Bastille this book

Crime, Punishment, and the Prison in Modern China, 1895-1949
Bradley Winterton in the TLS in 2003, reviewing Crime, Punishment and the Prison In Modern China by Frank Dikötter,

a scholar who has retained his compassion as well as his ideological scepticism. His fundamental principle is contained in one phrase -“the prison is a failed invention of modernity”. Rationally based penitentiaries were a nineteenth-century evangelical ideal, eagerly copied in reform-minded Asia. But whether in Europe, the US, or China, they stubbornly remained soulless and degrading, succeeding only in creating despair and eroding their victims’ self-respect.

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