Carceral Utopia - by Gregory Salle (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

What underpins the legitimacy of the prison system in the twenty-first century? Despite numerous challenges and setbacks, there is still a widespread belief that prisons can be improved in a socially progressive way. Even today, 'model prisons' are being built that seek to fix the shortcomings and failures of their predecessors, as if past failures were due to a lack of imagination, determination, or resources.

The aim of creating model prisons is not new: it dates back to the early nineteenth century. Ranging from England to Switzerland and Spain, from Russia to China and India, Carceral Utopia documents a rich, global history of ambitious efforts to create model prisons - places of confinement initially lauded for their progressive ideals but later revealed as fiascos.

At the end of this journey through time and space, it will not suffice merely to highlight the gap between plans and realities, or even to dispel the illusion that model prisons could not live up to their claims. We need to ask why, despite so many failures, these institutions are still being built today. Might their many obvious shortcomings conceal a covert success?

Review Quotes

"Salle delivers a revelatory history of the model prison, showing how each ambitious design promised humane transformation yet reproduced failure. A sweeping and unsettling account of the enduring fantasy that prisons can perfect human behaviour, Carceral Utopia provides essential historical depth to contemporary debates over imprisonment."
Heather Schoenfeld, Boston University

"Why does the prison persist after over two centuries of evident failures? Grégory Salle reopens this question and takes it in a new and provocative direction. Moving over two hundred years of history and examining model prisons on a global scale, Carceral Utopia shows how the gap between the non-place of penal dreams and the actual architecture and regulation of penal reality provides an incessant opportunity for the prison and its promoters to insist that they deserve one last chance. Unfortunately, as Salle also shows, that chance is never the last."
Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles

About the Author