Inside Criminal Justice: Thinking about Police, Courts, and Corrections provides students with a comprehensive and critical exploration of the U.S. criminal justice system. Opening chapters introduce criminal justice as a system, a career, and an academic discipline; identify the main types of crimes in American jurisprudence; define crime; and explain how the criminalization process works. Additional chapters describe approaches to justice in American society, criminal injustice, the complexities and realities of police work, and police reform. Students learn about democratic policing, police powers and the rights of citizens, federal and state courts, the roles of prosecutors and judges in the courtroom, defendants' rights, and the practices of criminal defense attorneys. Sentencing, mass incarceration, institutional corrections, community corrections, the death penalty, and juvenile justice are covered. Learning outcomes, chapter summaries, discussion questions, key terms, and references enrich the student reading and learning experience. Inside Criminal Justice is designed for introductory courses in criminal justice.

The paths of a secret paramour, a jilted lover and a reluctant hangman cross in one fateful winter week in Galway, 1885 James Berry was the notorious hangman who ended the lives of over 100 criminals in Victorian Britain and Ireland. Tortured by nightmares as he tried to come to terms with the toll his gruesome work took on him, he played a central role in some of the crimes of the century, including the hanging of William Bury, the man suspected of being Jack the Ripper. The Hangman Who Came to Galway focuses on a winter week in Irish history where Berry was tasked with bringing to a conclusion the case of two notorious murders in Galway, keeping readers transfixed as they journey with this fascinating character through nineteenth-century Ireland in all its gruesome glory.

To many, asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in psychiatric hospitals, and many mental health facilities closed down. Yet, as Anne Parsons reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the modern prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance. Focusing on Pennsylvania, the state that ran one of the largest mental health systems in the country, Parsons tracks how the lack of community-based services, a fear-based politics around mental illness, and the economics of institutions meant that closing mental hospitals fed a cycle of incarceration that became an epidemic. This groundbreaking book recasts the political narrative of the late twentieth century, as Parsons charts how the politics of mass incarceration shaped the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals and mental health policy making. In doing so, she offers critical insight into how the prison took the place of the asylum in crucial ways, shaping the rise of the prison industrial complex.

In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Robert T. Chase narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as "slaves of the state" and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.

The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political culture among dissidents since the 1970s-a culture that laid the foundation for the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The emergence of prison literature as a specific genre helped articulate opposition to authoritarian states, including the Assad regime. However, the significance of Syrian prison literature goes beyond a form of witnessing, expressing creative opposition, and illuminating the larger cultural and historical backstory of the Syrian uprising. Prison literature, in all its diversity, challenges the narrative structures and conventional language of human rights. In doing so, prison literature has played an essential role in generating the "experimental shift" in Arabic literature since the 1960s. Taleghani's groundbreaking work explores prison writing's critical role in resistance movements in Syria, the evolution of Arabic literature, and the development of a global human rights.

Many organizations are engaged in a race to prevent the execution by lethal injection of death sentenced prisoners in Texas (and elsewhere in the USA). Some of these men and women claim to be completely innocent, as described in this book. Texas is the most punitive place within one of the harshest penal systems in the world. Michael O'Brien - who was himself wrongly convicted of murder - dissects a selection of Death Row cases with the eye of a man who has spent years watching how miscarriages of justice happen and why. He explains how practitioners, politicians and others are in denial and how livelihoods depend on a conveyer belt from the courts to the execution chamber. Aided by bias, discrimination and prejudice he describes a killing process triggered by unfair trials, supposed expert evidence and closed minds. This is just one hallmark of a country obsessed with guns, violence and the ultimate penalty. No legal system should take away human lives, especially one tarnished by defects of the kind the author sets out in this book. Extract: 'Can you just imagine being an individual who is innocent but facing execution, whether in Texas or elsewhere? Or you were on Death Row but you did not take part in any killings, just got caught up in the hysteria? Can you picture the pressure and abject loneliness of serving 15 years or more, and then the State setting a date to kill you?'

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.

Current Issues in Corrections explores a variety of the most timely and salient challenges facing the correctional system. The text is comprised of chapters written by experts in the field who have experience as both academic and criminal justice practitioners.The book begins with an exploration of issues in private corrections and then moves forward to discuss the history of the field, legal issues, jails, diversion programs, community corrections, institutional corrections, correctional career concerns, and the interaction of the system with women, people of color, and juveniles. The text concludes by considering the future of capital punishment in America and examining the field of corrections from a human rights perspective. Each chapter includes pre-reading and post-reading questions to stimulate reflection and critical thinking. Featuring a unique balance of theory and practice, Current Issues in Corrections is an exemplary textbook for courses in criminal justice and corrections.

Trapped in a Vice explores the consequences of a juvenile justice system that is aimed at promoting change in the lives of young people, yet ultimately relies upon tools and strategies that enmesh them in a system that they struggle to move beyond. The system, rather than the crimes themselves, is the vice. Trapped in a Vice explores the lives of the young people and adults in the criminal justice system, revealing the ways that they struggle to manage the expectations of that system; these stories from the ground level of the justice system demonstrate the complex exchange of policy and practice.