Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 192264

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Description

Gender and punishment in Ireland explores womens lethal violence in Ireland.

Drawing on comprehensive archival research, including government documents, press reporting, the remnants of public opinion and the voices of the women themselves, the book contributes to the burgeoning literature on gender and punishment and women who kill. Engaging with concepts such as double deviance, chivalry, paternalism and coercive confinement, the work explores the penal landscape for offending women in postcolonial Ireland, examining in particular the role of the Catholic Church in responses to female deviance. The book is an extensive interdisciplinary treatment of women who kill in Ireland and will be useful to scholars of gender, criminology and history.

Reviews

Beautifully written and comprehensively researched, this book is a vital addition to historical and criminological work on women, murder and punishment. Extending the literature on women who kill, Black goes beyond a focus on gender representation alone to examine the complex dynamics that influenced conviction, sentencing and punishment of women accused of murder in Ireland in the decades after independence. Distinct from existing research on women accused of murder, she traces their experiences of punishment, including what happened to women reprieved from the death penalty. A particularly fascinating aspect of Gender and punishment in Ireland is Black's analysis of the use of religious detention in Ireland's shadow system of penalty as a disposal, which further develops feminist penology on gender and mixed economies of punishment. As such, this book is highly recommended for its combination of rigorous empirical research and fresh conceptual insight.
Professor Lizzie Seal, University of Sussex

Black has provided an extensive and close reading of court records, including trial record
books, case files, the state books for the Central Criminal Court, relevant files from the
Department of the Taoiseach and newspaper accounts of trials. The book is a major intervention
into studies of crime and criminality in post-Independence Ireland and forms the basis
for comparative work with other countries. It is informative, well structured, well written and
conceptually sophisticated.
Maria Luddy, University of Warwick, Women's History Review

This book contributes to an international literature on histories and practices
of capital punishment. It also adds to a growing literature presenting the history
of Irish criminal justice as a distinct object of study. And Blacks book makes a
significant contribution here. One of the questions Black sets out in the introduction
is whether the theoretical literature on state responses to women who kill
can be universalized. While this books argument fundamentally requires Irish
womens experiences to be taken on their own terms, in setting out exactly
how these experiences were unique, it also makes major contributions to the relevant
literature well beyond Ireland.
Kay Crosby, Newcastle University, The Journal of Legal History

Author Bio

Lynsey Black is Lecturer in Criminology at Maynooth University.