Mary Bosworth’s Explaining U.S. Imprisonment is an ambitious and wide-ranging study of the

historical path to mass incarceration. It is an impressive and provocative contribution to the sociology of punishment and, while the book tackles territory that is already well covered by an extensive literature, it does not have an over-familiar or derivative feel. Bosworth seeks to break with the focus of much scholarship by taking a longer view of the institution and situating imprisonment in a broader context of nation-building, conflict and identity. In doing so, the text is enlivened by well-researched detail, drawn from published prisoner accounts and primary source documents written by penal reformers, practitioners and legislators that sheds fresh light on the enduring persistence of the prison. Bosworth’s approach is driven by a combination of revisionist feminism and critical race scholarship that seeks to address the absence of women and minorities from the established histories of imprisonment. Such a move is instructive, and reveals much about the processes of exclusion structuring both the institution itself and the academic commentary on it. From the outset, she insists that this is will not be ‘a book arguing for abolition’, but rather ‘one that calls for a reduction in prison numbers and a curbing o