Germany today has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the industrialized world, and social welfare principles play an essential role at all levels of the German criminal justice system. Warren Rosenblum examines the roots of this social approach to criminal policy in the reform movements of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, when reformers strove to replace state institutions of control and incarceration with private institutions of protective supervision. Reformers believed that private charities and volunteers could diagnose and treat social pathologies in a way that coercive state institutions could not. The expansion of welfare for criminals set the stage for a more economical system of punishment, Rosenblum argues, but it also opened the door to new, more expansive controls over individuals marked as ""asocial."" With the reformers' success, the issue of who had power over welfare became increasingly controversial and dangerous. Other historians have suggested that the triumph of eugenics in the 1890s was predicated upon the abandonment of liberal and Christian assumptions about human malleability. Rosenblum demonstrates, however, that the turn to ""criminal biology"" was not a reaction against social reform, but rather an effort to rescue its legitimacy.

Prisoners of Conscience continues the work begun by Gerard A. Hauser in Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, winner of the National Communication Association's Hochmuth Nichols Award. In his new book, Hauser examines the discourse of political prisoners, specifically the discourse of prisoners of conscience, as a form of rhetoric in which the vernacular is the main source of available appeals and the foundation for political agency. Hauser explores how modes of resistance employed by these prisoners constitute what he deems a ""thick moral vernacular"" rhetoric of human rights. Hauser's work considers in part how these prisoners convert universal commitments to human dignity, agency, and voice into the moral vernacular of the society and culture to which their rhetoric is addressed. Hauser grounds his study through a series of case studies, each centred on a different rhetorical mechanism brought to bear in the act of resistance. Through a transnational rhetorical analysis of resistance within political prisons, Hauser brings to bear his skills as a rhetorical theorist and critic to illuminate the rhetorical power of resistance as tied to core questions in contemporary humanistic scholarship and public concern. 2013 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award

This book is for penitential professional criminals whose involvement in the criminal/carceral world is of long duration and commitment. Professional criminals commit crimes for money and live by the ancient criminal way that precludes betrayal of partners or hurting women and children. To professional criminals, crime is their profession and way of life. To those professional criminals who are very good-and lucky-at what they do and never get caught, my work will have little value. It is for those professional criminals who do get caught and serve time in prison, comprising approximately 70 - 80% of the prison population; and who, at some point, may enter a penitential state.

Winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Over 2% of U.S.children under the age of 18--more than 1,700,000 children--have a parent in prison. These children experience very real disadvantages when compared to their peers: they tend to experience lower levels of educational success, social exclusion, and even a higher likelihood of their own future incarceration. Meanwhile, their new caregivers have to adjust to their new responsibilities as their lives change overnight, and the incarcerated parents are cut off from their children's development. Parental Incarceration and the Family brings a family perspective to our understanding of what it means to have so many of our nation's parents in prison. Drawing from the field's most recent research and the author's own fieldwork, Joyce Arditti offers an in-depth look at how incarceration affects entire families: offender parents, children, and care-givers. Through the use of exemplars, anecdotes, and reflections, Joyce Arditti puts a human face on the mass of humanity behind bars, as well as those family members who are affected by a parent's imprisonment. In focusing on offenders as parents, a radically different social policy agenda emerges--one that calls for real reform and that responds to the collective vulnerabilities of the incarcerated and their kin.

"What a long, extraordinary process digging into the deepest secrets of the Gulag has been. Now, here is its history, fully, factually, and humanly effected for the present day by Oleg Khlevniuk."- Robert Conquest, from the forward The human cost of the Gulag, the Soviet labor camp system in which millions of people were imprisoned between 1920 and 1956, was staggering. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and others after him have written movingly about the Gulag, yet never has there been a thorough historical study of this unique and tragic episode in Soviet history. This groundbreaking book presents the first comprehensive, historically accurate account of the camp system. Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk has mined the contents of extensive archives, including long-suppressed state and Communist Party documents, to uncover the secrets of the Gulag and how it became a central component of Soviet ideology and social policy. Khlevniuk argues persuasively that the Stalinist penal camps created in the 1930s were essentially different from previous camps. He shows that political motivations and paranoia about potential enemies contributed no more to the expansion of the Gulag than the economic incentive of slave labor did. And he offers powerful evidence that the Great Terror was planned centrally and targeted against particular categories of the population. Khlevniuk makes a signal contribution to Soviet history with this exceptionally informed and balanced view of the Gulag.

The pieces in this collection range from an account of the Skeleton Army riots against the Salvation Army in the early 1880s to the unsuccessful campaign to abolish the death penalty in the aftermath of the Second World War.

A laid back and from the heart description of how a young man who was destined to go nowhere (according to his high school counselor) was educated and employed in law enforcement.

" Given the choice, instead of a slow, scheduled death, we ask the government of France, the voice of human rights and liberties, to instantly re-establish the real death penalty for all of us ."
- This petition, dated 16 January 2006, was signed by ten prisoners serving long sentences at Clairvaux
Description

"Bastille Nation" tells the story of an attempt to reform the French prison system, resulting in the passing of a penitentiary law at the end of 2009. This law had been ten years in the making, and was presented as the culmination of the modernization and humanization of the French prison system. The law was challenged by political parties, unions, associations and human rights groups. Yet, despite this opposition, the prison administration went about recovering its position of expertise in the face of this vocal criticism. Unresolved points of conflict still exist and continue to shift. The persistence of activist groups, official authorities and opposition parties has allowed prisoners to continue to challenge the system. By contributing to the study of the various means by which prisoners make demands and subjectify themselves, this book also recounts the history of prisons on the "outside" as well as on the "inside, " casting light on both the juxtaposition of voices and their unequal power relationship.

Endorsements

..".What is striking, and what Berard and Chantraine bring out with admirable clarity and passion is the insistence by prisoners on their dignity and that they be treated as human beings and as citizens of the Republic."
- James Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science, Yale University and author of "The Art of Not Being Governed."
..".an emancipatory text which breaks down the prison walls and gives voice to the incarcerated, presenting them as political subjects rather than as offenders or criminals."
- Emma Bell, Senior Lecturer, Universite de Savoie, and author of "Criminal Justice and Neoliberalism."

A bold and provocative interpretation of one of the most religiously vibrant places in America--a state penitentiary
Baraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid--four black men from South Philadelphia, two Christian and two Muslim--are serving life sentences at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in Graterford's chapel, a place that is at once a sanctuary for religious contemplation and an arena for disputing the workings of God and man. Day in, day out, everything is, in its twisted way, rather ordinary. And then one of them disappears.
"Down in the Chapel "tells the story of one week at Graterford Prison. We learn how the men at Graterford pass their time, care for themselves, and commune with their makers. We observe a variety of Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and others, at prayer and in study and song. And we listen in as an interloping scholar of religion tries to make sense of it all.
When prisoners turn to God, they are often scorned as con artists who fake their piety, or pitied as wretches who cling to faith because faith is all they have left. Joshua Dubler goes beyond these stereotypes to show the religious life of a prison in all its complexity. One part prison procedural, one part philosophical investigation, "Down in the Chapel "explores the many uses prisoners make of their religions and weighs the circumstances that make these uses possible. Gritty and visceral, meditative and searching, it is an essential study of American religion in the age of mass incarceration.

Neoslavery, Injustice, Genocide, Racism, and Hate live in the bosom chest of the people behind the prison industry complex here in antediluvian times. Wrong turn, Georgia Particularly the police, legislators, judges, district attorneys, prosecutors, prison officials, pardon and paroles board officials, the Governor, and most so-called defense attorneys, just to name a few And the people that they are endeavoring to extirpate and remove from the planet altogether is the BLACK MAN I am apperception that to some the aforementioned may sound bizarre and unconventional. But it's the unadulterated truth. We must remember that Georgia assiduously fought to maintain CHATTEL-SLAVERY And they were the last to enter into the UNION And they boldly stressed that the South will rise again. And it has. I maintain that the Federal Government has entered into a Klandestine-Konspiracy with Georgia's pernicious and flagitious officials, which is to allow the officials to execute their Neoslavery via their prison industry complex. I submit to you that you will visit in this book in Technicolor vivid accounts of Assault, Murder, Cover-Ups, Sex Scandals, Racketeering, Discrimination, and other egregious injustices by the aforementioned officials Which is carried out against convicts and inmates. And you can believe the beforehand or not, but the pardons and paroles board officials operate with impunity and diplomatic immunity And they have more POWER than the President of the United States The BLACK MAN is the majority in any prison or jail in the United States. And that's both federal and state. Moreover, the aforementioned is not an accident It is the wholly quintessence of a proficient Klandestine Konspiracy to eradicate the BLACK MAN It is also called a Sophisticated-Genocide-Plan And let it be overstood that to destroy the Black Man is also the demise of the BLACK WOMAN Because the Black Woman cannot exist without the Black Man Paul J. Austin

The setting is the United States of America, land of the free, yet the world's leading jailer. The U.S. prison population has reached an explosion point. Attorney and author Jack W. Cline reveals the issues involved in his powerful memoir Yardbird USA: How the United States Became the World's Leading Jailer (Musings of a Trial Lawyer). The book contains a dozen true crime cases with bizarre, humorous and unjust outcomes, but all point to a single conclusion: Politicians have made a mess of the criminal justice system, and have created a monster in the U.S. prison population. As a result of the prison population explosion of the past two decades, Americans now have more people behind bars than Russia and China combined! The cost and side effects of this fetish for incarceration is staggering. How did this happen and what can be done to stop the bleeding? Jack W. Cline is a practicing trial lawyer in western Pennsylvania. "I am very disturbed at our prison population growth, the criminal justice system being hijacked by the legislative branch, and the erosion of our liberties. The government is so far up in our business right now it is amazing that anyone can still walk." http://sbpra.com/JackWCline

Presents data from the 2008-09 National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC), conducted in 195 juvenile confinement facilities between June 2008 and April 2009, with a sample of over 9,000 adjudicated youth. The report provides national-level and facility-level estimates of sexual victimization by type of activity, including youth-on-youth sexual contact, staff sexual misconduct, and level of coercion. It also includes an analysis of the experience of sexual victimization, characteristics of youth most at risk to victimization, where the incidents occur, time of day, characteristics of perpetrators, and nature of the injuries. Finally, it includes estimates of the sampling error for selected measures of sexual victimization and summary characteristics of victims and incidents. The report and appendix tables provide a listing of results for sampled state and large locally or privately operated facilities, as required under the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-79). Facilities are listed alphabetically by state with estimated prevalence rates of sexual victimization as reported by youths during a personal interview and based on activity in the 12 months prior to the interview or since admission to the facility, if shorter. Highlights include the following: This report presents findings from the first National Survey of Youth in Custody (NSYC), representing 26,550 adjudicated youth held nationwide in state operated and large locally or privately operated juvenile facilities. Overall, 91% of youth in these facilities were male; 9% were female. About 12% of youth in state juvenile facilities and large non-state facilities (representing 3,220 youth nationwide) reported experiencing one or more incidents of sexual victimization by another youth or facility staff in the past 12 months or since admission, if less than 12 months. About 2.6% of youth (700 nationwide) reported an incident involving another youth and 10.3% reported an incident involving staff.

Thomas Mott Osborne's account of his voluntary stay in Auburn State prison. Osborne, the head of a state commission on "the prison problem," checked into Auburn to personally experience conditions there. It is really engaging and heartfelt, as well as highly political. Osborne encountered tremendous institutional and political resistance to his reform efforts and you get a real sense of that in this book ... In a review of a biography of Osborne the New York Times had this to say: Thomas Mott Osborne presents the phenomenon, not rare among men of genius and high talent, where the work of the man surpasses the individual. To no one person is the modem world of prison reform and the whole broad subject of penology so much in debt as to him. Yet in his own eyes he felt, near the end of his days, that he had lived an ineffectual life. With the shortsightedness of disappointment and despair he could not realize that within ten years of his death biographers would be preoccupied with the ideal of evaluating him as one of the major figures in American reform . . .

ADVANCE READER COPY: The bold account of launching an innovative creative writing class inside San Quentin and the journey of hardship, inspiration, and redemption of its members, from New York Times bestselling twin authors. San Quentin State Prison would be an unlikely place to look for writing talent. But Keith and Kent Zimmerman, twin brothers and New York Times bestselling coauthors of Operation Family Secrets, have found creative passion, a range of gritty, authentic voices, and a path to hope and redemption behind the guarded walls of the H-Unit at San Quentin-through a creative writing course they founded almost a decade ago. H-Unit: A Story of Writing and Redemption Behind the Walls of San Quentin is the dramatic account of hope and purpose that recounts Keith and Kent's experience teaching the class and their students' experience in the Literary Throwdown writing competition. Seen from the inside, H-Unit is written in an authentic voice and tells the story of real-life characters, from the recidivous "Big Bob" to the incorrigible "Midget Porn," whose lives are transformed by the written word.

Prison-reformation has been a controversial and politically charged issue in Kenya. In the past it has elicited such legendary and emotional responses as 'What reforms? Prisons are not supposed to be five star hotels ' Recently, however, there has been a greater consensus between the public sector and the civic society in Kenya - than has ever in the past - of the need to revisit the human rights of inmates in various Kenyan prisons. Since 2003 a number of ground breaking reforms have been introduced in Kenyan prisons and more reforms seem to be on the way. Jacqueline Korir in this book takes a serious and dispassionate look into a single variable: the quality of catering in Kenyan prisons. Her findings were both shocking and challenging. The food was lacking in both nutritive value as well aesthetic appeal. The site of food samples was only reminiscent of a grotesque meaning of the famous Council in Church History - The Diet of Worms This book, grounded, in empirical data analysis by hard statistics and backed by rare photographs from inside Kenyan prisons serves as an eye-opener to both the prison-reformists as well as students and teachers of African sociology and institutional catering all over the world.

One of the most comprehensive examinations of US torture policy, from the Cold War to the War on Terror to the debate over accountability Waterboarding. Sleep deprivation. Sensory manipulation. Stress positions. Over the last several years, these and other methods of torture have become garden variety words for practically anyone who reads about current events in a newspaper or blog. We know exactly what they are, how to administer them, and, disturbingly, that they were secretly authorized by the Bush Administration in its efforts to extract information from people detained in its war on terror. What we lack, however, is a larger lens through which to view America's policy of torture-one that dissects America's long relationship with interrogation and torture, which roots back to the 1950s and has been applied, mostly in secret, to "enemies," ever since. How did America come to embrace this practice so fully, and how was it justified from a moral, legal, and psychological perspective? The United States and Torture opens with a compelling preface by Sister Dianna Ortiz, who describes the unimaginable treatment she endured in Guatemala in 1987 at the hands of the the Guatemalan government, which was supported by the United States. Then a psychologist, a historian, a political scientist, a philosopher, a sociologist, two journalists, and eight lawyers offer one of the most comprehensive examinations of torture to date, beginning with the CIA during the Cold War era and ending with today's debate over accountability for torture. Ultimately, this gripping, interdisciplinary work details the complicity of the United States government in the torture and cruel treatment of prisoners both at home and abroad and discusses what can be done to hold those who set the torture policy accountable. Contributors: Marjorie Cohn, Richard Falk, Marc D. Falkoff, Terry Lynn Karl, John W. Lango, Jane Mayer, Alfred W. McCoy, Jeanne Mirer, Sister Dianna Ortiz, Jordan J. Paust, Bill Quigley, Michael Ratner, Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, Philippe Sands, Stephen Soldz, and Lance Tapley.

In this volume, the author sets aside the usual division between theories of punishment that do or do not focus on retribution. In its place he proposes and explores the distinction between internalist and externalist theories.

On October 26, 2004, Dominique Green, thirty, was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas. Arrested at the age of eighteen in the fatal shooting of a man during a robbery outside a Houston convenience store, Green may have taken part in the robbery but always insisted that he did not pull the trigger. The jury, which had no African Americans on it, sentenced him to death. Despite obvious errors in the legal procedures and the protests of the victim's family, he spent the last twelve years of his life on Death Row.
When Cahill found himself in Texas in December 2003, he visited Dominique at the request of Judge Sheila Murphy, who was working on the appeal of the case. In Dominique, he encountered a level of goodness, peace, and enlightenment that few human beings ever attain. Cahill joined the fierce fight for Dominique's life, even enlisting Dominique's hero, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to make an historic visit to Dominique and to plead publicly for mercy. Cahill was so profoundly moved by Dominique's extraordinary life that he was compelled to tell the tragic story of his unjust death at the hands of the state.
"A Saint on Death Row" will introduce you to a young man whose history, innate goodness, and final days you will never forget. It also shines a necessary light on America's racist and deeply flawed legal system. "A Saint on Death Row" is an absorbing, sobering, and deeply spiritual story that illuminates the moral imperatives too often ignored in the headlong quest for justice.

The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person's life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country. Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, dramatic changes have taken place in the ways capital punishment has been administered and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the penalty was standard for a laundry list of crimes-from adultery to murder, from arson to stealing horses. Hangings were public events, staged before audiences numbering in the thousands, attended by women and men, young and old, black and white alike. Early on, the gruesome spectacle had explicitly religious purposes-an event replete with sermons, confessions, and last-minute penitence-to promote the salvation of both the condemned and the crowd. Through the nineteenth century, the execution became desacralized, increasingly secular and private, in response to changing mores. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, ironically, as it has become a quiet, sanitary, technological procedure, the death penalty is as divisive as ever. By recreating what it was like to be the condemned, the executioner, and the spectator, Banner moves beyond the debates, to give us an unprecedented understanding of capital punishment's many meanings. As nearly four thousand inmates are now on death row, and almost one hundred are currently being executed each year, the furious debate is unlikely to diminish. The Death Penalty is invaluable in understanding the American way of the ultimate punishment.

For 25 years, the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) has been a prisoner written, academically oriented and peer reviewed, non-profit journal, based on the tradition of the penal press. It brings the knowledge produced by prison writers together with academic arguments to enlighten public discourse about the current state of carceral institutions.

How did a nation so famously associated with freedom become internationally identified with imprisonment? After the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and in the midst of a dramatically escalating prison population, the question is particularly urgent. In this timely, provocative study, Caleb Smith argues that the dehumanization inherent in captivity has always been at the heart of American civil society.

Exploring legal, political, and literary texts--including the works of Dickinson, Melville, and Emerson--Smith shows how alienation and self-reliance, social death and spiritual rebirth, torture and penitence came together in the prison, a scene for the portrayal of both gothic nightmares and romantic dreams. Demonstrating how the "cellular soul" has endured since the antebellum age, "The Prison and the American Imagination" offers a passionate and haunting critique of the very idea of solitude in American life.