The Politics of Punishment

Bruce F. Adams examines how Russia's Main Prison Administration was created, the number of prisoners it managed in what types of prisons, and what it accomplished. While providing a thorough account of prison management at a crucial time in Russia's history, Adams explores broader discussions of reform within Russia's government and society, especially after the Revolution of 1905, when arguments on such topics as parole and probation boiled in the arena of raucous public debate.

Bruce F. Adams (1946-2008) was Professor of History at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Tiny Revolutions in Russia.

A seminal work of meticulous scholarship. The Politics of Punishment is especially and unreservedly recommended for college and university library collections. It should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject.

Adams provides a useful corrective to popular conceptions about Imperial Russia by showing convincingly that the exile system played a small and even diminishing part in the Russian system of incarceration.

On the basis of substantial archival research, Adams describes in tremendous detail the complex social and intellectual milieu that underlay the struggle for reform of Russia's prisons, as well as the tortuous administrative and legislative process by which it developed.

Those who are interested in the history of prisons and how societies have dealt with crime will find the book of considerable interest, but it has a much wider appeal as well, because it is one of the most detailed and careful studies of how the late imperial bureaucracy dealt with a significant issue.

This is a useful and solidly researched survey of imperial Russia's efforts to improve its prisons in the half century before the revolution. On the basis of largely unexplored archival documents, Bruce F. Adams follows the struggle of state officials to create penal institutions that met the standards established in Western Europe and the United States.