"An instant classic and an astonishing resource that will forever change how we think about the history of incarceration."--Candida Moss, author of God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible "Larsen and Letteney's work--centrally concerned with rendering the lived experience of ancient incarceration--both uncovers a hidden past and provides a roadmap for historians, criminologists, and practical reformers alike to find, listen to, and recenter too-often silenced voices."--Keramet Reiter, author of 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Longterm Solitary Confinement "Drawing on an array of documentary and archaeological sources to argue that incarceration, broadly defined, was an essential instrument of coercion in the ancient Mediterranean world, Larsen and Letteney have given us nothing less than a disturbing new framework for understanding the pervasiveness of institutional violence and social control in classical antiquity."--Carlos F. Noreña, author of Imperial Ideals in the Roman West: Representation, Circulation, Power