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.

Now in its Sixth Edition, this book remains the most comprehensive and authoritative on the penal system, providing students with an incisive, critical account of the punitive, managerial and humanitarian approaches to criminal justice. Fully updated to cover the most recent changes in the Criminal Justice System, the new edition: Outlines contemporary policy debates on sentencing, staffing, youth custody and overcrowding. Explores growing inequalities in the criminal justice system including issues of race, religion, gender and sexuality, with new content on faith, and transgender prisoners. Considers the impact of privatisation on the probation service. Discusses the most recent debates around the parole process, including high-profile cases and attempts at reform. The book is supported by online resources for lecturers and students, including chapter PowerPoints, sample syllabus, summaries of key legislative acts, bills and official reports, a list of recommended further reading for each chapter, and links to important Penal Agencies and Organisations, Law Reform Organisations, and other useful academic sites. Essential reading for students of criminal justice and criminology, studying penology, punishments and the penal system.

The 'punitive turn' has brought about new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Carceral geography offers a geographical perspective on incarceration, and this volume accordingly tracks the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant subdiscipline, and scopes out future research directions. By conveying a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, it traces the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. Synthesizing existing work in carceral geography, and exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the 'carceral' as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.

Restorative justice is an innovative approach to addressing conflict and bullying, as well as disruptive, challenging and criminal behaviour. A restorative approach in a care setting shifts the emphasis from managing and responding to anti-social behaviour to the building, nurturing and repairing of relationships, and encourages the young person to accept responsibility and put things right. In this photocopiable resource, Belinda Hopkins identifies the practical benefits of employing the restorative approach. In extreme cases, this can mean dealing with serious incidents effectively without recourse to the police and the criminal justice system. For day-to-day interactions the approach builds on the principles of social pedagogy and 'restorative parenting', and offers a fresh look at encouraging self-regulation through the promotion of pro-social behaviour and greater involvement of the young people themselves in making choices that address everyone's needs. Just Care is essential reading for residential care managers and staff, social workers, youth offending team managers and those with responsibility for foster care training and development.

One of Buzzfeed's 25 New And Upcoming Books You Won't Be Able To Put Down and one of LitHub's Best New Nonfiction to Read This November The Uninnocent is so elegantly crafted that the pleasure of reading it nearly overrides its devastating subject matter . . . a story of radical empathy, a triumph of care and forgiveness. --Stephanie Danler, author of Stray and Sweetbitter A harrowing intellectual reckoning with crime, mercy, justice and heartbreak through the lens of a murder On a Thursday morning in June 2010, Katharine Blake's sixteen-year-old cousin walked to a nearby bike path with a boxcutter, and killed a young boy he didn't know. It was a psychological break that tore through his brain, and into the hearts of those who loved both boys--one brutally killed, the other sentenced to die at Angola, one of the country's most notorious prisons. In The Uninnocent, Blake, a law student at Stanford at the time of the crime, wrestles with the implications of her cousin's break, as well as the broken machinations of America's justice system. As her cousin languished in a cell on death row, where he was assigned for his own protection, Blake struggled to keep her faith in the system she was training to join. Consumed with understanding her family's new reality, Blake became obsessed with heartbreak, seeing it everywhere: in her cousin's isolation, in the loss at the center of the crime, in the students she taught at various prisons, in the way our justice system breaks rather than mends, in the history of her parents and their violent childhoods. As she delves into a history of heartbreak--through science, medicine, and literature--and chronicles the uneasy yet ultimately tender bond she forms with her cousin, Blake asks probing questions about justice, faith, inheritance, family, and, most of all, mercy. Sensitive, singular, and powerful, effortlessly bridging memoir, essay, and legalese, The Uninnocent is a reckoning with the unimaginable, unforgettable, and seemly irredeemable. With curiosity and vulnerability, Blake unravels a distressed tapestry, finding solace in both its tearing and its mending.

The problem of justifying legal punishment has been at the heart of legal and social philosophy from the very earliest recorded philosophical texts. However, despite several hundred years of debate, philosophers have not reached agreement about how legal punishment can be morally justified. That is the central issue addressed by the contributors to this volume. All of the essays collected here have been published in the highly respected journal "Philosophy & Public Affairs." Taken together, they offer not only significant proposals for improving established theories of punishment and compelling arguments against long-held positions, but also ori-ginal and important answers to the question, "How is punishment to be justified?"

Part I of this collection, "Justifications of Punishment," examines how any practice of punishment can be morally justified. Contributors include Jeffrie G. Murphy, Alan H. Goldman, Warren Quinn, C. S. Nino, and Jean Hampton. The papers in Part II, "Problems of Punishment," address more specific issues arising in established theories. The authors are Martha C. Nussbaum, Michael Davis, and A. John Simmons. In the final section, "Capital Punishment," contributors discuss the justifiability of capital punishment, one of the most debated philosophical topics of this century. Essayists include David A. Conway, Jeffrey H. Reiman, Stephen Nathanson, and Ernest van den Haag.

* emphasis on collaboration, co-creative innovation and organisational development. * discussion on academic/practitioner relations. * offers practical means of applying my discussion to real-world practice and research as well as means of boundary-crossing between academic and practitioners in the field. * offers a multinational, inter-sector, perspective on innovation, collaboration and learning in the penal system.

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?'

Punishment is a complex human institution. It has normative, political, social, psychological, and legal dimensions, and ways of thinking about each of them change over time. For this reader on punishment, Michael Tonry, a leading authority in the field, has composed a comprehensive collection of 28 essays ranging from classic and contemporary writings on normative theories by philosophers and penal theorists to writings on restorative justice, on how people think about punishment, and on social theories about the functions punishment performs in human societies. This volume includes an accessible, non-technical introduction on the development of punishment theory, as well as an introduction and annotated bibliography for each section. The readings cover foundational traditions of punishment theory such as consequentialism, retributivism, and functionalism, new approaches like restorative, communitarian, and therapeutic justice, as well as mixed approaches that attempt to link theory and policy. It follows the evolution and development of thinking about punishment spanning from writings by classical theorists such as Kant and Hegel to recent developments in the behavioral and medical sciences for thinking about punishment. The result is a collection of empirically-informed efforts to explain what punishment does that should spark contemplation and debate about why and how punishment is carried out.

Typical offender risk factors include a history of antisocial behavior, an antisocial personality, antisocial cognition, antisocial associates, family and/or marital problems, school or work problems, leisure or recreation problems, and substance abuse. Though there are roughly 66 risk assessment instruments that measure these factors, only 19 of them are in wide use. Of these tools, micro-level and personal factors are included on typical risk instruments while external or macro-level matters are not. Community Risk and Protective Factors for Probation and Parole Risk Assessment Tools: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential research publication that explores tools for predicting recidivism rates among incarcerated individuals. The study provides evidence for an alternative explanation for a still prevailing notion that recidivism is primarily a result of personal/internal failings (such as mental illness or cognitive impairment) versus external/societal ones. Featuring a wide range of topics such as affordable housing, policy reform, and adult education, this book is ideal for criminologists, sociologists, law enforcement, corrections officers, wardens, therapists, rehabilitation counselors, researchers, policymakers, criminal justice professionals, academicians, and students.

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.