The Gerontological Imagination : Crime Policy and Older Prisoners

The Gerontological Imagination, Crime Policy and Older Prisoners This paper will discuss the needs of a group that more often than not has been ignored by criminologists and gerontologists: older offenders in prison. In relation to the disci-pline of criminology, I want to suggest that the gerontological and criminological ima-gination indeed are creative, resourceful, eclectic and can cross disciplinary boundaries. By drawing on the concept of the sociological imagination “which works between the personal troubles of milieu” and “the public issues of social structure” (Mills, 1959: 8): this paper will draw out the troubles and concerns of an aging prison population from a gerontological and criminological theoretical perspective. As the reader, you may be asking: why integrate the discipline of gerontology and criminology?

Maternal imagination: Reconceiving first impressions

The concept of maternal imagination, whereby the disordered thoughts and impressions of pregnant women are used to explain the prevalence of monstrous births, was at its height during the early modern period, albeit it with many prior and subsequent manifestations. Against a more familiar, and enduring, medieval and Renaissance context of supernatural agency at work, the device of MI was seen as a 'naturalistic' model more in keeping with the advent of Enlightenment scientism. Nonetheless, the debate around it was ferocious and indicative more of a masculine anxiety about female desire and generative power than of a concern for impartial explanation. In problematizing a simply descriptive approach to archival material, my purpose is to explore what is at stake in the competing discourses that seem alternately, and even simultaneously, to empower and degrade the place of the mother. What is the unspoken of an historical debate that prefigures our contemporary interest in feminine excess?