This book is about the world of prisons and prisons of the world. Its linking thread is a professional journey of almost 50 years which began in Edinburgh Prison in Scotland in 1973 and has continued through the United Kingdom on to hundreds of prisons in over 70 countries. This odyssey has encompassed experiences in Asia, in remote Siberia and regions of northern China, the Himalayas and war-torn Cambodia; in South Africa in the immediate aftermath of apartheid and in prisons throughout the African continent where there were inhuman conditions and drastic shortages of resources; in the Middle East as the second intifada erupted in Israel and Palestine; in Latin America in countries recovering from civil war and dictatorships; in North America where the United States has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world; in Caribbean countries where many prisons reflected the region's brutal colonial past; and in Europe, where countries in the East were coming to terms with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, while those in the West were struggling with their reduced sphere of influence in the world.

The book describes and analyses the way that imprisonment is used around the world through the lens of my personal experiences both as governor of what at the time were two of the most problematic prisons in the United Kingdom and also as an adviser on prisons to many governments and intergovernmental bodies as well as an expert witness in several high-profile court cases about prison issues in North America and elsewhere. I draw also on the knowledge gained from my academic work and writings as Professor of Prison Studies in King's College London.

There have been a number of occasions during my years of governing prisons when I have had to search deep inside myself, questioning whether I could justify what I was doing or was being asked to do, ostensibly for the greater good of society. At an intellectual level I would ask myself from time to time how it was that I had come to be spending my life locking up fellow human beings.