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This edited collection analyses the prison through the most fundamental challenge it faces: escapes. The chapters comprise original research from established prison scholars who develop the contours of a sociology of prison escapes. Drawing on firm empirical evidence from places like India, Tunisia, Canada, the UK, France, Uganda, Italy, Sierra Leone, and Mexico, the authors show how escapes not only break the prison, but are also fundamental to the existence of such institutions: how they are imagined, designed, organized, justified, reproduced and transformed. The chapters are organised in four interconnected themes: resistance and everyday life; politics and transition; imaginaries and popular culture; and law and bureaucracy, which reflect how escapes are productive, local, historical, and equivocal social practices, and integral to the mysterious intransigence of the prison. The result is a critical and theoretically informed understanding of prison escapes - which has so far been absent in prison scholarship - and which will hold broad appeal to academics and students of prisons and penology, as well as practitioners.

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INTRODUCTION: Towards a Sociology of Prison Escape; Gilles Chantraine and Tomas Max Martin.- PART ONE: Resistance and Everyday Life.- CHAPTER 1. Prison Escapes, Everyday Life and the State; Mahuya Bandyopadhyay.- Chapter 2. There is No Escape; Andrew M Jefferson.- Chapter 3. Resistant Adaptation to Prison; Simone Santorso.- PART TWO: POLITICS AND TRANSITION.- Chapter 4. Mocking the State: Heroism, Humanity and Humiliation in the Context of Naxal Jailbreaks in India; Atreyee Sen.- Chapter 5. Prison Escape and its Political Imaginary in Times of Political Crisis; Yasmine Bouagga.- Chapter 6. Maroon Prison Religion; Chris Garces.- PART THREE: LAW AND BUREAUCRACY.- Chapter 7. "Escaping from Hell is a Right!"; Gregory Salle.- Chapter 8. Escapees or Young Runaways?; Nicolas Sallée.- Chapter 9. The Tricky Escape from Kizoti Court; Tomas Max Martin.- PART FOUR: ESCAPE IMAGINARIES AND POPULAR CULTURE.- Chapter 10. Representations of Prison Escapes in Films; Jamie Bennett.- Chapter 11. Prison, Jailbreaks and Escapees in Two Popular Tv Series; Gwenola Ricordeau.- Chapter 12. ´Everybody Likes Escape Stories´; Matthew Ferguson, Devon Madill, Justin Piché and Kevin Walby.

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Tomas Max Martin is a Researcher at DIGNITY - Danish Institute Against Torture.

Gilles Chantraine is a sociologist and Permanent Researcher at CLERSE - CNRS, France.

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