ABSTRACT
The history of imprisonment in the US and UK is a broadly shared history, with each country exporting penal philosophies and practices to the other, and in both nations crime and security have become the major battlegrounds on which political entrepreneurs have staked their power. Since The Politics of Abolition was first published in 1974, the number of prisoners in the United States has risen by 500% and the number of US prisons has more than tripled, from 600 to nearly 2,000. The UK’s prison population has doubled in the same period and, despite promising a ‘rehabilitation revolution’, the Conservative-led, coalition government is committed to further expanding the prison estate, including closing some of the country’s oldest prisons and commissioning new ‘super-size’ facilities.
