This book is the first of its kind that brings together human geography and the sociology of punishment to explore the relationship between distance and punishment in con-temporary Russia. Using established penological and geographical theories, the book presents in-depth empirical research to show how the experiences of women prisoners are shaped by the distances that the Russian penal service sends prisoners to serve their sentences. Its most eye-catching feature is its use of interviews conducted by the authors and their research team with adult and juvenile women prisoners, ex-prisoners and prison officers in penal facilities in different regions of the Russian Federation between 2006 and 2010. It includes discussion of the impact of Russia's distinctive penal geography on pris-oners' family relationships, how women prisoners' sense of place and gender identities are shaped and re-shaped on their journey from pre-trial facility to 'correction colony' to release, and the
social hierarchies, relationships and practices that characterise Russia's penal institutions for women. The authors are both experienced researchers in Russia. The book brings together their complementary disciplinary expertise in the development of the concept of 'coerced mobilization' to explore Russia's punishment culture. The book argues that Russia's inherited geography of penality, combined with traditional ideas about women's role that shape the penal service's management of women prisoners, add to their 'pains of imprisonment'. Crucially, the authors show how these factors are con-straining the Russian penal service's ability to implement successive reforms aimed at humanizing Russia's notoriously tough prisons. Russian imprisonment as it relates to women is, they believe, an area of significant concern for lawmakers in that country as well as to human rights campaigners, geographers interested in space and power, and scholars studying the post-Soviet system.

About the Author:
Judith Pallot has developed an interest in the Russian penal system, having previously focused on the historical geography of the Russian peasantry and post-Soviet rural adap-tations. She has researched extensively in Russian archives and also in the field. She is the author of several books, three with OUP, on rural Russia and numerous articles in scholarly journals and she has held several large grants from UK funding councils. With her current AHRC grant she is extending her interest in women's relationship with the Russian penal system to explore the experiences of the 'wives, mothers and daughters' of Russia's large prison population and she is also engaged in a project to map to the gulag (www.gulagmaps.org). She is Professor of the Human Geography of Russia and Official Student of Christ Church in the University of Oxford.

Laura Piacentini is the first Criminologist and scholar to conduct empirical and theoretical research in Russian prisons and has been researching prisons in Russia since 1997, hav-ing visited some 20 penal colonies and lived within the regimes in Siberia and in Western Russia. A Russian speaker, her work explores a variety of penological problems including the changing nature of prison labour, human rights and the conceptual shifts in punish-ment ideology and practices in the post-Soviet period. She is Reader in Criminology at Strathclyde Law School, The University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.