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Considers the penal law in Poland since the change in regime from totalitarian to democratic state. Discusses the different approaches used and the change in crime over the decade. Gives some statistics. States that Polish law will have to change to comply with European law as it strive to join the economic community. Concludes that the reader should “ponder anew the sense and role of penal responsibility” on an international scale.

This chapter calls attention to penal regime shifts, emphasizing the importance of comparing different periods of prison development. In particular, it examines different instantiations of prison across time.

I discuss three periods of prison development (1790–1810s, 1820–1860, and 1865–1920), focusing on the nature of prison diffusion across the United States. Specifically, I discuss the homogeneity and diversity of prison forms in each period.

I demonstrate that the first two periods were particularly homogenous, as most states that adopted prisons followed a single model, the Walnut Street Jail model (1790–1810s) and the Auburn System (1820–1860), respectively. By contrast, the post—Civil War period experienced the emergence of women’s prisons, adult reformatories, and distinctively Southern approaches to confinement. Using neo-institutional theory, I suggest this post-war proliferation of prison forms was only possible because the prison had become institutionalized in the penal landscape.

Scholars rarely examine multiple shifts in penal regime together, reducing their ability to make comparative insights. This chapter juxtaposes three historical periods of prison development, thereby illustrating the diversity of the third period and improving extant understandings of prison evolution.

In this chapter, I trace Arizona's prison siting and construction history to examine how cultural norms and traditions, economics, political prerogatives, and notions about the prison's purpose shape how such institutions are conceived, planned, and realized over time. By looking longitudinally at how prisons have come to be – as physical entities – in one locale, I reveal both the continuities and changes in the underlying meaning of the prison. In doing so, I aim to contribute to a broader understanding of the process of late modern penal change, especially the proliferation of prison building in the past 30 years.

This chapter explores how the principles of retribution and deterrence were framed and thus used to justify capital punishment in the early years of the Republic, and how the purposes for capital punishment have changed in the past two centuries. We ask several related questions: (1) Has our understanding of the morality and utility of retributive justice changed so dramatically that the historical argument tying justification for capital punishment to the past now ought to carry less weight? (2) Have our perspectives on the purposes for capital punishment changed in ways that now might call the entire experiment into question? and (3) What, in short, can we say about the historical similarities between arguments concerning retribution and deterrence at the Founding and those same arguments today?As is often true of common law principles, the reasons for the rule are less sure and less uniform than the rule itself. (Justice Marshall's majority opinion in Ford v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 399 (1986))

Following the military coup that toppled the government in September 1980, Turkish prisons, like the rest of the country, came under military control. Abhorrent levels of violence inflicted under military discipline became the source of horror stories. However, by early 1990s, official authorities had almost completely lost control of prisons to political prisoner organizations. This chapter analyzes how such a drastic change took place within a decade. Focusing on the ongoing struggles between political prisoner organizations and official actors over control of daily life, I argue that the resistance strategies developed by the political prisoners against the military disciplinary project in 1980s became the source of a prisoner-imposed disciplinary project in 1990s.