Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland

Lynsey Black is Lecturer in Criminology at the Department of Law, Maynooth University. Her research interests include gender and punishment, the death penalty, and historical and postcolonial criminology.Louise Brangan is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Criminology at the University of Strathclyde. Her research focuses on penal culture, social history of punishment, penal politics, and the comparative sociology of punishment.Deirdre Healy is Director of the UCD Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Associate Professor at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin. Her research interests include desistance from crime, community sanctions, and victimisation.

• Introduction PART I. BEYOND CRIMINAL JUSTICE Chapter 1. The Past in the Present: A Historical Perspective on Probation Work at the Intersection between the Penal Voluntary and Criminal Justice Sectors; Deirdre Healy and Louise Kennefick Chapter 2. 'Straightening Crooked Souls': Psychology and Children in Custody in 1950s and 1960s Ireland; Fiachra Byrne and Catherine Cox OPEN ACCESSChapter 3. ‘Coercive Confinement’: An Idea Whose Time has Come?; Ian O’Donnell and Eoin O’Sullivan Chapter 4. A Certain Class of Justice: Ireland’s Magdalenes; Katherine O’Donnell Chapter 5. Ireland’s ‘Historical’ Abuse Inquiries and the Secrecy of Records and Archives; Maeve O’Rourke PART II. RETHINKING CRIME AND PUNISHMENT Chapter 6. Against Hibernian Exceptionalism; Louise Brangan Chapter 7. Capital Punishment and Postcolonialism in Ireland; Lynsey Black Chapter 8. The Ultimate Sacrifice: Irish Police (Gardaí) Murdered in the Line of Duty, 1922-2020; Liam O’Callaghan, David M. Doyle, Diarmuid Griffin, and Muiread Murphy Chapter 9. Gender, Punishment and Violence in Ireland’s Revolution 1919-23; Linda Connolly Chapter 10. Histories of Penal Oversight; Mary Rogan Chapter 11. "Nothing to Say?" Prisoners and the Penal Past; Cormac Behan Chapter 12. Peripheral: Women’s Imprisonment in Twentieth-Century Ireland; Christina Quinlan

This exciting volume leverages the unique trajectory of Irish criminology’s 21st century emergence and its distinctive commitment to historical inquiry to raise important questions for criminology as a field about what might have been and, moving forward, what could be. Editors Lynsey Black, Louise Brangan, and Deirdre Healy invite readers to reconsider assumptions and received theories that have dominated a field whose tunnel vision for the US and UK has weakened our historical and criminological imaginations. Instead, by immersing themselves in the history of criminological theory and penal practices (broadly construed) of an under-explored nation, they observe large and small differences that challenge our conventional expectations and that draw our focus to the importance of gender, religion, rural settings, and ongoing colonial legacies for understanding penality and how these considerations can play different roles from those we’ve come to expect from the standard national case studies. Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland is a thus contribution not only to Irish Criminology, but to both broader Anglophone and global discussions about criminology, southern criminology, criminological history, punishment and society.