ISBN10: 0195118146, ISBN13: 9780195118148, [publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, New York] Softcover Paperback. The word "prison" immediately evokes stark images: forbidding walls spiked with watchtowers; inmates confined to cramped cells for hours on end; the suspicious eyes of armed guards. They seem to be the inevitable and permanent marks of confinement, as though prisons were a timeless institution stretching from medieval stone dungeons to the current era of steel boxes. But centuries of development and debate lie behind the prison as we now know it--a rich history thatreveals how our ideas of crime and practices of punishment have changed over time.In The Oxford History of the Prison, a team of distinguished scholars offers a vivid account ofthe rise and development of this critical institution. Penalties other than incarceration were once much more common, from such bizarre death sentences as the Roman practice of drowning convicts in sacks filled with animals to a frequent reliance on the scaffold and on to forms of public shaming (such as the classic stocks of colonial America). The first decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the full-blown prison system--and along with it, the idea of prison reform. Alexis deTocqueville originally came to America to write a report on its widely acclaimed prison system. The authors trace the persistent tension between the desire to punish and the hope forrehabilitation, recounting the ...
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