The prison is a recent invention, hardly more than two centuries old, yet it has become the universal system of punishment. How can we understand the place that the correctional system occupies in contemporary societies? What are the experiences of those who are incarcerated as well as those who work there?

To answer these questions, Didier Fassin conducted a four-year-long study in a French short-stay prison, following inmates from their trial to their release. He shows how the widespread use of imprisonment has reinforced social and racial inequalities and how advances in civil rights clash with the rationales and practices used to maintain security and order. He also analyzes the concerns and compromises of the correctional staff, the hardships and resistance of the inmates, and the ways in which life on the inside intersects with life on the outside. In the end, the carceral condition appears to be irreducible to other forms of penalty both because of the chain of privations it entails and because of the experience of meaninglessness it comprises. Examined through ethnographic lenses, prison worlds are thus both a reflection of society and its mirror.

At a time when many countries have begun to realize the impasse of mass incarceration and question the consequences of the punitive turn, this book will provide empirical and theoretical tools to reflect on the meaning of punishment in contemporary societies.

About the Author

Didier Fassin, born in 1955, is a French anthropologist and sociologist. He is currently the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and holds a Direction of Studies in Political and Moral Anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Reviews
"In his penetrating field study, Didier Fassin introduces English-speaking readers to the social process of incarceration in France, from the courtroom to the prison. Fassin shows how a poor and largely immigrant population becomes entangled in a criminal justice system whose everyday operation reflects and reinforces the contours of social and economic inequality. Remarkable in its range and empirical detail, this is important reading for students of crime, law, and urban life."
Bruce Western, Harvard University

"Prison Worlds is simply extraordinary. It is at once a philosophy and history of modern prisons and punishment, an ethnography of French male prisoners, a racial and socio-economic theory of incarceration, and a searching meditation on world that locks up so many so cruelly and so thoughtlessly for so little. The narrative is elegant, the stories are searing, and the scholarship is impeccable. Fassin's work will sit next to Foucault's Discipline and Punish as among the most important works on carceral punishment of the past century."
Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

"As I read it, I felt that I was going on a long train journey with a wise and chatty French professor: the book is full of vignettes of life and snatches of conversations, all grounded in a huge range of global academic sources."
Nicola Padfield, The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice

"Prison Worlds is exceptional for both its breadth and exceptionally detailed accounts of everyday life for prisoners and those who work in prisons. Even the title of the book, Prison Worlds, reflects Fassin's comprehensive approach. Instead of analyzing prison as circumscribed and separate from society, he explicitly connects prisons with the rest of society."
The American Journal of Sociology

Book Information
ISBN 9781509507559
Author Didier Fassin
Format Paperback
Page Count 416
Imprint Polity Press
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Weight(grams) 612g
Dimensions(mm) 226mm * 155mm * 33mm