As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing …
Spanning almost a century of penal policy and practice in England and Wales, this book is a study of the long arc of the rehabilitative ideal, beginning in 1895, the year of the Gladstone Committee on Prisons, and ending in 1970, when the policy of treating and training criminal…
Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the…
"35,000 Americans are arrested every day, and the number of prisoners has increased 500% over the last three decades. Truthout Executive Director Maya Schenwar shows that incarceration actually doesn't deter crime, looks at its devastating effect on families and communities, and…
Much has been written about the laogai (sometimes likened to the Soviet gulag) in the People's Republic of China. Depending on the source, the prisons are described as nonexistent, enlightened institutions, or hellish places that subject the inmates to degradation and misery. Th…
In "Punishment in Disguise", Kelly Hannah-Moffat presents a look at some current forms of penal governance in Canadian federal women's prisons. Hannah-Moffat uses women's imprisonment to theorize the complexity of penal power and to show how the meaning and content of women's pe…
"The resurrection of former prisons as museums has caught the attention of tourists along with scholars interested in studying dark tourism. Unsurprisingly, due to their grim subject matter, prison museums tend to invert the 'Disney' experience, becoming the antithesis of 'the h…
