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In his penetrating field study, Didier Fassin introduces English-speaking readers to the social process of incarceration in France, from the courtroom to the prison. Fassin shows how a poor and largely immigrant population becomes entangled in a criminal justice system whose everyday operation reflects and reinforces the contours of social and economic inequality. Remarkable in its range and empirical detail, this is important reading for students of crime, law, and urban life. Bruce Western, Harvard University Prison Worlds is simply extraordinary. It is at once a philosophy and history of modern prisons and punishment, an ethnography of French male prisoners, a racial and socio-economic theory of incarceration, and a searching meditation on world that locks up so many so cruelly and so thoughtlessly for so little. The narrative is elegant, the stories are searing, and the scholarship is impeccable. Fassin's work will sit next to Foucault's Discipline and Punish as among the most important works on carceral punishment of the past century. Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley As I read it, I felt that I was going on a long train journey with a wise and chatty French professor: the book is full of vignettes of life and snatches of conversations, all grounded in a huge range of global academic sources. Nicola Padfield, The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice Prison Worlds is exceptional for both its breadth and exceptionally detailed accounts of everyday life for prisoners and those who work in prisons. Even the title of the book, Prison Worlds, reflects Fassin's comprehensive approach. Instead of analyzing prison as circumscribed and separate from society, he explicitly connects prisons with the rest of society. The American Journal of Sociology

In his penetrating field study, Didier Fassin introduces English-speaking readers to the social process of incarceration in France, from the courtroom to the prison. Fassin shows how a poor and largely immigrant population becomes entangled in a criminal justice system whose everyday operation reflects and reinforces the contours of social and economic inequality. Remarkable in its range and empirical detail, this is important reading for students of crime, law, and urban life. Bruce Western, Harvard University Prison Worlds is simply extraordinary. It is at once a philosophy and history of modern prisons and punishment, an ethnography of French male prisoners, a racial and socio-economic theory of incarceration, and a searching meditation on world that locks up so many so cruelly and so thoughtlessly for so little. The narrative is elegant, the stories are searing, and the scholarship is impeccable. Fassin's work will sit next to Foucault's Discipline and Punish as among the most important works on carceral punishment of the past century. Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley

In his penetrating field study, Didier Fassin introduces English-speaking readers to the social process of incarceration in France, from the courtroom to the prison. Fassin shows how a poor and largely immigrant population becomes entangled in a criminal justice system whose everyday operation reflects and reinforces the contours of social and economic inequality. Remarkable in its range and empirical detail, this is important reading for students of crime, law, and urban life. Bruce Western, Harvard University Prison Worlds is simply extraordinary. It is at once a philosophy and history of modern prisons and punishment, an ethnography of French male prisoners, a racial and socio-economic theory of incarceration, and a searching meditation on world that locks up so many so cruelly and so thoughtlessly for so little. The narrative is elegant, the stories are searing, and the scholarship is impeccable. Fassin's work will sit next to Foucault's Discipline and Punish as among the most important works on carceral punishment of the past century. Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley As I read it, I felt that I was going on a long train journey with a wise and chatty French professor: the book is full of vignettes of life and snatches of conversations, all grounded in a huge range of global academic sources. Nicola Padfield, The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice Prison Worlds is exceptional for both its breadth and exceptionally detailed accounts of everyday life for prisoners and those who work in prisons. Even the title of the book, Prison Worlds, reflects Fassin's comprehensive approach. Instead of analyzing prison as circumscribed and separate from society, he explicitly connects prisons with the rest of society. The American Journal of Sociology

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Didier Fassin is James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

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