Customer Reviews

Prisons: Houses of Darkness

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Picked this book up at the San Diego County Public Law Library. It hadn't been checked out in over a decade! That is a shame, since this book deserves better.

I was interested to discovery that "Prisons" was published in 1975, the same year that Michel Foucault published his seminal work "Discipline and Punishment". The two books make many of the same points, although unlike Foucault, Orland is working towards a series of policy recommendations which he makes at the end of the book.

This book begins with a short and interesting history of the prison in America and Europe. At this point, this a very well "known" area, but Orland's treatment is accesible and easy to understand. Orland makes reference to the work of Goffman for his concept of the modern prison as a "total institution" i.e. a place which controls every waking moments of its inhabitants.

By the time you get to his series of "recommendations", the book has run out of steam. As anybody who has lived in America during the last quarter of a century knows, we shan't be reforming the prison system to be more leinent anytime soon!

Perhaps the most remarkable part of this book is that Orland wrote it before the reforms in sentencing under Federal Law made by the United States Sentencing Commission! He wrote this BEFORE the advent of the "war on drugs"! That is a scary thought!