The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society

"Penal history was long dominated by a Whiggish approach, which traced a glorious progress from the old hellholes and dungeons to liberal reform. Michel Foucault stood this story on its head: a prison reform should be read, he maintained, as the creation of a crueler carceral archipelago. The discerning scholarship of 'The Oxford History of the Prison' points up the shortcomings of all such doctrinaire postures, and affords an escape from the twin mental cages of blind optimism and bleak despair."The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, was published 1997 under ISBN 9780195118148 and ISBN 0195118146.