Collaborative Research Networks
Organizers
Ashley Rubin and Natalie Pifer
This interdisciplinary group of scholars seeks to understand the social, political, economic, and cultural underpinnings of punishment. We examine punishment in all its guises, not limited to prisons and executions, or community corrections, but also in immigrant detention facilities, mental institutions, welfare offices, schools, neighborhoods, and downtown. We examine punishments across time and space, examining historical change, international differences, and local variation within individual countries. We examine penal policies as established at the organizational, state, and national levels and punishment in practice, as meted out behind closed doors or on city streets. We examine not only punishment’s origins, but also its consequences for society. Ultimately, we examine punishment, broadly construed, as it is experienced, constructed, and contested around the world, throughout history.