Imprisonment in America: Choosing the Future

By Michael Sherman and Gordon Hawkins

FROM THE PREFACE: “"Don't look back," Satchel Paige advised, "something might be gaining on you." Yet, of necessity, this book regards the future by looking over its shoulder at the past. In any consideration of the social institution of imprisonment especially in any attempt to change it--the weight of history must be placed in the balance. The recentexcellent works of David Rothman, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ignatieff have confirmed the importance of a historical perspective on any era's policy prescriptions.

This is, however, explicitly a policy book. In Chapter 5, the analysis of the past is allowed to inform some recommendations which mesh liberal and conservative views. Although in some cases we have been driven back to original sources, this is not a work of primary social history in which lessons are inferred from a mass of detail. Ours is an idiosyncratic view of the constraints imposed by traditions on future choices, and its policy lessons are not shared by many of the historians on whose work we have tried to build.”

Chicago and London. The University of Chicago Press. 1981. 156p.