ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1970s, and continuing to this day, an impressive body of factual findings and theoretical overviews has discredited each component of our inherited criminal justice system. Foreign observers, who once flocked to visit American prisons, are now appalled by current conditions and sentencing practices, astonished to find them so retrogressive. Christie was so repelled by American prisons that after opening his analysis with the apologetic phrase: "Whom one loveth, one chasteneth," he went on to draw an analogy with Nazi Germany: "The extermination camp was a product of industrialization ... a combination of thought-patterns, social organization and technical tools. My contention is that the prison system in the USA is rapidly moving in the same direction" (Christie 1993).
