Studies on prisons

[An archist]

Does anyone know of any scientific studies about prisons? expecially the usefulness of them? I can't find anything on the internet and the school library is closed for a week.

All help would be really appreciated.

[Sasha]

this should be a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_abolition_movement

[Bitter Ashes]

The Stanford Prison experiment is frequently quoted and something I did a bit about in pyschology classes. I'd take it with a pinch of salt though as although the results were intresting, the method was questionable.