This thesis analyzes the reforms in Turkish Prison System in the light of the international standards and accession to the European Union. The standards and Turkey&rsquo / s efforts to comply with the requirements of those standards are handled in historical order. The process, reasons and initiators of the change are evaluated in the thesis. In order to understand if the process is shaped by a top down or a bottom up effect, criticisms of the Council of Europe and the European Union, and petitions of the prisoners sent to Human Rights Investigation Committee of the Turkish Grand National Assembly are examined.

As policymakers reckon with how the United States became a global leader in imprisonment after World War II, scholars have suggested that the roots of this phenomenon are in conservative backlash to postwar crime or in federal intervention in American cities during the urban crisis. However, historians and social scientists have overlooked the role of jails in the origins story of mass incarceration. Through a close historical examination of Cook County Jail in Chicago, my research addresses how policymakers used reform claims to rationalize the growth of large urban jails from the 1950s through the 1990s. As a massive state building project, mass incarceration was contingent upon branding urban jails as providers of social services and rehabilitation, even though there was proof that jails failed to provide such services and as jail policymakers built bigger and more brutal jails. While activists, lawyers, and prisoners challenged dehumanizing conditions and state violence, jailers responded to public scrutiny by assuring the public that Cook County Jail was in the process of becoming a space that was beneficial to people awaiting trial there. This project locates the emergence of the contemporary carceral crisis in the battle to transform America’s jails. / History