From the vermin-ridden hell that was Newgate in the 1700s, to the supposedly inescapable Alcatraz and the privatized jails of `90s England, this book looks at the regimes and conditions of the jailed and examines the changes history has made to punishment by imprisonment. This study of the arguments for and against the jailing of prisoners, whether the perpetrators of violence or prisoners of conscience, includes sections on British criminal prisons (Dartmoor, the Maze), Islands of the Damned (Devil's Island, Robben Island) and prisoners of conscience (the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition, Lubyanka).