A01=Lorna A. Rhodes
american prison system
american society
anthropology
Author_Lorna A. Rhodes
Category=JBSF
Category=JHB
Category=JHMC
confinement
crime and punishment
criminal justice
discussion books
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
expose
firsthand account
incarceration
injustice
interviews
isolation
life behind bars
life in prison
maximum security prison
mental health units
mental illness
nonfiction
prison administrators
prison industry
prison stories
prison workers
prisoners
prisons and inmates
punishment
sense of self
social science
sociology
Product details
- ISBN 9780520240766
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 26 Feb 2004
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this rare firsthand account, Lorna Rhodes takes us into a hidden world that lies at the heart of the maximum security prison. Focusing on the 'supermaximums' - and the mental health units that complement them - Rhodes conveys the internal contradictions of a system mandated to both punish and treat. Her often harrowing, sometimes poignant, exploration of maximum security confinement includes vivid testimony from prisoners and prison workers, describes routines and practices inside prison walls, and takes a hard look at the prison industry. More than an expose, "Total Confinement" is a theoretically sophisticated meditation on what incarceration tells us about who we are as a society. Rhodes tackles difficult questions about the extreme conditions of confinement, the treatment of the mentally ill in prisons, and an ever-advancing technology of isolation and surveillance. Using her superb interview skills and powers of observation, she documents how prisoners, workers, and administrators all struggle to retain dignity and a sense of self within maximum security institutions.
In settings that place in question the very humanity of those who live and work in them, Rhodes discovers complex interactions - from the violent to the tender - among prisoners and staff. "Total Confinement" offers an indispensable close-up of the implications of our dependence on prisons to solve long-standing problems of crime and injustice in the United States.
Lorna A. Rhodes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, is author of Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (California, 1991).
