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How prisons around the world shape the social lives of their inhabitantsPrison Life offers a fresh appreciation of how people in prison organize their lives, drawing on case studies from Africa, Europe and the US. The book describes how order is maintained, how power is exercised, how days are spent, and how meaning is found in a variety of environments that all have the same function – incarceration – but discharge it very differently. It is based on an unusually diverse range of sources including photographs, drawings, court cases, official reports, memoirs, and site visits.Ian O’Donnell contrasts the soul-destroying isolation of the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado with the crowded conviviality of an Ethiopian prison where men and women cook their own meals, seek opportunities to generate an income, elect a leadership team, and live according to a code of conduct that they devised and enforce. He explores life on wings controlled by the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland’s H Blocks, where men who saw the actions that led to their incarceration as politically-motivated moved as one, in perpetual defiance of the authorities. He shows how prisoners in Texas took to the courts to overthrow a regime that allowed their routine subjugation by violent men known as building tenders, who had been selected by staff to supervise and discipline their peers.In each case study O’Donnell presents the life story of a man who was molded by, and in return molded, the institution that held him. This ensures that his reflections on law and policy as well as on theory and practice never lose sight of the human angle. Imprisonment is about pain after all, and pain is personal.

Prisoners --- Prisons --- ADX. --- Chalew Gebino. --- David Ruiz. --- Eastham Unit. --- H Blocks. --- Integration. --- Irish Republican Army. --- Isir Bet. --- Jack Powers. --- Laurence McKeown. --- SAMs. --- autonomy. --- building tenders. --- carceral geometry. --- charter. --- code. --- compliance. --- conditioning. --- constitutions. --- control unit. --- dormitories. --- legitimacy. --- order keepers. --- order. --- porosity. --- race. --- regulation. --- security. --- sensemaking. --- slave. --- solitary confinement. --- supermax. --- ‘society of captives’.

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Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state--all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, The Law Is a White Dog tackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist suspects, and felons? Reading the language, allusions, and symbols of legal discourse, and bridging distinctions between the human and nonhuman, Colin Dayan looks at how the law disfigures individuals and animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen effects in our daily lives. Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, Dayan considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and she explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, she also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions, The Law Is a White Dog illuminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.

Law --- Civil rights --- Torture --- Slavery --- Persons (Law) --- Law of persons --- Personality (Law) --- Status (Law) --- Acts, Legislative --- Enactments, Legislative --- Laws (Statutes) --- Legislative acts --- Legislative enactments --- Jurisprudence --- Legislation --- Social aspects. --- Law and legislation --- American prison system. --- Constitution. --- Hecuba. --- Herman Melville. --- Judeo-Christian. --- animal treatment. --- animals. --- appellate cases. --- banishment. --- chattels. --- civil death. --- civil existence. --- civil ghost. --- degradation. --- deprivation. --- dignity. --- dogs. --- domesticated animals. --- felon. --- felons. --- genocide. --- ghosts. --- human chattels. --- human empathy. --- human rights. --- illegal practices. --- incarceration. --- inferiority. --- juridical diminution. --- larceny. --- lawful repression. --- legal boundaries. --- legal protections. --- legal rituals. --- legality. --- modern law. --- modernity. --- negative personhood. --- personal identity. --- personal rights. --- post-Magna Carta. --- property. --- punishment. --- punishments. --- religious fictions. --- restitution. --- servitude. --- slave law. --- slave. --- slavery. --- slaves. --- social death. --- social marginalization. --- spectral emanations. --- supermax penitentiary. --- taxonomies. --- torture. --- untamed animals. --- war on terror. --- wills.