Book dossier

Prison riots in Britain and the USA

by Robert V. Adams

"This compelling and unique book amasses a wealth of documentary and research evidence to explode popular myths about the absence of significant prison riots until the 1960s. It demonstrates that prison riots are a central feature of penal history, from traditional riots in which prisoners made no specific demands, to consciousness-raising riots where they often challenged the dominant penal philosophy of rehabilitation." "The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen the discrediting of the rehabilitative philosophy of imprisonment and a shift in the nature of challenges to the authorities by prisoners, from an almost exclusive focus on macho confrontations by the 'heavy end' of long-sentence prisoners to riots by diverse categories of prisoners, including women, mentally-ill and remand or trial prisoners." "Drawing on incidents where in extreme cases the prisoners have blow-torched, sodomised and raped their guards and each other, and the authorities have used the military, tanks, dynamite, and machine-guns to quell riots, the book illustrates the violent nature of prison riots and of responses to them by the authorities. It concludes that the challenge to all involved in debates about penal policy and practice is to project a future for prisons, beyond the patterns of violent confrontations which have been so much a feature of prison riots in the past."--BOOK JACKET.