Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons : The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment

An ex-convict struggles with his addictive yearning for prison. A law-abiding citizen broods over his pleasure in violent, illegal acts. A prison warden loses his job because he is so successful in rehabilitating criminals. These are but a few of the intriguing stories Martha Grace Duncan examines in her bold, interdisciplinary book **Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons**. Duncan writes: "This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns - about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds." She portrays upright citizens who harbor a strange liking for criminal deeds, and criminals who conceive of prison in positive terms: as a nurturing mother, an academy, a matrix of spiritual rebirth, or a refuge from life's trivia. In developing her unique vision, Duncan draws on literature, history, psychoanalysis, and law. Her work reveals a nonutopian world in which criminals and non-criminals--while injuring each other in obvious ways--nonetheless live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, enriching each other's lives in profound and surprising fashion. Part one: Cradled on the sea: positive images of prison and theories of punishment -- A thousand leagues above: prison as a refuge from the prosaic -- Cradled on the sea: prison as a mother who provides and protects -- To die and become: prison as a matrix of spiritual rebirth -- Flowers are flowers: prison as a place like any other -- Methodological issues -- Positive images of prison and theories of punishment -- Part two: A strange liking: our admiration for criminals -- Reluctant admiration: the forms of our conflict over criminals -- Rationalized admiration: overt delight in camouflaged criminals -- Repressed admiration: loathing as a vicissitude of attraction to criminals -- Part three: In slime and darkness: the metaphor of filth in criminal justice -- Eject him tainted now: the criminal as filth in Western culture -- Projecting an excrementitious mass: the metaphor of filth in the history of Botany Bay -- Stirring the odorous pile: vicissitudes of the metaphor in Britain and the United States -- Conclusion: The romanticization of criminals and the defense against despair