From the outset of my career in the Prison Service, in my search to understand the principles which underpinned the concept of imprisonment, I had developed an interest in prison matters beyond the United Kingdom and read all that I could find about the history of prisons and about the philosophical, social and judicial traditions on which it was based. My first direct experience of prisons outside the United Kingdom came in 1984 when I was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship which enabled me to spend several months in North America studying the management of long-term prisoners in Canada and the United States. That circle was rounded some 30 years and over 70 countries later when I was asked to provide support to a number of legal initiatives to reduce the current excessive use of solitary confinement in prisons in those two countries. The experience of preparing expert evidence for court cases in California, British Columbia and Ontario over the last decade brought home to me forcefully that, while there had been many developments and some improvements in the treatment of prisoners since my first encounters with prisons in the region, some fundamental issues had not been resolved and may even have regressed, notwithstanding the fact that these two countries were among the most advanced in the world, prided themselves on being at the forefront of what was now described as ‘corrections’ management and were home to some of the world's leading academic writers and teachers on criminal justice. These two sets of different experiences decades apart could be considered as a paradigm for the circuitous and often repetitive nature of all discussions about prisons and imprisonment and form a useful introduction to the description which follows in succeeding chapters about the prisons of the world.

Canada and the United States: 35 years of progress?

In 1984 the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) held around 45,000 prisoners, significantly less than the 170,500 it held in 2020. Over a period of a number of years there had been a dramatic increase in levels of violence within federal prisons, with serious assaults on both staff and prisoners and in an attempt to manage this the BOP had established what it described as a control unit within its most secure penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.