While the use of imprisonment continues to rise in developed nations, we have little sociological knowledge of the prison's inner world. Based on extensive fieldwork in a medium-security prison, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison provides an in-depth analysis of the prison's social anatomy. It explains how power is exercised by the institution, individualizing the prisoner community and demanding particular forms of compliance and engagement. Drawing on prisoners' life stories, it supplies a detailed typology of adaptive styles, showing how different prisoners experience and respond to the new range of penal practices and frustrations. It then explains how the prisoner society - its norms, hierarchy and social relationships - is shaped both by these conditions of confinement and by the different backgrounds, values and identities that prisoners bring into the prison environment. Through this analysis, this meticulously researched book aims to revive and update the dormant tradition of prison ethnography. It provides an empirical snapshot of a modern prison, documenting the aims and techniques of contemporary imprisonment and illuminating the social structures and behaviours that they generate. Through a penetrating account of power relations throughout the institution, the author documents the pains of modern imprisonment, the new techniques of survival, and the prison's distinctive forms of trade, friendship and everyday culture.

This social history analyses a period in which the modern prison faced serious challenges both on practical & philosophical grounds. These included the use of prison to victimise the poor, the disaffected & political activists, & the failure to establish the prison as a satisfactory means of punishment.

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

In the late 1950s crime and its treatment had never been of greater public interest. In The English Prisons, originally published in 1960, D.L. Howard used his knowledge of academic criminology and his practical experience of criminals of all ages to produce a book which would be of value to all who were concerned with crime in this country at the time. The author gives the first full survey of the history of prisons to appear for many years. He describes conditions in the early prisons and prison hulks, the colonial penal settlements, and the part played by outstanding individuals such as John Howard, Elizabeth Fry and Alexander Paterson in the development of the modern prison system. He then discusses, in the light of first-class experience as a trained sociologist working inside an English prison, the changes which were taking place in the treatment of criminals, and the problems which these changes were creating. Mr Howard shows a rare insight into his subject, and this, together with an ability to write vividly and informally, would make his book appeal to both the general reader and all who were studying the social sciences in the universities and as part of their training for social work. Today it can be read in its historical context.

In the eighteenth century, as wars between Britain, France, and their allies raged across the world, hundreds of thousands of people were captured, detained, or exchanged. They were shipped across oceans, marched across continents, or held in an indeterminate limbo. The Society of Prisoners challenges us to rethink the paradoxes of the prisoner of war, defined at once as an enemy and as a fellow human being whose life must be spared. Amidst the emergence of new codifications of international law, the practical distinctions between a prisoner of war, a hostage, a criminal, and a slave were not always clear-cut. Renaud Morieux's vivid and lucid account uses war captivity as a point of departure, investigating how the state transformed itself at war, and how whole societies experienced international conflicts. The detention of foreigners on home soil created the conditions for multifaceted exchanges with the host populations, involving prison guards, priests, pedlars, and philanthropists. Thus, while the imprisonment of enemies signals the extension of Anglo-French rivalry throughout the world, the mass incarceration of foreign soldiers and sailors also illustrates the persistence of non-conflictual relations amidst war. Taking the reader beyond Britain and France, as far as the West Indies and St Helena, this story resonates in our own time, questioning the dividing line between war and peace, and forcing us to confront the untenable situations in which the status of the enemy is left to the whim of the captor.

Ranging from ancient times to the present, a survey of the evolution of the prison explores its relationship to the history of Western criminal law and offers a look at the social world of prisoners over the centuries.