LEGALLY FREE BUT PALPABLY BOUND
‘Papa’s House’ is what one small boy calls San Quentin, California’s oldest and exclusively male prison.Ìý The Tube is the long narrow corridor where prisoner visitors queue, sometimes for hours, to get in the prison.
Megan Comfort, a sociologist working at the London School of Economics and Science and the University of California, spent long hours in the Tube whilst carrying out fieldwork examining the experiences of the wives, girlfriends, friends and relations who invest a lot of their time and money in efforts to keep the notion of family alive for the inmates.
Prison visiting is widely regarded as extremely important in aiding prisoner rehabilitation and countering recidivism.Ìý But as Laurie Taylor hears prison-visiting also results in considerable suffering for the visitors themselves.
THOSE WHO CANNOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT - George Santayana
A recent survey of six hundred students in the United Kingdom, the USA and Germany has discovered they know little or nothing of the history behind the news headlines.Ìý Since our understanding of current events can be shaped by our knowledge of history, what cost this collective amnesia?
Laurie Taylor discusses the issue with Greg Philo, Professor of Communications at Glasgow University’s Media Research Unit and author of a chapter called Black Holes of History: Public Understanding and the Shaping of our Past and the writer George Walden, author ofÌý The New Elites: making a career in the masses.
Additional information:
Megan Comfort
Papa’s House: The Prison as Domestic and Social Satellite
Published in October 2002
in Ethnography Vol 3, No 4
In The Tube At San Quentin: The Secondary Prisonization of Women visiting Inmates
Published in February 2003
in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography Vol 32, No 1
Tell Me Lies: The Media and Propaganda in the Attack on Iraq
edited by David Miller
Pluto Press ISBN 0745322018 (to be published in Oct/Nov 2003)
In the above book Greg Philo has written the chapter titled:
Black Holes of History: Public Understanding and the Shaping of Our Past
Bad News From Israel
by Greg Philo
Pluto press, will be published in spring 2004
George Walden
From 1962 to 1983 he worked for the British Foreign Office. From 1983 to 1997 he was Conservative MP for Buckingham and from 1985 to 1987 Minister for Higher Education.
The New Elites: Making a Career in the Masses
Penguin Books ISBN 014028222X
The Â鶹ԼÅÄ is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
|
