Expert on the growth of prison as punishment

One of the world’s leading anthropologists gives a guest lecture at the University’s Templeman Library on Monday 13 June.

Professor Didier Fassin, who will be a guest of Socril (the Social Critiques of Law group at Kent Law School), will give a lecture entitled The Carceral Condition in a Punitive Time from 3-5pm in the Templeman Lecture Room. It is open to all and free to attend but booking is advisable.

Professor Fassin is James D Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

In his lecture, he will address questions about prison, which he says is a recent invention – hardly more than two centuries old – and which has become the universal system of punishment with an unprecedented expansion in most Western countries.

Based on a thorough discussion of legal and philosophical theories of punishment, and on an ethnographic study conducted in a French prison over four years, Professor Fassin will explain the place that the correctional system occupies in contemporary societies. He will also look at the experiences of those who are incarcerated – as well as those who work there.