A collection of essays and responses from diverse contributors united in original examination of the intersection between incarceration and human rights. Poets, practitioners, academics and theorists offer an illuminating range of perspectives for specialists and the general reader.

IntroductionPart I: behind bars1. Prisons inspection and the protection of human rights – Anne Owers1a. Inspecting the tail of the dog – Liora Lazarus2. Asylum and incarceration – Shami Chakrabarti2a. Curtailing freedoms, diminishing rights in Britain’s asylum policy: a narrative of ‘them and ‘us’ – Roger Zetter3. ‘Old’ and ‘new’ institutions for persons with mental illness: treatment, punishment or preventive confinement? – Lawrence O. Gostin3a. Mental illness, preventive detention, prison and human rights – Stephen ShutePart II: beyond the prison 4. The use and abuse of prison in the age of social insecurity – Loïc Wacquant4a. Journeying into, and away from, neoliberal penality – Ian Loader5. Ten reasons for not building more prisons – Thomas Mathiesen5a. Comments on Mathiesen’s ‘Ten reasons’ – David Downes6. Creative incarceration and strategies for surviving freedom – Jack Mapanje6a. ‘With no amulet to protect him’: a South African response to Jack Mapanje – Jonny SteinbergIndex

A collection of essays and responses from diverse contributors united in original examination of the intersection between incarceration and human rights. What do human rights concerns dictate about the practices that we tolerate in places of incarceration? And conversely, what can prisons, their hard facts and the ideas underpinning them, tell us about human rights?The book offers a diversity of voices: from the inside view of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Prisons to the words of a poet and former political prisoner; from an international policy overview of abuses of the mentally ill to a socio-economic reading of race and class in prisons. This range of approaches offers a uniquely rounded view of the topic, while each contributor’s eminence in their field gives great depth of expertise.