Opening up The Big House.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Briefly Noted - The Big House - Brief article - Book review

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In his contribution to Yale University Press' series on icons of American culture, Liberty editor and U.C.-San Diego literature professor Stephen Cox takes us inside The Big House. By that he means not prisons in general but the now-receding wave of huge institutions designed to be isolated worlds of social control, such as Sing Sing and Alcatraz. He takes an anecdotal and discursive walk through the practices and aesthetics of huge prisons and our attitudes toward them, covering food, uniforms, rape, reformers, and the frequent easiness of "hard labor."

Cox gently mocks those who, blinded by Foucault, believe that...