A sociologist with an interest in understanding the psychological makeup of terrorists and recidivist criminals, Martha Duncan came to the Psychoanalytic Institute at New York University Medical Center for analytic research training. She went on to Yale Law School, eventually becoming a law professor at Emory University where, among other activities, she has been teaching courses on Psychoanalysis and the Law and on Law and the Unconscious. This extremely interesting book is a very welcome product of her educational peregrinations. In it, she examines unconscious determinants of attitudes toward prisons, both of the criminals who are incarcerated in them and of the noncriminals who put them there. Her conclusions shed light upon the psychological basis of the use by modern society