Prison Worlds

Preface to the English Edition
 
Acknowledgements
 
Prologue: Where it all begins
 
"So this case is quite extraordinary!" That driving one's vehicle with a revoked license can lead to prison, and how the carceral world is both a mirror for and a reflection of society.
 
Introduction: The expanding prison
 
A recent invention. That the punitive turn of the late twentieth century has led to a carceral inflation that is presented as justified despite the evidence, and how a study in a short-stay prison can shed light on the consequences.
 
Chapter 1: For whom the cells fill
 
"Put me in solitary!" That contemporary developments in penal policy and practice have precipitated prison overcrowding, and how they reveal a way of dealing with inequalities.
 
Chapter 2: A well-kept public secret
 
"Let's face it." That the overrepresentation of ethnic and racial minorities in a short-stay prison is rendered invisible, and how disparities in social structures and the penal chain help to explain this.
 
Chapter 3: Ye who enter here
 
"Tell them I'm holding up." That incarceration shock means different things depending on whether one is a judge or correctional staff, and how the prison attempts to mitigate its impact by applying the European Penitentiary Rules.
 
Chapter 4: Life in prison: a user's manual
 
"There shouldn't be all this wasted time here." That imprisonment represents a spatial, temporal and sensorial experience without equivalent, and how each individual strives to cope with the emptiness of prison life.
 
Chapter 5: In the nature of things
 
"It's their way of resisting us." That the usage of the peephole, the circulation of cellphones, and the exchanges of tobacco say a great deal about life in prison, and how everyday objects speak of politics and morality.
 
Chapter 6: A profession in search of honor
 
"I never tell anyone what I do for a

Didier Fassin is James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

"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