Many years ago, I periodically visited HMP Grendon Underwood, both a prison and a therapeutic community in the UK, whose governor I knew. In conversations with prisoners, I noticed that they consistently distinguished between “here”—Grendon—and “there”—the System, meaning every other prison, of which they had extensive experience. Grendon was an “oasis”; the System, a “desert”. As Alison Liebling observes in this remarkable book, prisoners can be excellent judges of which environments foster human flourishing and which are merely survivable—or worse. The challenge is to develop meaningful, compelling, and measurable descriptions that allow prisons to be compared and more sustaining environments to be identified and nurtured. This has been the focus of Liebling’s evolving body of research over more than thirty years, characterised by a willingness to draw on a wide range of disciplines and approaches within humane inquiry. At the centre of her work is the idea that prisons are mor...