At age eighteen, as a part-time employee of a prisoners’ rights group, I visited an archipelago of decrepit prisons, all relics of an earlier age. My job was gathering inmates’ accounts of bucket toilets, unheated cells, bugs, molds, and rats. Soon after, I began reading and writing about prison reform and its history. And in the many decades since, whether practicing or teaching criminal law, I never lost sight of prisons and their problems. Several of these five books fed my young fascination with prison reform. All of them still challenge me to imagine true and enduring reform.
I wrote
Beware Euphoria: The Moral Roots and Racial Myths of America's War on Drugs
John Howard was the first hero of prison reform. Though born to a life of ease, he risked–and ultimately lost–his life by inspecting prisons throughout Britain at a time when “jail fever,” a form of typhus, killed many of those imprisoned.
Howard’s damning findings of filthy dungeons and corrupt jailers, all chronicled in this book, sparked a reform movement that reached the highest levels of government and endured for a generation.
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Delve into what it was like to live during the eighteenth century by reading the…
Two centuries after Howard’s book awakened Britain to the cruelties of prison confinement, Michael Ignatieff traced the influence of Howard’s program of prison reform. That movement prompted construction across Britain of at least forty-five “reformed” prisons between 1775 and 1795.
When I first read Howard’s and Ignatieff’s books forty-five years ago, they sparked a lifelong interest in prisons, their evils, and how we might reform them.
Subtitled "The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850", "A Just Measure of Pain" describes the moment in 18th century England when the modern penitentiary and its ambiguous legacy were born. In depicting how the whip, the brand and the gallows - public punishments once meant to cow the unruly poor into passivity - came to be replaced by the "moral management" of the prison and the notion that the criminal poor should be involved in their own rehabilitation. Michael Ignatieff documents the rise of a new conception of class relations and with it a new philosophy of punishment, one directed…
Many of Howard’s prescriptions for prison reform focused on the physical plant. His favorite prison architect, William Blackburn, translated Howard’s reform principles into brick and mortar.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” presented a far different and more insidious vision of a circular prison in which each inmate was under the constant surveillance of a guard posted in a central viewing station.
Robin Evans’s gorgeous photographs of the centuries-old remnants of this wave of prison building and prison reform embellish the story told by Howard and Ignatieff.
First published in 1982, this book describes a new kind of prison architecture that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book concentrates on architecture, but places it in the context of contemporary penal practice and contemporary thought. Beginning with an exploration on the eighteenth-century prisons before reform, the book goes on to consider two earlier kinds of imprisonment that were modified by eighteenth-century reformers. The theory and practice of prison design is covered in detail. The later parts of the book deals with alliance between architecture and reform, and with the connection between the utilitarian architecture…
Though Foucault’s book appeared at almost the same moment as Ignatieff’s, Foucault painted a far darker image of early penitentiaries. He cast them not as places of reform but as instruments of disciplinary control, rendering inmates docile and amenable to the monastic repression and routine of schools and factories.
Foucault’s book taught me decades ago that history is crafted, not discovered, and that skilled chroniclers can weave very different plotlines from similar facts.
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.
Tracking the movement for prison reform to American shores, McLennan documents the grim consequences of grafting incarceration with capitalism.
In her telling, the North’s contract labor system took root amid the new industries of Jacksonian America and flourished in the Gilded Age alongside the South’s proto-plantation convict lease camps. Vast penal industrial plants in almost every state proved how foolhardy early reformers had been to think a state enterprise could long abide by its reforming ideals.
America's prison-based system of punishment has not always enjoyed the widespread political and moral legitimacy it has today. In this groundbreaking reinterpretation of penal history, Rebecca McLennan covers the periods of deep instability, popular protest, and political crisis that characterized early American prisons. She details the debates surrounding prison reform, including the limits of state power, the influence of market forces, the role of unfree labor, and the 'just deserts' of wrongdoers. McLennan also explores the system that existed between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, where private companies relied on prisoners for labor. Finally, she discusses the…
My book traces the moral roots of the drug war. It asks why we have banned drugs and why we have treated alcohol and other euphoric substances so differently. The answer to the first question lies in our culture’s deep moral aversion to reason-depriving pleasures. This cultural euphoria taboo has played out differently with alcohol and other drugs for reasons I trace back through the history of euphoria regulation.
A surprising lesson of this history is that the long-accepted story of the roots of the drug war is wrong. The drug war did not result from racial animus against groups linked with various banned drugs. Rather, lawmakers acted to protect the moral integrity of their own race and especially of respectable women and youth.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
