The first biography of the prison reformer Alexander Paterson (1884-1947). Sir Alexander Paterson (1884-1947) is best remembered for his role as Commissioner of Prisons and as the individual responsible for some of the greatest British innovations in the field of penal practice. All major prison reforms of his day can be associated with his name. One of the key characteristics of Paterson's reform drive was that he brought a much more 'scientific' approach to penology, encouraging psychiatrists and psychologists to work in prison. He was the prime mover behind the rapid expansion and transformation of the Borstal System and the introduction of open prisons, gaining Britain an international reputation for being at the forefront of penal reform. Harry Potter's account is the first biography of Alexander Paterson and it is based on unpublished material from government and family archives. Besides his achievements as prison reformer, Paterson's life encapsulated many trends in English society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: from the influence of Liberalism and Unitarianism in the industrial heartland of his youth, the Idealist philosophy of Thomas Hill Green at Oxford, to the impact of school and university 'missions' in the dark reaches of London. At Oxford he became friends with Clement Atlee. He also knew the radical Winston Churchill and it was Churchill who in 1910 first appointed him to a leading role in the aftercare of prisoners. Paterson's most formative years were undoubtedly spent living in a slum dwelling in South London when he devoted his time and energy to the Oxford and Bermondsey Medical Mission, one of the university settlements so common at the time - Attlee famously spent years in Hailesbury boys' club and Toynbee Hall in the East End. Paterson went on to publish a best-selling book - Across the Bridges - on his experiences in the South London slums. After a distinguished service in the Great War, Paterson devoted the rest of his life to the prison service at home and to penal reform abroad. Given current debates about prison reform and the general challenges the penal system is facing, revisiting Paterson's life and work will be a timely endeavour. Harry Potter - criminal barrister, historian and former prison chaplain - is ideally suited to write this biography.

A collection of original contributions by philosophers working in the ethics of punishment, gathering new perspectives on various challenging topics including punishment and forgiveness, dignity, discrimination, public opinion, torture, rehabilitation, and restitution.

Since Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, the fate of British convicts has burned brightly in the popular imagination. Incredibly, their larger story is even more dramatic--the saga of forgotten men and women scattered to the farthest corners of the British empire, driven by the winds of the American Revolution and the currents of the African slave trade. In A Merciless Place, Emma Christopher brilliantly captures this previously unknown story of poverty, punishment, and transportation.
The story begins with the American War of Independence, until which many British convicts were shipped across the Atlantic. The Revolution interrupted this flow and inspired two entrepreneurs to organize the criminals into military units to fight for the crown. The felon soldiers went to West Africa's slave-trading posts just as the war ended; these forts became the new destination for England's rapidly multiplying convicts. The move was a disaster. Christopher writes that "before the scheme was abandoned, it would have run the gamut of piracy, treachery, mutiny, starvation, poisonings, allegations of white women forced to prostitute themselves to African men, and not least several cases of murder." To end the scandal, the British government chose a new destination, as far away as possible: Australia.
Christopher here captures the gritty lives of Britain's convicts: victims of London's underworld, rife with brutal crime and sometimes even more brutal punishments. Equally fascinating are the portraits of Fante people of West Africa, forced to undergo dramatic changes in their role as intermediaries with Europeans in the slave trade. Here, too, are the aboriginal Australians, coping with the transformation of their native land. They all inhabit A Merciless Place a tour de force and historical narrative at its finest.

This book explores the origins of the so-called 'punitive turn' in penal policy across Western nations over the past two decades. It demonstrates how the context of neoliberalism has informed penal policy-making and argues that it is ultimately neoliberalism which has led to the recent intensification of punishment.

The searing accounts of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Evgeniia Ginsberg and Varlam Shalamov opened the world's eyes to the terrors of the Soviet Gulag. But not until now has there been a memoir of life inside the camps written from the perspective of an actual employee of the Secret police. In this riveting memoir, superbly translated by Deborah Kaple, Fyodor Mochulsky describes being sent to work as a boss at the forced labor camp of Pechorlag in the frozen tundra north of the Arctic Circle. Only twenty-two years old, he had but a vague idea of the true nature of the Gulag. What he discovered was a world of unimaginable suffering and death, a world where men were starved, beaten, worked to death, or simply executed. Mochulsky details the horrific conditions in the camps and the challenges facing all those involved, from prisoners to guards. He depicts the power struggles within the camps between the secret police and the communist party, between the political prisoners (most of whom had been arrested for the generic crime of "counter-revolutionary activities") and the criminal convicts. And because Mochulsky writes of what he witnessed with the detachment of the engineer that he was, readers can easily understand how a system that destroyed millions of lives could be run by ordinary Soviet citizens who believed they were advancing the cause of socialism. Mochulsky remained a communist party member his entire life-he would later become a diplomat-but was deeply troubled by the gap between socialist theory and the Soviet reality of slave labor and mass murder. This unprecedented memoir takes readers into that reality and sheds new light on one of the most harrowing tragedies of the 20th century.

Examining the successful movements to abolish capital punishment in the UK, France, and Germany, this book examines the similarities in the social structure and political strategies of abolition movements in all three countries. An in-depth comparative analysis with other countries assesses chances of success of abolition elsewhere.

Prisons and the multiple ways that Latino/as have developed to combat the pervasive inhumane acts visited on them are the core of this anthology. Its combination of scholarly presentations, interviews, poetry, visual arts, and narratives of the inmates' lived experiences situates the realities of prison and its aftermath in the discussion about the ideals of individual freedom and rights. The authors highlight the attempts to normalize the systematic dehumanization of incarcerated Latino/as by "walling off" and sanitizing the urgent problems their very presence inevitably poses. This book argues for the societal responsibility to uphold the dignity of all peoples, irrespective of their histories and status in their respective societies.

This book provides an up-to-date analysis of major issues in the field of sexual abuse, both established and emerging, and asks how we can develop the most evidence-based, fit-for-purpose approach in responding to and preventing it. Sexual abuse is a multi-disciplinary, international issue that exists at the crossroads of theory, practice, and research. Therefore, the book is future-facing and asks the reader to critically reflect upon current and future research and practice, and to ask: what next? In doing this the book examines the theory, research, and practice on a range of topics including, grooming behaviors, risk management, risk assessment, sexual fantasies, professional engagement, and policy development. These, and other essential topics for effective and efficient care for people who have committed sexual offenses, are addressed as part of the ultimate goal to reduce and even eliminate sexual victimization in the future.

"Jeanne Stinchcomb's book makes an excellent contribution to the field of corrections serving as a substantial resource for those teaching corrections and as a practical inspiration for those students who will ultimately lead the profession. Stinchomb carefully crafts a balanced perspective that presents a powerful argument for why corrections is an important and necessary part of our criminal justice system while at the same time cautioning that justice can only be served when corrections is implemented with integrity and held to the highest of professional standards....This book will dare those who care about corrections to move beyond the ease of accepting the status quo to optimistically embracing the greater challenges of implementing a just and effective system of corrections." - Faith E. Lutze, Ph.D., Washington State University Written by a master teacher with over a decade of experience in federal, state, and local justice agencies, this is the most comprehensive, yet affordable, corrections text on the market. Students will like everything about it - from the reasonable cost to the user-friendly narrative that keeps them engaged. Chapters are written with the passion of a former correctional trainer and administrator, while balancing both sides of every issue. Based on proven concepts of instructional design, the narrative features: measurable learning outcomes that are placed strategically throughout the chapters material is presented in a "building-block" method designed to enhance learning "Close-up on Corrections" boxes reinforce content with real-life stories and examples. Realistic insights are provided into virtually every aspect of the "correctional conglomerate" - from the impact of sentencing policies to the effects of institutional life and the difficulties of re-entry. Unlike most other texts, an entire chapter is devoted to the correctional workforce - which gives students insights into the challenges as well as rewards of such employment. Best of all for the instructor, the book's flexibility and supplemental material make it a breeze to use in the classroom. Electronic versions are available for online and hybrid courses, and it is customizable in inexpensive paperback form. The instructor's manual, written entirely by the Author of the text itself, includes over 500 high-quality test questions directly correlated with each learning outcome featured in the text, along with annotated websites, teaching tips, and powerpoint slides.

According to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) 'Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.' Connecting the politics of abolition to wider emancipatory struggles for liberation and social justice, this book argues that penal abolitionism should be understood as an important public critical pedagogy and philosophy of hope that can help to reinvigorate democracy and set society on a pathway towards living in a world without prisons. For Abolition draws upon the socialist ethics of dignity, empathy, freedom and paradigm of life to systematically critique imprisonment as a state institution characterised by 'social death'.

Considering the question of how levels of security allow state power to be increased to the point at which it infringes essential civil liberties, this book explores the creeping power of the executive and the unfeasibility of widespread use of the Human Rights Act as a bulwark against the oppressive use of state power.

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society's commitment to mass incarceration. The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.

Bringing together new research, this book advances current theoretical understandings of punishment and control in society. It provides a critical analysis of institutions, punishment and the law, and explores the delivery of punishment and experience of incarceration in Western societies from the early-nineteenth century.

The book offers an incisive collection of contemporary research into the problems of crime control and punishment. It has three inter-related aims: to take stock of current thinking on punishment, regulation, and control in the early years of a new century and in the wake of a number of critical junctures, including 9/11, which have transformed the social, political, and cultural environment; to present a selection of the diverse epistemological and methodological frameworks which inform current research; and finally to set out some fruitful directions for the future study of punishment. The contributions to this collection cover some of the most exciting and challenging areas of current research including terrorism and the politics of fear, penality in societies in transition, penal policy and the construction of political identity, the impact of digital culture on modes of compliance, the emergent hegemony of information and surveillance systems, and the evolving politics of victimhood.

In 1989, Texas executed Carlos DeLuna, a poor Hispanic man with childlike intelligence, for the murder of Wanda Lopez, a convenience store clerk. His execution passed unnoticed for years until a team of Columbia Law School faculty and students almost accidentally chose to investigate his case and found that DeLuna almost certainly was innocent. They discovered that no one had cared enough about either the defendant or the victim to make sure the real perpetrator was found. Everything that could go wrong in a criminal case did. This book documents DeLuna's conviction, which was based on a single, nighttime, cross-ethnic eyewitness identification with no corroborating forensic evidence. At his trial, DeLuna's defense, that another man named Carlos had committed the crime, was not taken seriously. The lead prosecutor told the jury that the other Carlos, Carlos Hernandez, was a "phantom" of DeLuna's imagination. In upholding the death penalty on appeal, both the state and federal courts concluded the same thing: Carlos Hernandez did not exist. The evidence the Columbia team uncovered reveals that Hernandez not only existed but was well known to the police and prosecutors. He had a long history of violent crimes similar to the one for which DeLuna was executed. Families of both Carloses mistook photos of each for the other, and Hernandez's violence continued after DeLuna was put to death. This book and its website (thewrongcarlos.net) reproduce law-enforcement, crime lab, lawyer, court, social service, media, and witness records, as well as court transcripts, photographs, radio traffic, and audio and videotaped interviews, documenting one of the most comprehensive investigations into a criminal case in U.S. history. The result is eye-opening yet may not be unusual. Faulty eyewitness testimony, shoddy legal representation, and prosecutorial misfeasance continue to put innocent people at risk of execution. The principal investigators conclude with novel suggestions for improving accuracy among the police, prosecutors, forensic scientists, and judges.

This groundbreaking study examines patterns of offending among persistent juvenile offenders. The authors address questions that have been the focus of criminological debate over the last two decades. Are there are multiple groups of offenders in the population with distinct age-crime patterns? Are between-person differences in criminal offending patterns stable throughout the offender's life? Is there a relationship between offending at one time and at a subsequent time of life, after time-stable differences in criminal propensity are controlled? Ezell and Cohen address these issues by examining three large, separately drawn samples of serious youthful offenders from California. Each sample was tracked over a long time-period, and sophisticated statistical models were used to test eight empirical hypotheses drawn from three major theories of crime: population heterogeneity, state dependence, and dual taxonomy. Each of these three perspectives offers different predictions about the relationship between age and crime, and the possibility of crime desistance over the life of serious chronic offenders. Despite the serious chronic criminality among the sample offenders, by the time they reached their mid- to late twenties and continuing into their thirties, each of the six latent classes of offender identified by the study had begun to demonstrate a declining number of arrests. This finding has profound implications for penal policies that impose life sentences on multiple offenders, such as the Californian 'three strikes and you're out' which incarcerates inmates for 25 years to life with their 'third strike' conviction, at precisely the point when they have begun to grow out of serious crime.

The growth of Islam in Europe is reflected in the increasing numbers of Muslims in British and French prisons, but authorities have responded differently to the challenges presented by Muslim prisoners in each country. The findings of three years of intensive research in a variety of prisons show that British prisons facilitate and control the practice d of Islam, whereas French prisons discourage it and thereby sow the seeds of extremism. The policy implications of these ironic findings are examined in detail.

"Although the topics dealt with are complex, the author has been very successful in presenting and exploring them clearly. Students may find particularly helpful the summary at the end of each chapter of the main points covered in that section. The Legal Executive"...the real strength of this book lies in the critical thinking that arises from the juxtaposition of two very much unfinished debates: the question of how victims are treated by the justice system, and the practices and implications of restorative justice. "...I feel this book is particularly important because it reframes a whole series of debates and practices which, otherwise, might be in danger of getting 'stuck'. That this is also undertaken by someone who is extremely knowledgeable about the subject matter and perceptive in relation to key issues is an added bonus." VistaTwo of the principal and most influential developments within criminal justice policy - taking in a variety of common law jurisdictions during the past thirty years - have been the rise of the 'victim movement' and the emergence of a distinctive set of practices that have become associated with the term 'restorative justice'. Understanding Victims and Restorative Justice examines the origins of and the relationship between these two sets of developments, and seeks to assess their strengths and weaknesses in meeting the needs of victims as part of the overall response to crime. Written in a lively and accessible style this book is of benefit to students from a range of disciplines including criminology, sociology and the law. Also helpful to professionals, practitioners and policymakers working in voluntary agencies within the criminal justice system.

In reviving the idea of an informal approach to conflict resolution, the Restorative Justice movement attempts to break out of the freedom punitive thinking which shapes modern criminal justice. Its proponents claim that its guiding ideals - personalism, participation, and reintegration - deliver a fairer, more effective, and more humane justice than does the court system. However, a simplistic tendency both to extol the virtues of restorative justice and to denigrate all formal approaches risks blinding enthusiasts to the dangers inherent in unchecked participant power , as well as to the protection which State institutions and professionals can provide to individuals and communities. The procedural safeguard of institutional accountability helps reduce these dangers. Examining the experiences of 25 programmes in six countries, Accountability in Restorative Justice uncovers a number of neglected, overlapping, and incomplete types of accountability, including the informal type built into deliberations between victims and offenders and their supporters. This deliberative accountability can provide a rigorous check for regulating decision-making, holding state agencies accountable, and monitoring the completion of agreements reached between participants. This book also considers the role played by formal types of accountability, such as external review. It suggests a new approach, in which judges become more involved in monitoring the quality of deliberation in restorative justice conferences than with enforcing traditional sentencing principles.

This book addresses the role of victims in our criminal justice system and the shortcomings they perceive in the way they are treated. It examines whether restorative justice can offer them more justice than they receive from the formal court-based system. Research into the shortcomings of the court-based system has identified a number of issues that victims want to address. In brief, they want a less formal process where their views count, more information about both the processing and the outcome of their case, a greater opportunity for participation in the way their case is dealt with, fairer and more respectful treatment, and emotional as well as material restoration as an outcome. Over the past three decades, the victim movement worldwide has agitated for an enhanced role for victims in criminal justice. Despite some successes, it appears that structural as well as political factors may mean that victims have won as much as they are likely to gain from formal justice. A series of randomized controlled trials in Canberra, known as the Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE), has provided an opportunity to compare rigorously the impact on victims of court-based justice with a restorative justice program known as conferencing. In these experiments, middle-range property and violent offences committed by young offenders were assigned either to court (as they would normally have been treated) or to a conference. Empirical evidence from RISE examined in this book suggests that the restorative alternative of conferencing more often than court has the capacity to give victims what they say they want in achieving meaningful victim participation and restoration, especially emotional restoration.

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.

This book is the definitive analysis of the politics and impact of "get tough" criminal sentencing legislation. Zimring, Hawkins, and Kamin examine the origins of the law in California, compare it to other crackdown laws, and analyse large samples of offenders arrested in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco in the year before and the two years after the law went into effect. The study presents compelling evidence that the new regime has been enormously over-rated as a crime prevention measure.

Crime and Employment crystallizes the issue of work as a rehabilitative instrument in the modern correctional environment. It explores the effect of employment on crime and recidivism, with its implications for correctional programs and operations as well as for ex-offender reintegration into the community. The professionals contributing to this volume evaluate the effectiveness of employment in enabling offenders to desist from crime; the roles of prison versus community correctional services; the success of work programs for older versus younger offenders; the effect of industrial employment on reducing prison misconduct and post-release recidivism; the relevance of prior employment, substance abuse histories, poverty, and family contexts on subsequent inmate work programs; and the availability of quality employment, lawful lifestyles, and community vocational programs in sustaining economic rehabilitation of offenders. This book will be of great value to practitioners and policymakers alike in the areas of corrections, criminal justice, criminology, social problems, labor policy, social welfare, deviance and social control.

This edition includes a translator's preface, note on the text, and suggestions for further reading.

"This book is an important, systematic account of punishment and prisons in Japan from the Tokugawa period through the nineteenth century. Botsman shows quite well the ways that punishment has transformed over almost three centuries, and connects this to political power. The richness of detail--images of beheadings with a saw, severed heads, crucified bodies, crowded jails, and Benthamlike prisons--will no doubt stay with readers."--Stefan Tanaka, University of California, San Diego, author of "New Times in Modern Japan"

"I enjoyed reading this book, and learned a lot from it. Botsman avoids both the trap of attributing the rise of a modern penal complex in Japan to some authoritarian essence from time immemorial and the folly of placing all the causative weight on Western imperialism and Western ideas of crime and punishment. Further, he offers an explanation for the methods of colonization that Japanese colonialism adopted when it expanded into Asia. His clearly written work adds the significant experience of Japan to the literature on the emergence of modern systems of punishment and contributes to the comparative understanding of non-Western modernities."--Gyan Prakash, Princeton University, author of "Another Reason"

"A scholarly tour de force. This book is a unique contribution to a field of historical study that has, in the past, been marked either by a concern for central political institutions or intellectual history. Until now, there has been no serious work on Tokugawa and Meiji penal practices. But Botsman, by weaving the discursive strands of thinking about punishment into the fabric of institutional practice, has managed to give us an exemplary cultural history thatexceeds both its temporal and spatial location."--Harry Harootunian, New York University, author of "Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture," and "Community in Interwar Japan"