“Duncan readily solves the mystery by showing us how Botany Bay’s incoherence can be made sense of once we see it as an ‘archetypal story,’ re-enacting with real people and real places an epic drama of self-purification through the banishment of the filthy.”

— New York Times Book Review

“A brilliant and rattling study of how we love what we revile and desperately need that which we shun. Duncan’s precise and shrewd analysis of the close embrace between the THEM and US is managed with such understated assurance that we only gradually understand how original it is.”

— James R. Kincaid, University of Southern California

“If you desire a more complete understanding of prisons, inmates, and free society, . . . Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons is sure to be the most interesting work you’ve read in recent memory.”

— Corrections Today

“I heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in psychoanalysis and law. . . . For anyone who has worked in the area of forensic psychiatry, the volume is an utter delight.  Whereas lawyers and judges rarely acknowledge the unconscious, Duncan applies a deep, sophisticated, and well-articulated understanding of psychoanalysis to her topic.”

— Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

“This book could have been dry and dense in the hands of a less graceful and involved writer, but because of her excellent choices of literary examples and the clarity of her style, Martha Grace Duncan has written a book that is accessible to the motivated general reader as well as a more academic audience.”

— Arizona Daily Sun

“An important and arresting book.  Professor Duncan’s engagement with paradox, contradiction, and nuance is in stark contrast to the brutally simplistic approaches that have dominated American penal policy since the late 1960s.”

— Francis A. Allen, Florida Law Review 

“Outstanding . . . Duncan exposes and articulates social taboos not meant to be discussed.  A unique effort, addressed to a broad spectrum of readers, that may well become a classic in the theory of crime.”

— Walter O. Weyrauch, Buffalo Criminal Law Review