First published in 1974, The American Prison Business studies the lunacies, the delusions, and the bizarre inner workings of the American prison business. From the first demonstration that the penitentiary is an American invention that was initiated by the late eighteenth-century reformers, to the startling revelations, in the chapter called ‘Cheaper than Chimpanzees’ of how pharmaceutical companies lease prisoners as human guinea-pigs, every page stimulates and surprises the reader as Jessica Mitford describes, inter alia the chemical, surgical and psychiatric techniques used to help ‘violent’ prisoners to be ‘reborn’; why businessmen tend to be more enthusiastic than the prisoners they employ in the ‘rent-a-con’ plan; and the Special Isolation Diet which tastes like inferior dog food. Jessica Mitford’s financial analysis of the prison business is a scoop. Her hard-eyed examination of how parole really works is a revelation. As the prison abolition movement continues to gain momentum, this book will provide food for thought for legislators, officials and students of sociology, law, criminology, penology, and history.

This book queries the concept of rehabilitation to determine how, on a legislative and policy level, the term is defined as a goal of correctional systems. The book explores what rehabilitation is by investigating how, at different moments in time, its conceptualization has shaped, and been shaped by, shifting norms, practices, and institutions of corrections in California. The author calls for a rethinking of theoretical understandings of the corrections system, generally, and parole system, specifically, and calls for an expansion in the questions asked in reintegration studies. The book is designed for scholars seeking to better understand the relationship between correctional systems and rehabilitation and the full scope of rehabilitation as a legislative goal, and is also suitable for use as teaching tool for historical, textual, and interviewing methods.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.