Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison

This provides detailed (and interesting!) insights into the American penal system. Normally, I find textbooks to be bland, and to read like stereo instructions. In Total Confinement, Rhodes interjects a lot of narrative and storytelling with fact-based research, making the entire text accessible and easy to grasp. I agree with the other reviews, that this is a must-read for anyone wondering what prisons do to American society as a whole, and to the prison population itself.

this book is amazing and so are her classes. i've been lucky enough to take two of her classes. we really are lucky that people like her are writing.

This is a meticulously researched and theoretically sophisticated expose of a deeply hidden yet increasingly important facet of American culture. As the United States more and more becomes a prison nation, books like this will become essential reading not only for scholars but for average citizens.