Just as we turn to Dickens's prisons not as documentary testaments to Victorian penal practice but as iron-tough metaphors for the dreadful tethering of free play in every sphere of human action, so the Circus speaks to our profound unease in the face of all secrets.
British penal practice differs from that of many other European countries in that segregation units are used not only to isolate inmates for reasons of order and discipline, but also to separate vulnerable prisoners who are at risk of self-harm or harm from others.
Second, there are questions about the relation between theory and practice between the ideal, as portrayed by a normative theory of punishment, and the actualities of existing penal practice.
A forbidding institution that opened in 1931, Attica, roughly midway between Buffalo and Rochester, was overcrowded and governed by rigid and often capricious penal practices.
For those who think that punishment can in principle be justified, this means simply (and hardly surprisingly) that our penal practices need radical reform if they are to become justified: but the abolitionist critique goes much deeper than that, to argue that legal punishment cannot be justified even in principle.
A widening gulf between the numbers of men and women whipped in London (during the 1790s, 393 men versus 47 women), which mirrors a similar decline in the sending of women to the pillory, may also indicate an imposition of commonly-held gender ideals on English penal practices.
As documented by various scholars, "fueled by notions of colonialism, slavery, conquest, stereotypes, hate, and the perception of threats, the history of race and ethnic relations in the United States has been vicious, vindictive, and bloody", shaping and re-shaping criminalization and penal practices for minorities.
There are very clear parallels between the financial crisis and the crisis facing the country's penal policy and practice.
It is, to put it mildly, unlikely that our normative theory of justified punishment will justify our existing penal institutions and practices: it is far more likely that such a theory will show our existing practices to be radically imperfect that legal punishment as it is now imposed is far from meaning or achieving what it should mean or achieve if it is to be adequately justified.
And anyone "African" gets a study of American blacks from an Arkansas penal facility and two practices in Tennessee.
When the hangman failed to summon him from his cell by late December, Toshihiko Hasegawa, a convicted murderer, reckoned that, by the practices of Japan's penal system, he had at least one more year to live.
