The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives

The prison population in the Untied States has quadrupled since 1970, while Canada's federal prisons are 30 percent over capacity -- because the current trend in Western society is to arrest more criminals, sentence them to longer terms, and build more prisons to house them. In The Expanding Prison, David Cayley argues that such a strategy essentially undercuts democracy with totalitarianism. He offers proven alternatives to imprisonment that emphasize settlement-oriented techniques over punishment and move us toward a vision of justice as peacemaking rather than vengeance. The result is a learned and impassioned call for change in a system and a society that have become dangerously politicized.