Ashley Lucas's Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration explores a significant range of theatre practices, performance companies and sites of incarceration in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, Uruguay and the USA. Writing on prison theatre tends to be critical analyses shared by researchers embedded within a particular creative project or field notes from artists and artist–scholars reflecting on their own practice in prisons. This is indicative of the opaque systems of incarceration that operate across global contexts and an unwillingness to publicize the creative practices that take place in prisons. Such a context marks the reach of Lucas's study, remarkable in its depth of attention and sustained insight into different models of practice in the field of prison theatre.

The methodological approach Lucas takes is one of sustained ethnography, underpinned by interviews with artists working in prisons, correspondence and interviews with people who are incarcerated and their families, and reporting back from her own experiences of seeing performance or being embedded alongside artists as they make work. In her introduction Lucas refers briefly to the framework of travel writing – a reference to the international nature of her study, but also to the journeys taken by imprisoned people and those who care about them to sites of incarceration that are often located in difficult-to-reach locations and regularly do not appear on maps. In utilizing the travelogue as a kind of model, Lucas invites her reader to reflect on the carceral site, the geographical obstacles to accessing prisons and the ‘onus of travel – the time, distance, cost, exhaustion, and sometimes humiliation – involved in getting to the prison’ (p. 21). This is indicative of the careful attention Lucas gives to the lived realities of systems of incarceration throughout the book. Indeed, the most striking thing about the book is how Lucas holds space to include such a diverse range of voices and experiences (imprisoned artists and participants, family members, prison staff) alongside her own astute perspective as a practitioner and scholar.

The book is structured in four chapters that arrange case studies under the themes community building, professionalization, social change and hope. These frames for investigation draw together several practices which productively open up new perspectives on the chosen theme. In chapter 2, ‘Theatre as a Strategy for Professionalization’, Lucas undertakes a particularly significant interrogation of different models and structures for the organization of performance programmes running in prisons. Importantly, from the outset Lucas recognizes artists as both people involved in theatre-making while serving sentences and those who enter the prison to creatively collaborate with those inside (what she terms ‘free world artists’). Her discussion of the Canada-based William Head on Stage Company (WHoS) offers insight into practices which are self-run by prison artists. The WHoS board of directors – made up of men serving prison sentences – do identify particular skills needs and commission free-world practitioners to come in and work with them, but the company runs functions as an independent organization from within the walls of the prison. Across the book, Lucas attends multiple different models of the organization of performance practice in prisons, giving insight into varied structures and models of performance and identifying the multiplicity of possibilities for prison theatre to emerge, be structured, and be sustained.

The four chapters from Lucas are then followed with a section on critical perspectives offered in short chapters from Selina Busby, Stephanie Gaskill, Neil Packham and Elly Goodman, and Caoimhe McAvinchey. These critical perspectives expand the geographical reach of Lucas's project and also provide critical interrogations of several central concepts within prison theatre scholarship, namely intervention, containment, rehabilitation and representation. Busby explores how the Children's Play Project (England) traverses conflicting agendas of ‘radical intervention’ and ‘radical containment’, articulating how the work practises a pedagogy of utopia while acknowledging the challenges of such a practice within violent structures of incarceration and state narratives of recidivism. Gaskill interrogates how moral rehabilitation, social commentary, empowerment and radical injustice all entwined in the staging of passion play The Life of Jesus Christ by people serving sentences at Angola Prison and Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women. Packham and Goodman reflect on their work on the Citizens Theatre residency in HM Prison Barlinnie in Glasgow (Scotland), offering a series of vignettes peppered with participants’ stories, critical reflections on moments from workshops and performances, and the challenges encountered when making theatre in prison. Finally, McAvinchey takes up popular representations of women who have committed crimes to explore how Clean Break Theatre Company (UK) have persistently worked to expand public perceptions of criminalized women and reposition those with lived experience of the criminal-justice system as expert witnesses to the social injustices which regularly operate within such systems.

Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration offers a significant insight into creative practices in prison in different global contexts. Lucas communicates a sense of the power and possibility of arts practices in such settings, alongside underscoring the violence and injustices embedded within structures of incarceration. Students, scholars and artists involved in making such work will find this an excellent and accessible guidebook to the artistic and structural landscapes of prison theatre. But even far beyond those for whom the book feels directly relevant, as Lucas notes in her introduction, ‘prison theatre makers … have much to teach us in both practical and ideological terms about how we navigate institutional power, what we can accomplish with performance, and why we must not lose hope even in the face of the direst of circumstances’ (p. 28).