Summary
Contents
Subject index
This major new volume of papers by leading criminologists, sociologists and historians, sets out what is known about the political and penological causes of the phenomenon of mass imprisonment. Mass imprisonment, American-style, involves the penal segregation of large numbers of the poor and minorities. Imprisonment has become a central institution for the social control of the urban poor. Other countries are now looking to the USA to see what should be learned from this massive and controversial social experiment. This book describes mass imprisonment's impact upon crime, upon the minority communities most affected, upon social policy and, more broadly upon national culture. This is a book that all penologists and poli
The Private and the Public in Penal History: A Commentary on Zimring and Tonry
The Private and the Public in Penal History: A Commentary on Zimring and Tonry
Michael Tonry argues that appeals to retribution and reformation have alternated in the penal history of the West in general, and the US in particular. Periods of ‘moral panic,’ like our own today, precipitate crime policy driven by ‘ideology, emotion, and political opportunism,’ only to be superseded by calmer periods of crime control characterized by ‘rational analysis’ and ‘reasoned discussion.’ I wish I had such dialectical faith, or agreed that the historical record offered such cause for optimism. Unfortunately, Foucault's aphorism that ‘prison “reform” is virtually contemporary with the prison itself’ remains on the mark (Foucault, 1977). My ...
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