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What Are Prisons For?

What Are Prisons For?

By Hindpal Singh Bhui

"So, prisons can and must be improved – but if we think that a massive investment in prisons is the answer to complex social problems, we are not asking the right question." Dame Anne Owers, previously Chief Inspector of Prisons and Chair of prison Independent Monitoring Boards

  • Description

    What does a good prison look like? Over eleven million people are currently locked up in prisons across the world, but does that mean that prison actually works?

    Hindpal Singh Bhui, with 25 years’ experience of visiting and working in prisons worldwide, argues that we need to look at who is sent there and why, to disentangle reality from ideology and myth. Introducing the competing histories of prisons and allowing the voices of prisoners, prison staff and victims to be heard, he asks whether there is a better way to achieve what society wants from its prisons.

  • In the media

    'Why should we care about prisons?' on Transforming Society

  • Contents

    1. A Journey into Prisons

    2. A Brief History of Imprisonment in the West

    3. The Emergence of Prison around the World

    4. Mass Incarceration, Race and Crime

    5. Do the Crime, Do the Time? Who Are Prisoners?

    6. Experiencing Prison

    7. Where Next for Prisons?

Product details

About the author

Dr Hindpal Singh Bhui OBE is an Inspection Team Leader at HM Inspectorate of Prisons and a Visiting Law Professor at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford. He has worked in prisons for over 25 years undertaking hundreds of visits to places of detention around the world. He has also led various thematic reviews on custody in England and Wales, including on foreign prisoners, minority ethnic prisoners, rehabilitative work and immigration detention. He has given evidence to numerous UK parliamentary committees, public inquiries and the European Parliament, and is a regular speaker at international conferences.

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