ABSTRACT
In characteristically forceful style, and despite the fact that he is commenting on the US situation, Jock Young here captures in a nutshell some of the key contours of the debate explored in this book: the shock felt at the very presence of the mentally disordered in prisons; the sheer numbers of people involved; the apparent link with the emptying out of the mental hospitals and the failure to fund community facilities adequately; the use of incarceration as a tool for controlling the ‘troublesome’; and the deleterious impact of imprisonment itself on the mentally vulnerable.
