The Violence of Incarceration

Conceived in the immediate aftermath of the humiliations and killings of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, of the suicides and hunger strikes at Guantanamo Bay and of the disappearances of detainees through extraordinary rendition, this book explores the connections between these shameful events and the inhumanity and degradation of domestic prisons within the ’allied’ states, including the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Ireland.

The central theme is that the revelations of extreme brutality perpetrated by allied soldiers represent the inevitable end-product of domestic incarceration predicated on the use of extreme violence including lethal force. Exposing as fiction the claim to the political moral high ground made by western liberal democracies is critical because such claims animate and legitimate global actions such as the ’war on terror’ and the indefinite detention of tens of thousands of people by the United States which accompanies it. The myth of moral virtue works to hide, silence, minimize and deny the brutal continuing history of violence and incarceration both within western countries and undertaken on behalf of western states beyond their national borders.

Phil Scraton is Professor of Criminology in the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, School of Law, Queen’s University, Belfast. His latest books are Power, Conflict and Criminalisation, Hillsborough: The Truth (3rd edition) and The Incarceration of Women

Jude McCulloch is Professor of Criminology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her latest book is Counter-terrorism: Community, Cohesion and Security.