47 books like The Fabrication of Virtue

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why are female criminals "ugly"? Italian criminologist Professor Caesar Lombroso discusses crime causation, justice systems, penology, and the female offender. Lombroso rallied for humane treatment of inmates, advocating programs to reform the penal system, and believed both generated a better society. He argued that criminal behavior is inherited and categorizing offenders as: crimes of passion, aka "lunatics", occasional offenders, and born criminals. He also tried to identify them by physical attributes: the skull, features, and tattooing. 

Lombroso's atavistic theories initially seem outdated - and even laughable - but are still practiced today. "(S)he looks like a criminal" is something you commonly hear. Or, people instantly judge someone's tattoos. Lombroso's approach is still utilized in true crime media. The case becomes more interesting when perpetrators are attractive. Even the monikers for female criminals are modified: femme fatale, black widow, she-devil. Readers will enjoy the contrast/comparison to 1900s criminology. The Female Offender… show more.

In the past fifty years, economic analysis has contributed immensely to legal theory – in fact, it transformed the way legal scholars think about law, primarily in North America but increasingly around the globe.

In this book, one of the founding fathers of this school of thought takes stock of the contributions, limitations, and possible routes to advance law and economics.

Specifically, Calabresi tackles the normative shortcomings of economic analysis as a normative theory, considers ways to overcome these challenges, and highlights the ways in which law and legal thinking can contribute to positive and normative economic analysis.

Reading this book was a no-brainer for me. First – it has Maul in it. Actually, that’s enough of a reason. Who doesn’t love Maul? 

As far as I’m concerned he’s the ultimate bad guy. You don’t mess with him, he kicks serious ass, and he looks wow! My kind of hero/anti-hero. Dark, brooding, commanding, and can stop a conversation with just one look.

He’s the type of anti-hero you can’t help but root for and this book didn’t let me (or Maul) down. Imprisoned in hell, he has to complete his mission while staying alive against seemingly insurmountable odds. Plenty of deep stares, lots of kicking-ass, and a great plot that kept me up early into the morning.

Prisons were originally built for men (really, white men), not for women. But women were sent to prison, just not in big enough numbers to merit their own facilities until much later. Women were also viewed as a difficult population by reformers and prison administrators alike: Women who committed crimes were deemed so morally repugnant that they could not be rehabilitated, so the routines and purposes of prisons seemed not to apply to them (prisons were originally supposed to rehabilitate their prisoners).

As a small and unprofitable population (because they were assigned unprofitable labor like sewing and laundry), women prisoners were considered especially burdensome. Using the prison histories of three differently situated states, Rafter describes the experiences of incarcerated women and how those experiences were shaped by their unique position and the biases about women criminals.

Although this novel is not necessarily ‘apocalyptic,’ I couldn’t help but include it. Alexander Gordon Smith’s Lockdown is a high-stakes novel that follows Alex, a teenager who is wrongly accused of murder and sentenced to an underground prison. The Furnace Penitentiary is not a normal prison, but is a building where inhumane experiments take place. I’ve always been fascinated by characters who have to survive in an environment they cannot physically leave, and the Escape from Furnace series does this beautifully.

I could not stop reading this book once I started, and I stayed up late into the night glued to its pages. Bauer, a journalist, takes us inside the prison where he got a job as a correctional officer. Through engrossing prose that pairs his daily experiences with carefully researched historical context about incarceration in the United States, Bauer shows what prisons represent in real time.