This book offers a unique look into prisons in Iran and the lives of the prisoners and their families. It provides an overview of the history of Iranian prisons, depicts the sub-culture in contemporary Iranian prisons, and highlights the forms that gender discrimination takes behind the prison walls. The book draws on the voices of 90 men and women who have been imprisoned in Iran, interviewed in 2012 and 2017 across various parts of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It presents a different approach to the one proposed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish because the author argues that Iran never experienced "the age of sobriety in punishment" and "a slackening of the hold on the body". Whilst penal severity in Iran has reduced, its scope has now extended beyond prisoners to their families, regardless of their age and gender. In Iran, penalties still target the body but now also affect the bodies of the entire prisoner's family. It is not just prisoners who suffer from the lack of food, clothes, spaces for sleeping, health services, legal services, safety, and threats of physical violence and abuse but also their families. The book highlights the costs of mothers' incarceration for their children. It argues that as long as punishment remains the dominant discourse of the penal system, the minds and bodies of anyone related to incarcerated offenders will remain under tremendous strain. This unique book explores the nature of these systems in a deeply under-covered nation to expand understandings of prisons in the non-Western world.

Autorentext

Nahid Rahimipour Anaraki is Postdoctoral Fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. She holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Kerman, Iran and a PhD in sociology from Memorial University, and she has co-authored several articles published in Quality & Quantity journal.

Inhalt

Chapter 1 5Introduction 6The so called "prison" 6 Chapter 2 24History of Prison 24The First Spark of Juridical Reform in Iran 24Prisons In The Qajar Reign 27The Constitutional Revolution 29A Root-and-Branch Revamping of the Whole Judicial System 33Interregnum (1941-1953) 38Prison Life from 1971 to 1977 42The 1979 Revolution and its impact on prison conditions 49 Chapter 3 61Prison Subculture 61Unstable pyramid 63Captives as a society 88Battle zone 91Hegemony of drug-related networks 96Multidimensional identity 103Instrumental relationships 111Two sides of the same coin 121 Chapter 4 131Incarcerated women and children 131Women's Pathway to Prison 131Incarcerated Mothers 136The Most Visible Victims 141Being Prisoned Outside of Prison 150 Chapter 5 165Conclusion 165Never accomplished modernization Index