Sign-In
Cart
A History of Prisons and Imprisonment
Paperback
Currently unavailable to order
Please enter your email and a message will be sent to you when this product becomes available on our website.
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 3 2025
Pages: 156
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.33 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The image of the modern prison-with its high walls, steel doors, and regimented life-feels timeless and inevitable. But this comprehensive history reveals a startling truth: imprisonment as a primary form of punishment is a surprisingly recent invention. For most of human history, justice was a public and brutal spectacle performed on the body. From the stocks and the whipping post to the gallows, punishment was meant to be seen. Jails and dungeons were merely holding pens, temporary warehouses for those awaiting trial or the finality of a physical sentence. This book uncovers that forgotten world and traces the revolutionary shift in thinking that moved punishment from the public square to behind the prison wall.
The story of the modern prison begins in the Age of Enlightenment, when philosophers and reformers began to question the savagery of corporal punishment and proposed a new, rational alternative: the penitentiary. This was to be a machine for moral reformation, a place where, through solitude, labor, and reflection, the criminal could be transformed into a law-abiding citizen. This grand experiment was born in the fledgling United States, giving rise to two competing models that would define penology for a century. The Pennsylvania System championed absolute solitude as the path to repentance, while the rival Auburn System pioneered silent, congregate labor, a more profitable and ultimately more influential model that became the blueprint for the American prison.
As the prison became an established feature of the modern state, its purpose and form continued to evolve and expand in often-brutal ways. This history explores that expansion across the globe, from the vast penal colonies of Australia and Devil's Island that served as dumping grounds for European empires, to the squalid, class-based world of debtors' prisons. It delves into the dark history of coerced labor in the post-Civil War South through the convict lease system, a practice that effectively replaced slavery, and examines the ultimate perversion of confinement in the totalitarian nightmares of the Soviet Gulag and the Nazi concentration camps, where the prison was transformed into an instrument of mass terror and genocide.
Bringing the story to the present day, this work chronicles the dramatic pendulum swings of the last century. It charts the rise of the rehabilitative ideal after World War II, when prisons were reconceptualized as correctional institutions meant to treat and cure, and details its sudden collapse amid the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. This collapse, epitomized by the bloody Attica uprising, gave way to the get tough era, the War on Drugs, and the unprecedented explosion of mass incarceration. The narrative confronts the stark realities of this modern system-its profound racial disparities, the rise of for-profit prisons, and the intense ethical debate over solitary confinement-before concluding with an examination of the current movement toward decarceration and the search for alternatives, asking whether the two-hundred-year-old experiment of the penitentiary has finally reached its end.
1 different editions
Also available
Also from
Bugeja, Alex
Sailing Free: A Life on the Waves: How to Live, Travel, and Explore the World by Yacht
Bugeja, Alex
Paperback
Rolling Freedom: Embracing the Van Life: A Practical Guide to Adventure, Minimalism, and Living on the Road
Bugeja, Alex
Paperback
Also in
General World History
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Kendi, Ibram X.
Paperback
Titanic: The Ship Magnificent - Volume One: Design and Construction
Beveridge, Bruce
Braunschweiger, Art
Klistorner, Daniel
Hardcover
Titanic: The Ship Magnificent - Volume Two: Interior Design and Fitting Out
Braunschweiger, Art
Hall, Steve
Beveridge, Bruce
Hardcover
Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902 1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna
Hacohen, Malachi Haim
Hardcover
Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s
Howe, Sean
Hardcover
A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960
Van Slyck, Abigail A.
Hardcover
Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book
Bittman, Mark
Hardcover
The Rise of Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII, 1485-1534
Everett, Michael
Paperback
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Purnell, Sonia
Hardcover
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
Loewen, James W.
Paperback
The Allies: Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II
Groom, Winston
Paperback
Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World
McNeill, J. R.
Paperback
Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives
Cordingly, David
Paperback
Dangerous Games: Faces, Incidents, and Casualties of the Cold War
Wise, James E.
Baron, Scott
Hardcover
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
Green, John
Hardcover
The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail
Dolin, Eric Jay
Hardcover
1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World
Ahamed, Liaquat
Hardcover
The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy
Ross, Steven J.
Hardcover
Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution
Kiernan, Denise
Hardcover
100 Bible Verses That Made America: Defining Moments That Shaped Our Enduring Foundation of Faith
Morgan, Robert J.
Paperback
The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World
Mazzeo, Tilar J.
Hardcover
True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color--From Azure to Zinc Pink
Stamper, Kory
Hardcover
The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery
Tiffany, Kaitlyn
Hardcover
1,000 Days in America: An Illustrated History of the Moments That Defined a Nation
National Geographic
Hardcover
Two Ships: Jamestown 1619, Plymouth 1620, and the Struggle for the Soul of America
Reynolds, David S.
Hardcover
How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
Galer, Sophia Smith
Hardcover
The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
Kara, Siddharth
Hardcover
Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age
Tabor, James M.
Hardcover
The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women's Magic
Stewart, Lindsey
Hardcover
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
Sides, Hampton
Paperback
A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps
Elledge, Jonn
Paperback
Liberation Summer: The Moment That Changed the Women's Movement and the Future of American Politics
McElya, Micki
Hardcover
American Pope: Leo XIV's Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City
Burke, Daniel
Detrow, Scott
Hardcover
The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World
Pancevski, Bojan
Hardcover
No One's Coming: The Rogue Heroes Our Government Turns to When There's Nowhere Else to Turn
Hazzard, Kevin
Hardcover
Captain's Dinner: A Shipwreck, an Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History
Cohen, Adam
Hardcover
Socialism: The Real History from Plato to the Present: How the Deep State Capitalizes on Crises to Consolidate Control [With Paperback Book]
Federer, William J.
Paperback
Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City
Brown, Kate
Hardcover
The Summer of Death: The Great Heat Wave of 1936 and the Making of Modern-Day America
Williams, Geoff
Hardcover
The Women's History of the Modern World: How Radicals, Rebels, and Everywomen Revolutionized the Last 200 Years
Miles, Rosalind
Paperback
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II
Purnell, Sonia
Paperback
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation
Anderson, Scott
Hardcover
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them
Egan, Timothy
Paperback
How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy's Guide to Silencing Women
Venditozzi, Zoe
Mitchell, Claire
Paperback
The Long Run: Steve Prefontaine, Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit, Grete Waitz, and the Decade That Made the Marathon Cool
Dugard, Martin
Hardcover
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within Us Slave Culture
Woodard, Vincent
Paperback
Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight Over Free Speech in Modern America
Loeffler, James
Hardcover
The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
McGilchrist, Iain
Paperback
The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising
Hyman, Elizabeth R.
Paperback
How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession
Blackwell Baines, Caitlin
Hardcover
A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children
Gilliland, Haley Cohen
Hardcover
Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat-And the American Revolution-Transformed Britain
Allen, Danielle
Hardcover