It argues that many prisoners and nonprisoners exhibit powerful positive associations with penal confinement, and draws on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and sociology to account for the various sources of attraction that prison exerts. These sources include psychological processes such as institutional transference and oral fixation, cultural archetypes such as the dialectically related polarities of death and rebirth, and sociopolitical factors such as negative aspects of life in freedom. The study considers interrelationships between the analysis of positive images of prison and punishment goals (rehabilitation, deterrence, and retribution). The author contends that the risk of imprisonment for an appreciable number of criminals is actually an inducement rather than a deterrent to crime. She further suggests that the lack of political will to improve prison conditions may stem from the largely unconscious attractiveness of penal confinement to the general population. That is, deprivation of freedom is seen as an insufficient punishment for crime; hence, prisons must be allowed to remain places of physical and psychological brutality. Images of prison as a desirable place reflect actual negative aspects of life in the world outside. More basically, however, these images represent an expression of human beings' essentially psychological and mythopoeic nature and of their tendency to transcend immediate circumstances. 210 references.