An overview of prison policies and issues are addressed in the first section with emphasis on imprisonment in Israel, Western Australia, China, Cuba, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. A comparative analysis demonstrated similarities between Israel and the United States with regard to problems of overcrowding, few services for inmates, and high recidivism rates. Though rehabilitation is considered a universal goal of incarceration, meanings are culture-specific as highlighted in Section II. A study of a liberal prison system in Sweden and a punitive system in Ireland demonstrated different affective reactions to incarceration with more prisoner anxiety generated by the rehabilitative-oriented Swedish system. Issues of policy and management are addressed in Section III with a special emphasis on overcrowding. The Danish response to crime has been to incarcerate fewer offenders and to substitute shorter determinate sentences for longer indeterminate ones. In comparison, the United States' response to crime has been to incarcerate more offenders for longer periods of time. Section IV focuses on Prisoners' rights and injustices as demonstrated by data obtained from 155 countries with 60 percent indicating human rights' violations and a link between the political and religious structure of a nation and its prison practices. 4 graphs, references, and tables