Gender, Geography, and Punishment The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia

by Pallot, Judith; Piacentini, Laura

• ISBN13: 9780199658619
• ISBN10: 0199658617
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-12-12
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Gender, Geography, and Punishment should appeal to a wide range of non-specialists interested in developments in Russia in the past twenty years, in the situation of women, and in the rule of law, procedural justice, and rights consciousness. Given the widely predicted return of Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency, the time is ripe to examine whether Russia has managed to eliminate the vestiges of the Gulag which had such a defining influence onthe Soviet state. Gaining access to a number of penal colonies to interview prisoners, the authors show that much in the Russian prison system today is a direct inheritance from the Soviet period with the result that, despite wide-ranging the reforms since 1991, the Russian penal experience for women is stilluniquely painful. In particular, the authors highlight the continued use of penal facilities in remote and peripheral locations as a crucial factor shaping the Russian penal system today.

Author Biography

Judith Pallot has developed an interest in the Russian penal system, having previously focused on the historical geography of the Russian peasantry and post-Soviet rural adap-tations. She has researched extensively in Russian archives and also in the field. She is the author of several books, three with OUP, on rural Russia and numerous articles in scholarly journals and she has held several large grants from UK funding councils. With her current AHRC grant she is extending her interest in women's relationship with the Russian penal system to explore the experiences of the 'wives, mothers and daughters' of Russia's large prison population and she is also engaged in a project to map to the gulag (www.gulagmaps.org). She is Professor of the Human Geography of Russia and Official Student of Christ Church in the University of Oxford.

Laura Piacentini is the first Criminologist and scholar to conduct empirical and theoretical research in Russian prisons and has been researching prisons in Russia since 1997, hav-ing visited some 20 penal colonies and lived within the regimes in Siberia and in Western Russia. A Russian speaker, her work explores a variety of penological problems including the changing nature of prison labour, human rights and the conceptual shifts in punish-ment ideology and practices in the post-Soviet period. She is Reader in Criminology at Strathclyde Law School, The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Table of Contents

1. The Archipelago and the Matrioshka
2. Researching Women's Carceral Experience in Russia
Part I: Space and Place in Russia's System of Penality
3. The Historical Geography of Punitive Expulsion
4. Correctional Colonies in their Local Setting
5. 'Socialism in One Barracks'
Part II: Women's Experiences of Carceral Russia
6. Remand: The First Phase of Coerced Mobilisation
7. ETAP and Quarantine: The Second Phase of Coerced Mobilisation
8. Staying in Touch with the World Beyond the Colony Fences
9. Long Distance Motherhood
10. Social Relationships Behind the Colony Fences
11. Rehabilitation as Emotion Therapy
12. Re-Socialisation and the Construction of Gender Identities
13. Epilogue