Ashley T Rubin
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 343296 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Ashley T Rubin |
| NOMBRES | Ashley T |
| APELLIDO | Rubin |
| FIRMA | RUBIN A T |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8219-9951 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 26 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 141 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 26 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Comments by Ashley T. Rubin
This review highlights several key contributions of David Garland's Law and Order Leviathan, especially his updated definition of the “penal state” and his attention to its variable nature. It then shifts to historicize the penal state concept, describing the emergence of a penal state in the American context after the Revolution. Finally, it contrasts the weak and challenged early penal state to the contemporary monstrous penal state described G…
Appropriate research conduct in an age of political polarization
Stagnated, on the Verge of Breakthrough, or Both? The State of Big Theories of Legal Phenomena
Socio-legal studies has grown rapidly over the last six decades. As the field has expanded, however, it seems the pace of field-defining research (most notably, high-quality theoretical work, especially with aspirations toward grand or general theorizing) has waned, and a regime of normal science currently dominates. For some scholars, this state of affairs gives the impression of treading water, an incoherent field, or even theoretical stagnatio…
Normativity is not a replacement for theory
Neo-Institutional Analyses of Criminal Legal Organizations and Policies
Since emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s, neo-institutional theory has been a popular framework for understanding law, legal institutions, and policies on the books and in action. Neo-institutional theory has been particularly useful for explaining diverse criminal justice phenomena, from changes in penal law and policy statements to on-the-ground practices across police departments, courts, carceral facilities, and community corrections.…
Rocking Qualitative Social Science
Unlike other athletes, the rock climber tends to disregard established norms of style and technique, doing whatever she needs to do to get to the next foothold. This figure provides an apt analogy for the scholar at the center of this unique book. In Rocking Qualitative Social Science , Ashley Rubin provides an entertaining treatise, corrective vision, and rigorously informative guidebook for qualitative research methods that have long been dismi…
The promises and pitfalls of path dependence frameworks for analyzing penal change
Although the study of penal changes throughout history is central to punishment studies, the field has taken little from historical institutionalists’ theories of institutional change. One of the most relevant such theories is path dependence. This article outlines path dependence frameworks’ most fruitful elements for studying penal change. Drawing on foundational political science and historical sociology texts, as well as several punishment sc…
True believers, rational actors, and bad actors
Early US Prison History Beyond Rothman
David J. Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum, one of the first major works to critically interrogate the beginning of America's extensive reliance on institutionalization, effectively launched the contemporary field of prison history. Rothman traced the first modern prisons’ (1820s–1850s) roots to the post-Revolution social turmoil and reformers’ desire for perfectly ordered spaces. In the nearly 50 years since his pioneering work, several gene…
Interrogating the Penal Pendulum
This Essay introduces a Review Symposium for Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps’s Breaking the Pendulum , a book that challenges the centrality of the pendulum metaphor that scholars, journalists, and politicians have used to describe significant shifts in the overall orientation of punishment nationwide. Drawing on recent research, Goodman, Page, and Phelps lay out the case for abandoning this metaphor as well as its associated the…
Punishment's Legal Templates
The well-known gap between law on the books and law in action often casts doubt on the significance of changes to law on the books. For example, the rise and fall of penal technologies have long been considered significant indicators of penal change in socio-historical analyses of punishment. Recent research, however, has challenged the significance of apparently large-scale penal change of this kind. This article clarifies the significance of pe…
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water
Keramet Reiter, 23/7
The prehistory of innovation
New penal technologies, however innovative, rarely emerge fully formed, but we currently lack a theoretical appreciation of the lengthy, messy process by which penal innovations develop. Indeed, most studies of penal change focus on the conditions surrounding the emergence of a particularly successful innovation, a model of punishment whose widespread diffusion is indicative of significant change. This paper extends our analytical focus by examin…
Fracturing the penal state
The concept of a penal or carceral state has quickly become a staple in punishment and criminal justice literature. However, the concept, which suffers from a proliferation of meanings and is frequently undefined, gives readers the impression that there is a single, unified, and actor-less state responsible for punishment. This contradicts the thrust of recent punishment literature, which emphasizes fragmentation, variegation, and constant confli…
Continuity in the Face of Penal Innovation
Solitary confinement has been a perennial tool of control in US prisons, despite its status as a repeatedly delegitimized practice. Although there have been significant changes in punishment over time, solitary confinement has remained, mostly at the margins and always as a response to past failures, part of an unending search for greater control over prisoners. This history raises the question of how a discredited penal technology can neverthele…
Michael Welch, Escape to Prison
Professionalizing Prison
This article describes the process of “primitive professionalization”—the efforts of a small set of actors to claim professional status before their field has professionalized. Using a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1879), I examine the strategies by which one prison's administrators claimed status as professionals—those whose command of a specialized knowledge grants authority within their domain. Eastern's administrators deploye…
Penal change as penal layering
Recently, scholars have increasingly criticized descriptions of significant penal change as “ruptures”—sudden breaks with past practices, often replacing old technologies with new. This article promotes an alternative understanding of penal change as the layering of new penal technologies over old technologies to describe the complicated coexistence of old and new penal technologies following significant moments of change. This study demonstrates…
Resistance as Agency? Incorporating the Structural Determinants of Prisoner Behaviour
Journal Article Resistance as Agency? Incorporating the Structural Determinants of Prisoner Behaviour Get access Ashley T. Rubin Ashley T. Rubin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 57, Issue 3, 1 May 2017, Pages 644–663, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azw003 Published: 29 January 2016
Hadar Aviram, Cheap on Crime
The Consequences of Prisoners' Micro-Resistance
For more than twenty years, scholars have called for greater attention to the consequences of micro-resistance to legality. Using archival data from Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1875), I examine the consequences of noncompliant prisoner behavior. I find that prisoners' noncompliance often entailed substantial costs to prisoners, particularly in comparison to the substantial benefits of complying with the prison regime. Despite …
A Neo-Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion
Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation's emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison's historical roots persuasively explain the prison's "birth" in Jacksonian-Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead,…
Resistance or friction
Scholars examining prisoners’ “secondary adjustments” have often emphasized prisoners’ “resistance” to the prison regime, particularly their agentic acts that frustrate the prison’s rules, goals, or functions. While these agency-centered accounts offer an important corrective to the understanding of prisons as totalizing institutions, they may go too far. I argue that scholars have overused (and misused) the term “resistance” to describe certain …
The Unintended Consequences of Penal Reform
What were the consequences of penal transportation to the New World for eighteenth-century British criminal justice? Transportation has been described by scholars as either a replacement of the death penalty responsible for its decline, or a penal innovation responsible for punishing a multitude of people more severely than they would have been punished before. Using data from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers and the Parliamentary Papers, this stud…
Fracturing the penal state
The concept of a penal or carceral state has quickly become a staple in punishment and criminal justice literature. However, the concept, which suffers from a proliferation of meanings and is frequently undefined, gives readers the impression that there is a single, unified, and actor-less state responsible for punishment. This contradicts the thrust of recent punishment literature, which emphasizes fragmentation, variegation, and constant confli…
Resistance or friction
Scholars examining prisoners’ “secondary adjustments” have often emphasized prisoners’ “resistance” to the prison regime, particularly their agentic acts that frustrate the prison’s rules, goals, or functions. While these agency-centered accounts offer an important corrective to the understanding of prisons as totalizing institutions, they may go too far. I argue that scholars have overused (and misused) the term “resistance” to describe certain …
Punishment's Legal Templates
The well-known gap between law on the books and law in action often casts doubt on the significance of changes to law on the books. For example, the rise and fall of penal technologies have long been considered significant indicators of penal change in socio-historical analyses of punishment. Recent research, however, has challenged the significance of apparently large-scale penal change of this kind. This article clarifies the significance of pe…
Continuity in the Face of Penal Innovation
Solitary confinement has been a perennial tool of control in US prisons, despite its status as a repeatedly delegitimized practice. Although there have been significant changes in punishment over time, solitary confinement has remained, mostly at the margins and always as a response to past failures, part of an unending search for greater control over prisoners. This history raises the question of how a discredited penal technology can neverthele…
The Consequences of Prisoners' Micro-Resistance
For more than twenty years, scholars have called for greater attention to the consequences of micro-resistance to legality. Using archival data from Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1875), I examine the consequences of noncompliant prisoner behavior. I find that prisoners' noncompliance often entailed substantial costs to prisoners, particularly in comparison to the substantial benefits of complying with the prison regime. Despite …
A Neo-Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion
Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation's emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison's historical roots persuasively explain the prison's "birth" in Jacksonian-Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead,…
Normativity is not a replacement for theory
The prehistory of innovation
New penal technologies, however innovative, rarely emerge fully formed, but we currently lack a theoretical appreciation of the lengthy, messy process by which penal innovations develop. Indeed, most studies of penal change focus on the conditions surrounding the emergence of a particularly successful innovation, a model of punishment whose widespread diffusion is indicative of significant change. This paper extends our analytical focus by examin…
Neo-Institutional Analyses of Criminal Legal Organizations and Policies
Since emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s, neo-institutional theory has been a popular framework for understanding law, legal institutions, and policies on the books and in action. Neo-institutional theory has been particularly useful for explaining diverse criminal justice phenomena, from changes in penal law and policy statements to on-the-ground practices across police departments, courts, carceral facilities, and community corrections.…
The promises and pitfalls of path dependence frameworks for analyzing penal change
Although the study of penal changes throughout history is central to punishment studies, the field has taken little from historical institutionalists’ theories of institutional change. One of the most relevant such theories is path dependence. This article outlines path dependence frameworks’ most fruitful elements for studying penal change. Drawing on foundational political science and historical sociology texts, as well as several punishment sc…
True believers, rational actors, and bad actors
Interrogating the Penal Pendulum
This Essay introduces a Review Symposium for Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps’s Breaking the Pendulum , a book that challenges the centrality of the pendulum metaphor that scholars, journalists, and politicians have used to describe significant shifts in the overall orientation of punishment nationwide. Drawing on recent research, Goodman, Page, and Phelps lay out the case for abandoning this metaphor as well as its associated the…
Professionalizing Prison
This article describes the process of “primitive professionalization”—the efforts of a small set of actors to claim professional status before their field has professionalized. Using a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1879), I examine the strategies by which one prison's administrators claimed status as professionals—those whose command of a specialized knowledge grants authority within their domain. Eastern's administrators deploye…
Penal change as penal layering
Recently, scholars have increasingly criticized descriptions of significant penal change as “ruptures”—sudden breaks with past practices, often replacing old technologies with new. This article promotes an alternative understanding of penal change as the layering of new penal technologies over old technologies to describe the complicated coexistence of old and new penal technologies following significant moments of change. This study demonstrates…
The Unintended Consequences of Penal Reform
What were the consequences of penal transportation to the New World for eighteenth-century British criminal justice? Transportation has been described by scholars as either a replacement of the death penalty responsible for its decline, or a penal innovation responsible for punishing a multitude of people more severely than they would have been punished before. Using data from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers and the Parliamentary Papers, this stud…
Stagnated, on the Verge of Breakthrough, or Both? The State of Big Theories of Legal Phenomena
Socio-legal studies has grown rapidly over the last six decades. As the field has expanded, however, it seems the pace of field-defining research (most notably, high-quality theoretical work, especially with aspirations toward grand or general theorizing) has waned, and a regime of normal science currently dominates. For some scholars, this state of affairs gives the impression of treading water, an incoherent field, or even theoretical stagnatio…
Resistance as Agency? Incorporating the Structural Determinants of Prisoner Behaviour
Journal Article Resistance as Agency? Incorporating the Structural Determinants of Prisoner Behaviour Get access Ashley T. Rubin Ashley T. Rubin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 57, Issue 3, 1 May 2017, Pages 644–663, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azw003 Published: 29 January 2016
Punitive penal preferences and support for welfare
The individual has, until recently, been generally excluded from law and society explorations of the twin increases in penal and welfare punitiveness. However, public opinion enjoys an implicit role in policy change that is only now beginning to receive attention. This study explores the presence and nature of the correlation between attitudes toward welfare and penal policy at the individual level in general and across time. Using individual-lev…
Early US Prison History Beyond Rothman
David J. Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum, one of the first major works to critically interrogate the beginning of America's extensive reliance on institutionalization, effectively launched the contemporary field of prison history. Rothman traced the first modern prisons’ (1820s–1850s) roots to the post-Revolution social turmoil and reformers’ desire for perfectly ordered spaces. In the nearly 50 years since his pioneering work, several gene…
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water
Punitive penal preferences and support for welfare
The individual has, until recently, been generally excluded from law and society explorations of the twin increases in penal and welfare punitiveness. However, public opinion enjoys an implicit role in policy change that is only now beginning to receive attention. This study explores the presence and nature of the correlation between attitudes toward welfare and penal policy at the individual level in general and across time. Using individual-lev…
The Unintended Consequences of Penal Reform
What were the consequences of penal transportation to the New World for eighteenth-century British criminal justice? Transportation has been described by scholars as either a replacement of the death penalty responsible for its decline, or a penal innovation responsible for punishing a multitude of people more severely than they would have been punished before. Using data from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers and the Parliamentary Papers, this stud…
Resistance or friction
Scholars examining prisoners’ “secondary adjustments” have often emphasized prisoners’ “resistance” to the prison regime, particularly their agentic acts that frustrate the prison’s rules, goals, or functions. While these agency-centered accounts offer an important corrective to the understanding of prisons as totalizing institutions, they may go too far. I argue that scholars have overused (and misused) the term “resistance” to describe certain …
Hadar Aviram, Cheap on Crime
The Consequences of Prisoners' Micro-Resistance
For more than twenty years, scholars have called for greater attention to the consequences of micro-resistance to legality. Using archival data from Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1875), I examine the consequences of noncompliant prisoner behavior. I find that prisoners' noncompliance often entailed substantial costs to prisoners, particularly in comparison to the substantial benefits of complying with the prison regime. Despite …
A Neo-Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion
Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation's emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison's historical roots persuasively explain the prison's "birth" in Jacksonian-Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead,…
Michael Welch, Escape to Prison
Professionalizing Prison
This article describes the process of “primitive professionalization”—the efforts of a small set of actors to claim professional status before their field has professionalized. Using a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1879), I examine the strategies by which one prison's administrators claimed status as professionals—those whose command of a specialized knowledge grants authority within their domain. Eastern's administrators deploye…
Penal change as penal layering
Recently, scholars have increasingly criticized descriptions of significant penal change as “ruptures”—sudden breaks with past practices, often replacing old technologies with new. This article promotes an alternative understanding of penal change as the layering of new penal technologies over old technologies to describe the complicated coexistence of old and new penal technologies following significant moments of change. This study demonstrates…
Resistance as Agency? Incorporating the Structural Determinants of Prisoner Behaviour
Journal Article Resistance as Agency? Incorporating the Structural Determinants of Prisoner Behaviour Get access Ashley T. Rubin Ashley T. Rubin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 57, Issue 3, 1 May 2017, Pages 644–663, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azw003 Published: 29 January 2016
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water
Keramet Reiter, 23/7
The prehistory of innovation
New penal technologies, however innovative, rarely emerge fully formed, but we currently lack a theoretical appreciation of the lengthy, messy process by which penal innovations develop. Indeed, most studies of penal change focus on the conditions surrounding the emergence of a particularly successful innovation, a model of punishment whose widespread diffusion is indicative of significant change. This paper extends our analytical focus by examin…
Fracturing the penal state
The concept of a penal or carceral state has quickly become a staple in punishment and criminal justice literature. However, the concept, which suffers from a proliferation of meanings and is frequently undefined, gives readers the impression that there is a single, unified, and actor-less state responsible for punishment. This contradicts the thrust of recent punishment literature, which emphasizes fragmentation, variegation, and constant confli…
Continuity in the Face of Penal Innovation
Solitary confinement has been a perennial tool of control in US prisons, despite its status as a repeatedly delegitimized practice. Although there have been significant changes in punishment over time, solitary confinement has remained, mostly at the margins and always as a response to past failures, part of an unending search for greater control over prisoners. This history raises the question of how a discredited penal technology can neverthele…
Early US Prison History Beyond Rothman
David J. Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum, one of the first major works to critically interrogate the beginning of America's extensive reliance on institutionalization, effectively launched the contemporary field of prison history. Rothman traced the first modern prisons’ (1820s–1850s) roots to the post-Revolution social turmoil and reformers’ desire for perfectly ordered spaces. In the nearly 50 years since his pioneering work, several gene…
Interrogating the Penal Pendulum
This Essay introduces a Review Symposium for Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps’s Breaking the Pendulum , a book that challenges the centrality of the pendulum metaphor that scholars, journalists, and politicians have used to describe significant shifts in the overall orientation of punishment nationwide. Drawing on recent research, Goodman, Page, and Phelps lay out the case for abandoning this metaphor as well as its associated the…
Punishment's Legal Templates
The well-known gap between law on the books and law in action often casts doubt on the significance of changes to law on the books. For example, the rise and fall of penal technologies have long been considered significant indicators of penal change in socio-historical analyses of punishment. Recent research, however, has challenged the significance of apparently large-scale penal change of this kind. This article clarifies the significance of pe…
True believers, rational actors, and bad actors
Rocking Qualitative Social Science
Unlike other athletes, the rock climber tends to disregard established norms of style and technique, doing whatever she needs to do to get to the next foothold. This figure provides an apt analogy for the scholar at the center of this unique book. In Rocking Qualitative Social Science , Ashley Rubin provides an entertaining treatise, corrective vision, and rigorously informative guidebook for qualitative research methods that have long been dismi…
The promises and pitfalls of path dependence frameworks for analyzing penal change
Although the study of penal changes throughout history is central to punishment studies, the field has taken little from historical institutionalists’ theories of institutional change. One of the most relevant such theories is path dependence. This article outlines path dependence frameworks’ most fruitful elements for studying penal change. Drawing on foundational political science and historical sociology texts, as well as several punishment sc…
Neo-Institutional Analyses of Criminal Legal Organizations and Policies
Since emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s, neo-institutional theory has been a popular framework for understanding law, legal institutions, and policies on the books and in action. Neo-institutional theory has been particularly useful for explaining diverse criminal justice phenomena, from changes in penal law and policy statements to on-the-ground practices across police departments, courts, carceral facilities, and community corrections.…
Stagnated, on the Verge of Breakthrough, or Both? The State of Big Theories of Legal Phenomena
Socio-legal studies has grown rapidly over the last six decades. As the field has expanded, however, it seems the pace of field-defining research (most notably, high-quality theoretical work, especially with aspirations toward grand or general theorizing) has waned, and a regime of normal science currently dominates. For some scholars, this state of affairs gives the impression of treading water, an incoherent field, or even theoretical stagnatio…
Normativity is not a replacement for theory
Comments by Ashley T. Rubin
This review highlights several key contributions of David Garland's Law and Order Leviathan, especially his updated definition of the “penal state” and his attention to its variable nature. It then shifts to historicize the penal state concept, describing the emergence of a penal state in the American context after the Revolution. Finally, it contrasts the weak and challenged early penal state to the contemporary monstrous penal state described G…
Political science (21 obras) · Criminology (20 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (17 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Prison (12 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (10 obras) · Punishment (psychology (9 obras)