"Salle delivers a revelatory history of the model prison, showing how each ambitious design promised humane transformation yet reproduced failure. A sweeping and unsettling account of the enduring fantasy that prisons can perfect human behaviour, Carceral Utopia provides essential historical depth to contemporary debates over imprisonment."
Heather Schoenfeld, Boston University

"Why does the prison persist after over two centuries of evident failures? Gregory Salle reopens this question and takes it in a new and provocative direction. Moving over two hundred years of history and examining model prisons on a global scale, Carceral Utopia shows how the gap between the non-place of penal dreams and the actual architecture and regulation of penal reality provides an incessant opportunity for the prison and its promoters to insist that they deserve one last chance. Unfortunately, as Salle also shows, that chance is never the last."
Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles