Walker James’s Reviews > Are Prisons Obsolete? > Status Update

There's this really interesting idea that moral transgression in men was/is associated with criminality and so punishment has been prisons. And that moral transgression in women was/is associated with hysteria/insanity and so punishment has been asylums. But that these two binaries (prison/asylum) have not only been gendered but also racialized.

"Bender thus sees a kinship between two major developments of the eighteenth century-the rise of the novel in the cultural sphere and the rise of the peniten­ tiary in the socio-Iegal sphere."

Popular novels, such as Robinson Crusoe, which extolled monastery-like ideas about solitude leading to transformation, seemingly influenced prison reform in the Victorian era.

More proof that popular entertainment influences.

Thinking about the phenomenon of prison rape jokes. I think it goes like this.... We associate men having sex with criminality -> we place that into the imagined prison we carry around with us -> which is also where we place any male-assigned body we associate with criminality -> the imagined (and the real) prison functions to ensure the comfort of white-male power? Still organizing these thoughts.