Essay Database

In the book "Crime Control As Industry", Nils Christie states that our upward spiraling prison populations, particularly in the United States is a move towards gulags of the west. In particular, this book suggests that we may already be moving into an age of penal control that takes us beyond the gulag. Our American prison may be moving from a form of criminal control to a form of slave labor. Christie also points out that …

…points of view. This modern assembly line of our criminal justice needs to be reexamined, retooled in order to satisfy all parties involved. This modernistic culture of crime control concludes with a consideration of the social processes that tend to lock us into an institutionalized culture of control. Our modern criminal system cannot exist independently from social theory; it is without doubt troubled with the central problems of social order and the effects of disorder.