The co-editors open the volume with a general introduction to issues and themes relevant to carceral space and the usable past, and historical geographies of prisons and jails. The volume brings together works that examine, analyze, and critique practices of incarceration, regimes of punishment, and their corresponding spaces of “correctional” institutions (prisons and jails), with the overall aim of helping to understand their legacies in the present. The contributors to this volume focus on the historical-geographical study of spaces and sites of corrections in three ways: (1) by examining individuals’ experiences within various regulatory regimes and spaces of punishment; (2) by interpreting spaces of incarceration as cultural-historical artifacts; and (3) by analyzing the spatial-distributional geographies of incarceration, particularly with regard to their historical impact upon community political-economic development and local geographies.