Theorizing Race and Imprisonment: Towards a New Penality.

This article compares historical and contemporary notions of race in France, England and Wales, and the United States, in order to explain each nation's prison population. It seeks to demonstrate how the distinct interpretations and ways of documenting race in each place correspond with an over-representation of specific populations in that nation's prison system. After describing the prison population in each country, the paper analyzes the historical and cultural construction of ideas of race in France. Of particular importance is the Enlightenment and the 19th century love of taxonomy that articulated, mapped and reified Otherness and which is also considered to be the birth of prison and criminology. Thus, the genealogical approach may provide a new understanding of the conceptual and practical interdependence of race and imprisonment, which is then applied to the U.S. and England. This paper aims to help criminologists move beyond merely documenting the over-representation of minorities to critiquing the structures of race and punishment, grounded in colonialism and slavery, that serve to legitimate strategies of social control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]