Why read The Fabrication of Virtue?

Book cover of The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750-1840

Book description

First published in 1982, this book describes a new kind of prison architecture that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book concentrates on architecture, but places it in the context of contemporary penal practice and contemporary thought. Beginning with an exploration on the eighteenth-century prisons before…

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Prison

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Design

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Fabrication of Virtue as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

George Fisher

Author

Many of Howard’s prescriptions for prison reform focused on the physical plant. His favorite prison architect, William Blackburn, translated Howard’s reform principles into brick and mortar.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” presented a far different and more insidious vision of a circular prison in which each inmate was under the constant surveillance of a guard posted in a central viewing station.

Robin Evans’s gorgeous photographs of the centuries-old remnants of this wave of prison building and prison reform embellish the story told by Howard and Ignatieff.

From George's list on profound books on the history of the penitentiary and of its hopes and disappointments.