Imprisonment and Institutional Life

Imprisonment and institutional life covers ideas about confinement and about life inside prisons. Solitary confinement, also called isolation or administrative segregation, places a prisoner in a cell away from other prisoners with limited contact, usually as internal discipline for serious or minor infractions or to keep the general population or the prisoner safe. Mass incarceration is the growth in imprisonment, and The Sentencing Project says the United States prison population grew nearly 500 percent in fifty years, with punitive sentencing laws and policies, not crime rates, explaining most of the increase. Jeremy Bentham's panopticon belongs to the same family, as a design for institutions built around watching.