welcome to Malaya Rodina ('Little Homeland'): Gender and Penal Order in A Russian Penal Colony'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Women in the Russian penal system: the role of distance in the theory and practice of imprisonment in late Soviet
Economic & Social Research Council
1/12/06 → 30/06/10
Project: Research Councils