The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World
The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World
by David Skarbek
New York: Oxford University Press, 2020
240 pp.
Christopher Calton ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Florida.
In The Puzzle of Prison Order, David Skarbek builds upon his governance theory of prison social order, which posits that in cases in which the official governance institutions are inadequate, prisoners will form their own institutions to secure property rights, facilitate market exchange, adjudicate disputes, and mitigate violence. Skarbek’s work rests at the intersection two interesting subjects of inquiry. Most obviously, he is contributing to the rapidly growing body of literature on carceral systems.1 Although The Puzzle of Prison Order is not a work of history, Skarbek answers historian Mary Gibson’s (2011) call for a more global approach to prison studies, which remains predominantly centered on the United States and the West. Skarbek also builds on a less prevalent body of work carried largely by George Mason-trained economists such as Edward Stringham and Peter Leeson: studies of private governance. Like Leeson’s The Invisible Hook (2009), which looks at the social order of pirates, Skarbek studies the people who seem least likely to establish functional systems of governance—criminals—to show how informal governance institutions form and operate.
Although Skarbek leans heavily on his previous work, there is a great deal of new insight even for those who are already familiar with his research. The focus of Skarbek’s analysis centers on the relationship between official and informal institutions—the foundation of his governance theory of prison social order—but the book is organized into two parts that respectively illustrate two newly developed features of his theory. By comparing prison governance across various systems, Skarbek categorizes the governance regimes in his study into four ideal types: official governance, co-governance, self-governance, and minimal governance regimes. These ideal types structure Part I of The Puzzle of Prison Order (chapters 2–4). In Part II (chapters 5–7), he considers the conditions that lead prisoners to develop either centralized or decentralized mechanisms of governance. Skarbek’s previous work on the San Quentin and San Pedro prisons (Skarbek 2010, 2014) involves only regimes that qualify as centralized systems of self-governance, according to his new taxonomy. His new book, therefore, offers a far more dynamic analysis than anything he has previously produced.
Each chapter is designed to highli
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