In the history of the modern Western prison system, the treatment of the prison population can inevitably be considered as one of many factors in assessing the level of social status that a civilized society has managed to achieve both beyond and behind prison walls. Prisons, in fact, are never a system completely detached from the historical context in which they are located and, as a result, prisoners are also more or less involved in the social and cultural changes in which they live. Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, French politician Alexis de Tocqueville and British writer Charles Dickens Read more