The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (Random House, 576 pages) Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil is a promise a long time coming. In 1971, when Zimbardo was a young psychology professor at Stanford University, he presided over a psychology experiment exploring what happened when normal students were immersed in two distinct roles: One group of students were to be prison guards -- in a makeshift prison set up in the basement of the psychology lab -- and the other group were to be prisoners. The experiment, peopled by well-adjusted, paid volunteers, was to last for two weeks. Within days, however, told they had to control the prison and provided with virtually no oversight by Zimbardo (in his role as prison superintendant), the bulk of the guards had begun engaging in startlingly sadistic, humiliation-based behavior -- dragging prisoners around naked and with bags over their heads, forcing them to do...

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Gilmore (University of California Press, 412 pages) For those involved in studying critically the U.S. criminal justice system, Ruth Gilmore's Golden Gulag has been a promise long-delayed. The book has been talked about, in often reverential tones, for many years now. After all, in addition to being a first-rank scholar -- Gilmore is a geography professor at USC and director of the university's American Studies and Ethnicity program -- the author is also one of the country's leading anti-prison activists. Who better than her, therefore, to answer two fundamental questions: Why did California build only 12 prisons in the first century-plus of its existence as a state, and 23 more prisons in the decades after 1984? And why did the state's political leadership and electorate support an expansion of corrections expenditures from two percent of the state's general fund in the 1970s to over eight...