Contents -- 1. The Birth of a Prison Nation -- 2. The Scarlet Letter and the Long Forever of Puritan Punishment -- The 'Body of Liberties' -- The prison door, the rose- bush and the wilderness within -- The 'strange joy' of Puritan punishment -- Mrs Hutchinson, Friends and the penitentiary system -- The headless Hawthorne on the gentle sex -- Ms Prynne and the New Puritans -- 3. Reading the Rosenbergs: The Public Burning and The Book of Daniel -- Plagues, panopticons and the permanent arms economy -- Theme parks, concentration camps and carnivals of cruelty -- From the chair to the bomb (and back) -- 4. Punishment, Resistance and the African-American Experience -- From the passage to the plantation prison -- Plantation punishments -- 'A small piece of hell': chain gangs, lynching and the reconstruction of slavery -- Beating the Bad Nigger: from Bigger Thomas to Rodney King -- White punishment, black resistance -- 5. The Whip, the Noose, the Cell and their Lover: Melville and Masochism -- White-Jacket and the necessity of discipline -- Benito Cereno and the performance of punishment -- 'Bartleby' and the carceral society -- Billy Budd and the perfection of punishment -- 6. Inside the American Prison Film -- Law/genre -- Land of the Free, or S&M culture? -- The escape film ( 1): Cool Hand Luke -- The execution film ( 1): The Green Mile -- The escape film ( 2): The Shawshank Redemption and Escape from Alcatraz -- The execution film ( 2): Dead Man Walking and The Last Dance -- Prison films and postmodernism: Down by Law, Natural Born Killers and Oz -- Science fiction prison films: Alien3 and The Truman Show -- 7. Image Burn: A Minority Report on the Future of US Punishment -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.