This book offers a systematic, sociological and penological exploration of the most up-to-date uses of electronic tagging (also known as electronic monitoring). With increasingly overcrowded prisons, electronic tagging has been proposed as an alternative form of punishment, and interest in this topic is growing throughout Europe. Current debates and research have often been limited to policy evaluation and effectiveness, whereas Electronic Monitoring examines the brand of punishment from a social-science perspective. This book explores the uses and history of electronic tagging, and draws upon the work of the Dutch criminologist Willem Nagel to reflect upon this form of punishment by examining its functions and dysfunctions. It speaks to those interested in criminal justice reform, surveillance, penology and penal innovation and probation.

How can you help someone who doesn't want to be helped? Should you even try? If motivation is considered not only as an intrinsic attribute of the offender, but dependent upon a range of factors including what obstacles there are, what sort of changes are needed and the kind of intervention on offer, steps can be taken to improve the situation.

Mary McMurran has skilfully brought together eminent researchers and practitioners, who provide the reader with best knowledge and practice from two major fields-addictions and criminological psychology-to examine the therapeutic process and suggest how best to engage offenders in therapy. Throughout, ethical issues surrounding motivating offenders to change are closely scrutinised.

This book is an invaluable resource and guide to those training and working with offenders and training staff, including clinical and prison psychologists, probation officers, forensic psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, social workers, occupational therapists , counsellors, and prison officers.

"Scholars and practitioners who despair because 'the people who are most in need of treatment are the most difficult to engage' will feel optimistic and reinvigorated after reading this book. Motivating Offenders to Change provides the most valuable and comprehensive information available anywhere about how to encourage offenders to attend sessions and to comply with and benefit from treatment." David P. Farrington, Professor of Psychological Criminology at Cambridge University, UK

"This excellent book is a must-read for all who are involved in the criminal justice system. It challenges the idea that confrontation with offenders is necessary and demonstrates that effective treatment results from building effective relationships with these clients. McMurran's book is a groundbreaking synthesis of what is known from various fields about motivating offenders." William L. Marshall, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Psychiatry at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada

When the photographs depicting torture at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were released in 2004, U.S. politicians attributed the incident to a few bad apples in the American military, exonerated high-ranking members of the George W. Bush administration, promoted Guantanamo as a model prison, and dismissed the illegality of the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation." By the end of the Bush administration, members of both major congressional parties had come to denounce enhanced interrogation as torture and argue for the closing of Guantanamo. What initiated this shift? In Talking About Torture, Jared Del Rosso reviews transcripts from congressional hearings and scholarship on denial, torture, and state violence to document this wholesale change in rhetoric and attitude toward the use of torture by the CIA and the U.S. military during the War on Terror. He plots the evolution of the "torture issue" in U.S. politics and its manipulation by politicians to serve various ends. Most important, Talking About Torture integrates into the debate about torture the testimony of those who suffered under American interrogation practices and demonstrates how the conversation continues to influence current counterterrorism policies, such as the reliance on drones.

This edited volume brings together a diverse group of contributors to create a review of research and an agenda for the future of dog care and training in correctional facilities. Bolstered by research that documents the potential benefits of HAI, many correctional facilities have implemented prison dog programs that involve inmates in the care and training of canines, not only as family dogs but also as service dogs for people with psychological and/or physical disabilities. Providing an evidence-based treatment of the topic, this book also draws upon the vast practical experience of individuals who have successfully begun, maintained, improved, and evaluated various types of dog programs with inmates; it includes first-person perspectives from all of the stakeholders in a prison dog program-the corrections staff, the recipients of the dogs, the inmate/trainers, and the community volunteers and sponsors Human-animal interaction (HAI) is a burgeoning field of research that spans different disciplines: corrections, psychology, education, social work, animal welfare, and veterinary medicine, to name a few. Written for an array of professionals interested in prison dog programs, the book will hold special interest for researchers in criminal justice and corrections, forensic psychology, and to those with a commitment to promoting the ideals of rehabilitation, desistance thinking, restorative justice, and re-entry tools for inmates.

This book presents a study of street children's involvement as workers in Bangladeshi organised crime groups based on a three-year ethnographic study in Dhaka. The book argues that 'mastaans' are Bangladeshi mafia groups that operate in a market for crime, violence and social protection. It considers the crimes mastaans commit, the ways they divide labour, and how and why street children become involved in these groups. The book explores how street children are hired by 'mastaans', to carry weapons, sell drugs, collect extortion money, commit political violence and conduct contract killings. The book argues that these young people are neither victims nor offenders; they are instead 'illicit child labourers', doing what they can to survive on the streets. This book adds to the emerging fields of the sociology of crime and deviance in South Asia and 'Southern criminology'.

This book offers a sociological exploration of street children in India and what pulls and pushes them into delinquency, at a time when the government of India is contemplating strengthening its juvenile justice system. It draws on in-depth, qualitative research carried out by an NGO which included unstructured and structured interviews with over 600 children as well as stakeholders. Through the stories of Indian children, this book examines the major factors which together play a crucial role in their engagement in deviant behaviour as they grow up. However, the authors argue that they should not be viewed not as a dangerous threat but as the country's most valuable resource. The authors conclude that a punitive strategy may not be the best option, advocating instead for a focus on restorative justice which has been found to be effective and beneficial alongside other strategies which help strengthen families and enhance parenting skills.

This book provides a detailed and practical exploration of criminal recidivism and social reintegration in Jamaica. It uses various methods to seek the authentic voices of inmates, ex-prisoners, deported migrants and practitioners, drawing on an original study to examine factors that might help ex-prisoners more successfully transition from a prison environment to life within the community. Leslie also raises important questions about the Jamaican state's capacity to meet the needs of inmates, particularly as a large number of its citizens are subject to forced repatriation to their homeland by overseas jurisdictions due to their offending. Recidivism in the Caribbean provides a unique insight into institutional and community life in a post-colonial society, whilst linking practices theories of offender management. It will particularly appeal to criminologists and sociologists interested in tertiary crime prevention but also those interested in correctional policy and practice, punishment and deviance.

This book analyses the experiences of prisoners in England & Wales sentenced when relatively young to very long life sentences (with minimum terms of fifteen years or more). Based on a major study, including almost 150 interviews with men and women at various sentence stages and over 300 surveys, it explores the ways in which long-term prisoners respond to their convictions, adapt to the various challenges that they encounter and re-construct their lives within and beyond the prison. Focussing on such matters as personal identity, relationships with family and friends, and the management of time, the book argues that long-term imprisonment entails a profound confrontation with the self. It provides detailed insight into how such prisoners deal with the everyday burdens of their situation, feelings of injustice, anger and shame, and the need to find some sense of hope, control and meaning in their lives. In doing so, it exposes the nature and consequences of the life-changing terms of imprisonment that have become increasingly common in recent years.

Among the more intriguing documentary sources from late medieval Europe are pardon letters-petitions sent by those condemned for serious crimes to monarchs and princes in France and the Low Countries in the hopes of receiving a full pardon. The fifteenth-century Burgundian Low Countries and duchy of Burgundy produced a large cache of these petitions, from both major cities (Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, and Dijon) and rural communities. In Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble, Peter Arnade and Walter Prevenier present the first study in English of these letters to explore and interrogate the boundaries between these sources' internal, discursive properties and the social world beyond the written text.Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble takes the reader out onto the streets and into the taverns, homes, and workplaces of the Burgundian territories, charting the most pressing social concerns of the day: everything from family disputes and vendettas to marital infidelity and property conflicts-and, more generally, the problems of public violence, abduction and rape, and the role of honor and revenge in adjudicating disputes. Arnade and Prevenier examine why the right to pardon was often enacted by the Burgundian dukes and how it came to compete with more traditional legal means of resolving disputes. In addition, they consider the pardon letter as a historical source, highlighting the limitations and pitfalls of relying on documents that are, by their very nature, narratives shaped by the petitioner to seek a favored outcome. The book also includes a detailed case study of a female actress turned prostitute.An example of microhistory at its best, Honor, Vengeance, and Social Trouble will challenge scholars while being accessible to students in courses on medieval and early modern Europe or on historiography.

Research on prisons prior to the prison boom of the 1980s and 1990s focused mainly on inmate subcultures, inmate rights, and sociological interpretations of inmate and guard adaptations to their environment, with qualitative studies and ethnographic methods the norm. In recent years, research has expanded considerably to issues related to inmates' mental health, suicide, managing special types of offenders, risk assessment, and evidence-based treatment programs. The Oxford Handbook of Prisons and Imprisonment provides the only single source that bridges social scientific and behavioral perspectives, providing graduate students with a more comprehensive understanding of the topic, academics with a body of knowledge that will more effectively inform their own research, and practitioners with an overview of evidence-based best practices. Across thirty chapters, leading contributors offer new ideas, critical treatments of substantive topics with theoretical and policy implications, and comprehensive literature reviews that reflect cumulative knowledge on what works and what doesn't. The Handbook covers critical topics in the field, some of which include recent trends in imprisonment, prison gangs, inmate victimization, the use and impact of restrictive housing, unique problems faced by women in prison, special offender populations, risk assessment and treatment effectiveness, prisoner re-entry, and privatization. The Oxford Handbook of Prisons and Imprisonment offers a rich source of information on the current state of institutional corrections around the world, on issues facing both inmates and prison staff, and on how those issues may impede or facilitate the various goals of incarceration.

Neil `Sam' Samworth spent eleven years working as a prison officer in HMP Manchester, aka Strangeways. A tough Yorkshireman with a soft heart, Sam had to deal with it all - gangsters and gangbangers, terrorists and psychopaths, addicts and the mentally ill. Men who should not be locked up and men who should never be let out. Strangeways is a shocking and at times darkly funny account of life in a high security prison. Sam tackles cell fires and self-harmers, and goes head to head with some of the most dangerous men in the country. He averts a Christmas Day riot after turkey is taken off the menu and replaced by fish curry, and stands up to officers who abuse their position. He describes being attacked by prisoners, and reveals the problems caused by radicalization and the drugs flooding our prisons. As staffing cuts saw Britain's prison system descend into crisis, the stress of the job - the suicides, the inhumanity of the system, and one assault too many - left Sam suffering from PTSD. This raw, searingly honest memoir is a testament to the men and women of the prison service and the incredibly difficult job we ask them to do.

In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia…

An epic description of the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia. The Fatal Shore is the prize-winning, scholarly, brilliantly entertaining narrative that has given its true history to Australia.

The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders, yet reforms to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, an ever-widening carceral state has sprouted in the shadows, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship--posing a formidable political and social challenge. In Caught, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies--one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism. With a new preface evaluating the effectiveness of recent proposals to reform mass incarceration, Caught offers a bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform.

This book explores the dual nature of legitimacy in prison. It examines the inter-connectivity between audience perception of legitimacy (the prisoners' perception) and the power-holders' perception of legitimacy (the prison staff perception). It defines legitimacy in this scenario as the ability of prison workers to implement their authority in an honest, lawful, and just manner, while prisoners acknowledge their status as eligible power-holders who deserve to be obeyed and comply with their decisions. Using mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative research, data were collected in all Slovenian prisons as well as a correctional home. The volume discusses the various factors influencing prisoner's perspective of legitimacy, and recommends avenues for further research. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with an interest in prison and incarceration, or with an interest in Eastern Europe. It will also be of interest to those studying legitimacy within the criminal justice system more generally, and related fields such as sociology, law enforcement, and organizational psychology. Utilizing an in-depth and longitudinal study of legitimacy in Slovenian prisons, Hacin and Mesko shed light on legitimacy's dual nature with an exquisite research design that removes any ambiguity about its essential nature in achieving prison order and correctional environments more conducive to rehabilitation. [...] Overall, the book is an excellent contribution to penological theory, research, and practice. A monograph and case study of a post-modern and post-socialist prison system, it offers a lens for re-examining the mass incarceration models of western prisons for cross-cultural comparisons of prison legitimacy. -Rosemary L. Gido, Professor Emerita, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA This book studies legitimacy in prisoners and among prison staff through the lens of procedural justice theory, focusing on the context of Slovenia. The book is a must-read for scholars who are theoretically and methodologically interested in testing and applying procedural justice theory. Rarely, both prison staff and prisoners are studied in the same inquiry. This is the added value. The results have value for prison policy. This book will be of interest to scholars in criminology and criminal justice, as well as political science and public policy. - Lieven Pauwels, Professor, Department of Criminology, Criminal Law and Social Law, Ghent University, Belgium The now global epistemic community for the study of criminal justice and criminology requires that scholars everywhere be in frequent communication, and that they engage in the testing of concepts that are of potential universal application in democratic countries seeking to build just and efficacious public institutions. The time is here for comparative criminal justice research of high quality to be undertaken, and this book represents exemplary scholarship in this regard. For those scholars from around the world interested in determining the potential and limitations of the theory of procedural justice as applied in the corrections setting, this book represents a "must read" for you. It presents findings from a comprehensive, mixed-methods study of how the core concepts of the theory of procedural justice can be insightfully explored within correctional institutions. The study done in the progressive, highly regarded setting of the Slovenian prison system - carried out with inmates, prison staff (corrections officers and rehabilitation services personnel) and administrators - serves as an excellent template for replication in other countries. The interpretation of findings made by two scholars of remarkable experience and profound knowledge add greatly to the value of this book. For scholars doing worthwhile research into the challenges of building and maintaining just and capable criminal justice systems in democratic countries, this book will inform and inspire you. - Nicholas Lovrich, Research Professor Emeritus, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Washington State University, Pullman, USA

Published some two decades ago, Elizabeth Comack's Women in Trouble explored the connections between the women's abuse histories and their law violations as well as their experience of imprisonment in an aged facility. What has changed for incarcerated women in those twenty years? Are experiences of abuse continuing to have an impact on the lives of criminalized women? How do women find the experience of imprisonment in a new facility? Drawing on the stories of forty-two incarcerated women, Coming Back to Jail broadens the focus to examine the role of trauma in the women's lives. Resisting the popular move to understand trauma in psychiatric terms - as post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) - the book frames trauma as "lived experience" and locates the women's lives within the context of a settler-colonial, capitalist, patriarchal society. Doing so enables a better appreciation of the social conditions that produce trauma and the problems, conflicts and dilemmas that bring women into the criminal justice net. In Coming Back to Jail, Comack shows how - despite recent moves to be more "gender responsive" - the prisoning of women is ultimately more punishing than empowering. What is more, because the sources of the women's trauma reside in the systemic processes that have contoured their lives and their communities, true healing will require changing women's social circumstances on the outside so they no longer keep coming back to jail.

This book draws on historical and cross-disciplinary studies to critically examine penal practices in Scandinavia. The Nordic countries are often hailed by international observers as 'model societies', with egalitarian welfare policies, low rates of poverty, humane social policies and human rights oriented internal agendas. This book, however, paints a much more nuanced picture of the welfare policies, ideologies and social control in strong centralistic states. Based on extensive new empirical data, leading Nordic and international scholars discuss the relationship between prison conditions in Scandinavia and Scandinavian social policy more generally, and argue that it is not always liberating and constructive to be embraced by a powerful welfare state. This book is essential reading for researchers of state punishment in Scandinavia, and it is highly relevant for anyone interested in the 'Nordic Model' of social policy.

At the height of the Middle Ages, a peculiar system of perpetual exile--or abjuration--flourished in western Europe. It was a judicial form of exile, not political or religious, and it was meted out to felons for crimes deserving of severe corporal punishment or death. From England to France explores the lives of these men and women who were condemned to abjure the English realm, and draws on their unique experiences to shed light on a medieval legal tradition until now very poorly understood. William Chester Jordan weaves a breathtaking historical tapestry, examining the judicial and administrative processes that led to the abjuration of more than seventy-five thousand English subjects, and recounting the astonishing journeys of the exiles themselves. Some were innocents caught up in tragic circumstances, but many were hardened criminals. Almost every English exile departed from the port of Dover, many bound for the same French village, a place called Wissant. Jordan vividly describes what happened when the felons got there, and tells the stories of the few who managed to return to England, either illegally or through pardons. From England to France provides new insights into a fundamental pillar of medieval English law and shows how it collapsed amid the bloodshed of the Hundred Years' War.

Brazilian authorities continuously fail to comply with international norms on minimal conditions of incarceration. Brazil's prison population has risen ten-fold since the country's return to democracy in the 1980s. Its prisons typically operate at double official capacity and with 100 prisoners for each guard on duty. At the same time, however, the average Brazilian prison is not as disorderly or its staff-inmate relations so conflictual as our established theories on prison life might predict. This monograph explores the means by which Brazilian prisons function in the absence of guards. More specifically, the means by which prison security and inmate discipline is negotiated between prison managers, gangs and the wider inmate body. While fragile and varied, this historical tradition of co-produced governance has for decades kept most prisons in better order and enabled most prisoners to better survive.

Reflections on Life in Ghettos, Camps and Prisons explores the relationship between ghettos, camps, places of detention and prisons with a focus on those people who are confined, encamped, imprisoned, detained, stuck, or forcibly removed through the lens of 'stuckness'. From a point of departure in anthropology, with important contributions from criminology, geography and philosophy, the chapters explore how life is lived in and across these sites of confinement by focusing on the tactics of everyday life, while being mindful of how forms of abjection are constitutive elements of these sites. Stuckness, from this inter-disciplinary perspective, is not simply a function of the spatial form it takes; we need to understand how temporality animates stuckness as an important dimension of confinement. Death, the ultimate temporal boundary, emerges as particularly significant in this regard. With case studies from Palestine, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Northern Australia, Rwanda, Ivory Coast and Nicaragua, the contributors focus on the empirical question of how structures of stuckness, confinement and forced mobility impact on the possibilities of 'making life'. Suggesting new ways of thinking about how temporality and spatiality intersect and overlap in the lives of people struggling to manage conditions of stuckness, Reflections on Life in Ghettos, Camps and Prisons will be of great interest to scholars of anthropology, geography, criminology and philosophy. The chapters in this book originally published as a special issue of Ethnos.

Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation's jails every year. What happens to them as they carry their pregnancies in a space of punishment? In this time when the public safety net is frayed, incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor. Using her ethnographic fieldwork and clinical work as an ob-gyn in a women's jail, Carolyn Sufrin explores how jail has, paradoxically, become a place where women can find care. Focusing on the experiences of incarcerated pregnant women as well as on the practices of the jail guards and health providers who care for them, Jailcare describes the contradictory ways that care and maternal identity emerge within a punitive space presumed to be devoid of care. Sufrin argues that jail is not simply a disciplinary institution that serves to punish. Rather, when understood in the context of the poverty, addiction, violence, and racial oppression that characterize these women's lives and their reproduction, jail can become a safety net for women on the margins of society.

Today the United States leads the world in incarceration rates. The country increasingly relies on the prison system as a "fix" for the regulation of societal issues. Captivity Beyond Prisons is the first full-length book to explicitly link prisons and incarceration to the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants. Starting in the 1990s, the United States saw tremendous expansion in the number of imprisoned (im)migrants, specifically Latinas/os. Consequently, there was also an increase in the number of deportations. In addition to regulating society, prisons also serve as a reproductive control strategy, both in preventing female inmates from having children and by separating them from their families. With an eye to racialized and gendered technologies of power, Escobar argues that incarcerated Latinas are especially depicted as socially irrecuperable because they are not considered useful within the neoliberal labor market. This perception impacts how they are criminalized, which is not limited to incarceration but also extends to and affects Latina (im)migrants' everyday lives. Escobar also explores the relationship between the immigrant rights movement and the prison abolition movement, scrutinizing a variety of social institutions working on solutions to social problems that lead to imprisonment. Accessible to both academics and those in the justice and social service sectors, Escobar's book pushes readers to consider how, even in radical spaces, unequal power relations can be reproduced by the very entities that attempt to undo them.

Final Judgments: The Death Penalty in American Law and Culture explores the significance and meaning of finality in capital cases. Questions addressed in this book include: how are concerns about finality reflected in the motivations and behavior of participants in the death penalty system? How does an awareness of finality shape the experience of the death penalty for those condemned to die as well as for capital punishment's public audience? What is the meaning of time in capital cases? What are the relative weights according to finality versus the need for error correction in legal and political debates? And, how does the meaning of finality differ in capital and non-capital (LWOP) cases? Each chapter examines the idea of finality as a legal, political, and cultural fact. Final Judgments deploys various theories and perspectives to explore the death penalty's finality.

Introduction to Corrections: Policy, Populations, and Controversial Issues provides students with a holistic introduction to contemporary corrections practice and the opportunities and challenges they are likely to face within their future professional careers. The text is divided into three distinct units. Unit I examines the evolution of contemporary corrections and philosophies of punishment, correctional administration, probation and parole, and reentry and reintegration. In Unit II, students learn about the constitutional rights of incarcerated individuals, prison culture, and correctional programming. Dedicated chapters explore the characteristics of incarcerated female, juvenile, and vulnerable populations-including LGBTQ persons, elderly persons, and individuals who suffer from mental illness-as well as how these characteristics can impact their incarceration experiences. The final unit speaks to modern controversies in corrections such as racial equity, wrongful conviction, the death penalty, and the prison industrial complex. Throughout, case studies, discussion questions, and application exercises facilitate greater student learning and retention. Written to provide students with a solid knowledge base within the discipline, Introduction to Corrections is an ideal textbook for courses in corrections, administration of justice, and criminal justice.

This work asks readers to reconsider punishment contracts in the United States. It illustrates the importance of state accountability and responsibility to those who are punished, while also focusing on the dual importance of desistance and re-entry. Looking across current criminological desistance literature, Stephen C. McGuinn shows the value of empowerment, meaning and, most of all, assimilation. Woven throughout the text, the work also captures the actual experiences of a man returning to society after eleven years in prison. He details his experiences in a daily journal, providing an honest and forthright account of the confusion and struggle of those who come home after lengthy prison stays. Through this account, readers are reminded of the importance of human connection and compassion. As researchers, as scientists, we must provide a map, or a language and narrative, on how to consider punishment in the US. In developing a new way to consider the process of desistance, this book champions the humanity in forgiveness and the compassion of justice.