ABSTRACT
THERE can be few institutions in Western society more magnetic in their unfailing attraction of intense feeling than the prison. For more than a century since the abandonment of wholesale capital punishment and its successor, transportation, the prison has been at the core of penal systems in the West. Around it have been focused not only the efforts of reformers and moral debates about the punishment for crime, but a range of sentiments from the curious to the macabre. The prison is both an institution of social control and a symbol of legitimate coercion on the part of the State.
