There are already at least a couple of recent small encyclopedias of American prisons and penal services – McShane and Williams (1996) and Sifakis (2003), both of which are worthy of consideration by penological libraries. It is, perhaps, debateable whether there are many libraries in the world that need more than one. The word American does need emphasising, as it does not appear in the title of the work under consideration. Although this kicks off with a chronology starting at the establishment of Bridewell in London in 1556, it moves rapidly on to the beginning of transportation to Virginia in 1619, and thereafter makes little mention of practices in other Anglophone countries, and completely ignores penal developments in the non‐Anglophone world.
The American prison system can be considered fairly barbaric. The USA is one of the few western countries to retain capital punishment, and the only one to execute minors. It has a larger proportion of its population in prison at any one time than any other western country, and, especially, a huge disproportion of ethnic minority prisoners. With what appears to be a condoned culture of male rape, and a long tradition of oppressive violence towards poor inmates and the use of money and influence to buy one's way out of the legal system, there is very little that liberal Americans can be proud of. The question of black prisoners especially concerns us. Most prisons are located in “white” rural areas. By a curious quirk of American electoral law, representation is based on the total number of people residing in a district, but felons, and in some cases ex‐felons, cannot vote. The election of George Bush and some of the troubles that have descended on the rest of the world since finally hung on that single factor.
The Encyclopedia's coverage of the prison system within the land area of the USA is fairly thorough. From an outsider's point of view, the fact that there are no entries for Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, or any mention of the USA accepting information extracted by torture carried out outside its borders, rather weakens the interest of this book. There is at least some evidence to suggest that the staff at Abu Ghraib were very similar to the sort of people who would otherwise be employed at, say, a Missouri rural prison, and that their attitude towards the largely black inmates there would not necessarily have been very different.
Like so many of the smaller specialised encyclopedias that have come my way recently, this one is singularly short of detailed statistical information. Statistics obviously date rapidly, which is a perfectly sound reason for excluding them, but a good reference book should make it clear how they can be found. The United States Department of Justice does publish exhaustive quantities of statistical data online, and I would have welcomed some guidelines on navigating my way around these. Apart from this I cannot see any serious omissions within the narrow remit of this book. Any publication on prisons is likely to date, as fashions change. Prisons basically are set up for three functions – deterrence, temporary incapacitation, and rehabilitation. The last of these – fitting prisoners for reintegration into society, has always been a poor third in the American penological tradition, and largely dropped off the screen in the mid‐1970s. There are some, very slight, signs of it making a comeback, with the clear evidence that boot camps cost more and have no measurable effect on recidivism, while grants towards college education cost less and have a clear measurable effect. Given the rightwing and authoritarian trend in recent American politics, a liberal backlash seems somewhat unlikely though, so this book will not go out of date as quickly as some might hope.
This book is clearly aimed at the American undergraduate/bright high school/educated general public level reader, with little interest in goings‐on outside the USA. As such it seems eminently suitable. Any American college or public reference library that does not already have an encyclopedia of penology could well consider this one. Those of us in the rest of the world will probably find Sifakis cheaper, more compact, and adequate for our purposes.
