The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison""The Big House" is America's idea of the prison - a huge, tough, ostentatiously oppressive pile of rock, bristling with rules and punishments, overwhelming in size and the intent to intimidate. Stephen Cox tells the story of the American prison - its politics, its sex, its violence, its inability to control itself - and its idealization in American popular culture. This book investigates both the popular images of prison and the realities behind them : problems of control and discipline, mainenance and reform, power and sexuality. It conveys an awareness of the limits of human and institutional power, and of the symbolic and iconic qualities the "Big House" has attained in America's understanding of itself"--Jacket. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 16 | |
Your Life as a Convict | 45 |
The Art of Humiliation | 62 |
Sex | 80 |
Illustrations | 98 |
You Built It Now Try to Run It | 99 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Alcatraz American Prisons architecture Attica Auburn Author's collection Big House Big House period Brockway building cages cell cellblocks cellhouse civilian Clemmer clothes convict number convict uniform crime Criminal Intimacy deputy warden discipline Duffy Elmira Reformatory escape experience film gangs Garrett and MacCormick guards homosexual humiliation icon idea Illinois inmates inside institution Jackson Joliet Kantrowitz Kunzel laundry Lawes Lewis Lewis Lawes Martin mates McGraw mess hall modern nineteenth normal officers Osborne of Sing panopticons Penitentiary percent popular population Powers That Punish pris Prison Community prison films prison movie prison reform Prison Riots Prison Service prison sex problems Ragen rape San Quentin segregation sentence Sex in Prison sexual shirt Sing Sing social society Stateville stories striped supermax symbol thing Thomas Mott Osborne tion Toughest Prison tower transformation twentieth century victs walls Warden Ragen yard York young Zebulon Brockway