A seafaring story with a twist--the incredible voyage of a shipload of "disorderly girls" and the men who transported them, fell for them, and sold them.
This riveting work of rediscovered history tells for the first time the plight of the female convicts aboard the Lady Julian, which set sail from England in 1789 and arrived in Australia's Botany Bay a year later. The women, most of them petty criminals, were destined for New South Wales to provide its hordes of lonely men with sexual favors as well as progeny. But the story of their voyage is even more incredible, and here it is expertly told by a historian with roots in the boat-building business and a true love of the sea.
Sian Rees delved into court documents and firsthand accounts to extract the stories of these women's experiences on board a ship that both held them prisoner and offered them refuge from their oppressive existence in London. At the heart of the story is the passionate relationship between Sarah Whitelam, a convict, and the ship's steward, John Nicol, whose personal journals provided much of the material for this book. Along the way, Rees brings the vibrant, bawdy world of London--and the sights, smells, and sounds of an eighteenth-century ship--vividly to life. In the tradition of Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, this is a winning combination of dramatic high seas adventure and untold history."

Anyone working in corrections has been trained to handle the basics of offender management. This training often fails to teach how to deal with offenders' mind games. The authors offer the basics of offender con games and ways to beat them at their own game. Chapters include: Winning the Game; The Psychology of Inmate Deception; Inmate Manipulation Based on a Sense of Entitlement; Inmate Manipulation Based on the Power Orientation; The Woman Offender: Gender Based Games; Games Women Offenders Play Based on Blaming or Mollification; Staff Moves in Managing Inmate Deception and Manipulation; Maintaining Player Readiness: Ten Commandments for Prison Staff; and Putting It All Together.

Evaluation by a retired warden of the Reprieve Unit in Galveston

On a misty September morning in rural Georgia, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian found himself cast in a role that he had never imagined for himself: an expert witness in the sentencing trial of a convicted kidnapper, rapist, and murderer. His brief testimony that day would ultimately lead him on a personal journey into the criminal justice system, to confront the actions and decisions of lawyers battling for and against the death penalty, convicts whose lives are at stake, and jurors forced to decide who shall live and who shall die.

In the late nineteenth century, prisoners in Alabama, the vast majority of them African Americans, were forced to work as coal miners under the most horrendous conditions imaginable. Black Prisoners and Their World draws on a variety of sources, including the reports and correspondence of prison inspectors and letters from prisoners and their families, to explore the history of the African American men and women whose labor made Alabama's prison system the most profitable in the nation.

To coal companies and the state of Alabama, black prisoners provided, respectively, sources of cheap labor and state revenue. By 1883, a significant percentage of the workforce in the Birmingham coal industry was made up of convicts. But to the families and communities from which the prisoners came, the convict lease was a living symbol of the dashed hopes of Reconstruction.

Indeed, the lease--the system under which the prisoners labored for the profit of the company and the state--demonstrated Alabama's reluctance to let go of slavery and its determination to pursue profitable prisons no matter what the human cost. Despite the efforts of prison officials, progressive reformers, and labor unions, the state refused to take prisoners out of the coal mines.

In the course of her narrative, Mary Ellen Curtin describes how some prisoners died while others endured unspeakable conditions and survived. Curtin argues that black prisoners used their mining skills to influence prison policy, demand better treatment, and become wage-earning coal miners upon their release.

Black Prisoners and Their World unearths new evidence about life under the most repressive institution in the New South. Curtin suggests disturbing parallels between the lease and today's burgeoning system of private incarceration.

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES - #1 "NEW YORK TIMES "BESTSELLER
With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187-424--one of the millions of people who disappear "down the rabbit hole" of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman's story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison--why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they're there.
Praise for "Orange Is the New Black"
"Fascinating . . . The true subject of this unforgettable book is female bonding and the ties that even bars can't unbind."--"People" (four stars)
"I loved this book. It's a story rich with humor, pathos, and redemption. What I did not expect from this memoir was the affection, compassion, and even reverence that Piper Kerman demonstrates for all the women she encountered while she was locked away in jail. I will never forget it."--Elizabeth Gilbert, author of "Eat, Pray, Love"
"This book is impossible to put down because Kerman] could be you. Or your best friend. Or your daughter."--"Los Angeles Times"
"Moving . . . transcends the memoir genre's usual self-centeredness to explore how human beings can always surprise you."--"USA Today"
"It's a compelling awakening, and a harrowing one--both for the reader and for Kerman."--Newsweek.com
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The 1930s was one of the most notorious eras in United States history when it came to career criminals roaring across the country in fast cars reining terror on the public and grabbing headlines in the process. The likes of Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and many more were robbing banks, committing murders and becoming legends in their own time. Over the Wall: The Men Behind the 1934 Death House Escape, chronicles one of the most daring prison escapes of the time and from one of the most notorious prisons. Never before revealed facts and eyewitness testimony - as well as newly uncovered, controversial photos - highlight the story of the men who dared to escape from the Death House at Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas.

This, Angela Devlin's classic text, was written at a time when there were few, if any, special arrangements for women in prison in England and Wales. It was a driving force in the creation of a dedicated female prison estate with its own director, regimes and regulations that took account of women's different needs. Until then, the media tended to focus mainly on high profile women prisoners like Myra Hindley and Rosemary West. Most women became 'invisible' as soon as they passed through the prison gates and were subsumed into a world that was predominantly masculine and insensitive to their own situation. The author spent five years visiting prisons taking women, interviewing female prisoners and those whose job it is to care for them - prison officers, education, probation and healthcare staff, chaplains and counsellors. The result is a book that is accessible to the general reader as well as the prison professional. It vividly recreates the realities of prison life for women prisoners. Devlin describes the over-use of medication as a means of control; overcrowding; expenditure cuts; staff shortages; the violence resulting from drug misuse; the plight of ethnic minority and foreign national women; and the self-mutilation and suicide attempts of female prisoners in desperate need of help. Invisible Women has stood the test of time. It enables readers - especially who have never set foot inside a prison - to see the unique impact of imprisonment on women.

Hanging in the Balance traces the history of capital punishment in the United Kingdom from ancient times to the modern day-through periods of reform until hanging for murder was finally abolished by Parliament in 1969. It describes in detail the Parliamentary and public debates, and notes the stance taken by organizations and individuals (including the tenacious and persistent Sydney Silverman MP). The book collates data and references not previously brought together in one place - and in exploring the underlying issues and the recurring arguments about deterrence, retribution and expediency it provides an invaluable resource vis-a-vis the same debate in the many countries where capital punishment still exists. Lord Callaghan was home secretary at the time of abolition. His Foreword conveys how strong his personal feelings were concerning the death penalty from the time he entered Parliament in 1945. The book's closing chapters record how his insistence that abolition should become permanent ultimately overcame the still considerable opposition. Capital punishment was finally abolished in 1999 throughout the UK. For all practical purposes this had already happened in 1969 when the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 was made fully effective into following a trial period. 'A masterwork': Justice of the Peace

For Emile Durkheim, writing in the nineteenth-century, punishment was simply understood as a clear response to the criminal behavior a society experiences. Today's penal institutions challenge such a simple understanding. Inseparably linked with many aspects of society, they are profoundly shaped by the traumatic events and changes a society undergoes. Nowhere is this clearer than in the American South.

Georgia embraced the concept of the penitentiary as a form of social control earlier than most of its southern neighbors. Its penal code of 1816 replaced or curtailed such traditional punishments as whipping, the pillory, fines, or death. Georgia's control over felony convicts effectively began in 1817, when the state prison at Milledgeville accepted its first convict.

Martha A. Myers finds that Georgia also led the region in embracing the convict lease system as an alternative to incarceration. In Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, she examines the social, political, and economic forces that shaped punishment over a seventy-year period. Between 1870 and 1940, Georgia's system of punishment shifted from capital and corporal punishment to hard labor in the penitentiary, then to the convict lease system, then to county-run chain gangs, and then back to incarceration in prison. This book forges a connection between these dramatic shifts and analyzes three facets of punishment for black and white men: rates of admission to the penitentiary, the harshness of sentences, and the ease with which felons achieved release from the penitentiary. Her findings challenge the conventional notion that hard times invariably prompt harsh punishment. In uncovering the complex link betweensocial change and southern punishment, Myers reveals the poverty of current theories of criminal punishment.

The Insitute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge recently undertook,at the behest of the Home Office, a comprehensive study of the literature on criminal deterrence, concentrating on recent research. The result, published in this book, examines the popular claim that 'deterrence works'. That it works in general terms is beyond dispute, but the claim most favoured by law-makers is narrower: that tougher sentences have a direct impact on criminal behaviour, limiting the number and severity of offences committed. This study seeks to discover the truth of that claim. Deterrence as a penal aim, is a broad subject, hence the authors of this work decided to look at two elements of recent research. First they looked at studies which examine the marginal deterrent effects of changing the certainty of punishment, that is, of altering the likelihood of an offender's being apprehended and convicted for a crime. Secondly they looked at studies of the marginal deterrent effects of altering the severity of punishment through changes in sentencing policy. It is their evaluation and analysis of the latter which is the principal focus of the work, and which will make the book essential reading for all those interested in sentencing and penal policy.

This book argues that abusive punishments are particularly deeply rooted in authoritarian states and in some Western countries such as Britain and the USA, from which they have been exported over past centuries. The book surveys a variety of psychological, physically constraining, custodial, corporal and capital punishments. The implicit punitive content of judicial processes such as trial, as well as treatments such as behavioural therapy, may have as much psychological impact as more explicitly physical punishments.

Since 1993, crime in the United States has fallen to historic lows, seeming to legitimize the country's mix of welfare reform and mass incarceration. The Upper Limit explains how this unusual mix came about, examining how, beginning in the 1970s, declining living standards for the poor have defined social and penal policy in the United States, making welfare more restrictive and punishment harsher. Francois Bonnet shows how low-wage work sets the upper limit of social and penal policy, where welfare must be less attractive than low-wage work and criminal life must be less attractive than welfare. In essence, the living standards of the lowest class of workers in a society determine the upper limit for the generosity of welfare and for the humanity of punishment in that society. The Upper Limit explores the local consequences of this punitive adjustment in East New York, a Brooklyn neighborhood where crime fell in the 1990s. Bonnet argues that no meaningful penal reform can happen unless living standards and the minimum wage rise again. Enlightening and provocative, The Upper Limit provides a comprehensive theory of the evolution of social and penal policy.

In some states by law, in others by tradition, judges imposing a sentence of death complete the grim ritual with the words "May God have mercy on your soul."
In 1982, in Grundy, Virginia, a young miner named Roger Coleman was sentenced to death for the murder of his sister-in-law. Ten years later, the sentence was carried out, despite the extraordinary efforts of Kitty Behan, a brilliant and dedicated young lawyer who devoted two years of her life to gathering evidence of Coleman's innocence, evidence so compelling that media around the world came to question the verdict. The courts, ruling on technicalities, refused to hear the new evidence and witnesses. Finally, the governor of Virginia ordered a lie-detector test to be administered on the morning of Coleman's scheduled execution, and in a chair that to Coleman surely looked like nothing so much as an electric chair.
In John Tucker's telling, this story is an emotional and unforgettable roller-coaster ride from the awful night of the crime to the equally awful night of the execution. Perhaps it was not Roger Coleman whose soul was in need of God's mercy, but the judges, prosecutors, and politicians who procured his death.

Bruce F. Adams examines how Russia's Main Prison Administration was created, the number of prisoners it managed in what types of prisons, and what it accomplished. While providing a thorough account of prison management at a crucial time in Russia's history, Adams explores broader discussions of reform within Russia's government and society, especially after the Revolution of 1905, when arguments on such topics as parole and probation boiled in the arena of raucous public debate.

This powerful book reveals how modern strategies of punishment--and, by all accounts, their failure--relate to political and economic transformations in society at large. Jonathan Simon uses the practice of parole in California as a window to the changing historical understanding of what a corrections system does and how it works. Because California is representative of policies and practices on a national level, Simon explicitly presents his findings within a national framework.
When parole first emerged as a corrections strategy in the nineteenth century, work was supposed to keep ex-prisoners out of trouble. This strategy foundered in the changing economy after World War II. What followed was a rehabilitative strategy, where the clinical expertise of the parole agent replaced the discipline of the industrial labor market in defining and controlling criminal deviance. Today, Simon argues, as drastic changes in the economy have virtually locked out an entire class, rehabilitation has given way to mere management. The effect is isolation of the offender, either in jail or in an underclass community; the result is an escalating cycle of imprisonment, destabilization, and insecurity.
No significant improvement in the current penal crisis can be expected until we better understand the relationship between punishment and social order, a relationship which this book explores in theoretical, historical, and practical detail.

It is a fundamental human impulse to seek restitution or retribution when a wrong is done, yet individuals and societies assess responsibility and allocate punishment for wrongdoing in different ways. This book investigates how average citizens in the United States and Japan think about and judge various kinds of wrongdoing, how they determine who is responsible when things go wrong, and how they prefer to punish offenders. Drawing on the results of surveys they conducted in Detroit, Michigan, and Yokohama and Kanazawa, Japan, the authors compare both individual and cultural reactions to wrongdoing. They find that decisions about justice are influenced by whether or not there seems to be a social relationship between the offender and victim: the American tendency is to see actors in isolation while the Japanese tendency is to see them in relation to others. The Japanese, who emphasize the importance of role obligations and social ties, mete out punishment with the goal of restoring the offender to the social network. Americans, who acknowledge fewer "ties that bind" and have firmer convictions that evil resides in individuals, punish wrongdoers by isolating them from the community. The authors explore the implications of "justice among friends" versus "justice toward strangers" as approaches to the righting of wrongs in modern society. Their findings will be of interest to students of social psychology, the sociology of law, and Japanese studies.

Who is responsible for juvenile delinquency? Mark D. Jacobs uses ethnographic, statistical, and literary methods to uncover the many levels of disorganization in American juvenile justice. By analyzing the continuities betwen normal casework and exceptional cases, he reveals that probation officers must commonly contrive informal measures to circumvent a system which routinely obstructs the delivery of services to their clients. Jacobs defines the concept of the "no-fault society" to describe the larger context of societal disorder and interpersonal manipulation that the juvenile justice system at once reflects and exacerbates.

This newly updated edition connects the past with the present, using the Clarence Thomas hearings -and their characterization by Thomas as a "high-tech lynching"- to examine the links between white supremacy and the sexual abuse of black women, and the difficulty of forging an antiracist movement against sexual violence.

"Revolt Against Chivalry" is the account of how Jesse Daniel Ames and the antilynching campaign she led fused the causes of social feminism and racial justice in the South during the 1920s and 1930s.

The book traces Ames's political path from suffragism to militant antiracism and provides a detailed description of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which served through the 1930s as the chief expression of antilynching sentiment in the white South.

"Revolt Against Chivalry" is also a biography of Ames herself: it shows how Ames connected women's opposition to violence with their search for influence and self-definition, thereby leading a revolt against chivalry which was part of both sexual and racial emancipation.

This is the first book to describe in detail how judges sentence white-collar criminals. Drawing from lengthy, in-depth interviews with fifty-one judges in seven federal districts, the authors explore such topics as the information available to sentencing judges and how they work with it; the principles of harm, blameworthiness, and consequence that affect judges' decisions; and the conceptual problems that make it difficult to convert a basic agreement on principle into a system of consistent sentences. "Sitting In Judgment will continue to have an impact on the academic and professional community, as well as on sentencing policy and legislation. . . . An eye opener. The presentation is cogent and persuasive. It moves the debate about sentencing to a more informed and less abstract level."-Charles M. Carberry, White-Collar Crime Reporter "Sitting in Judgement hits the bull's-eye in describing a judge's thinking process as to the sentencing of criminal defendants. Its analysis should be of great value to lawyers and other professions dealing with this important subject."-Judge Morris E. Lasker, United States District Court, Southern District of New York "This book should go a considerable way toward rehabilitating the standing of federal judges in the eyes of those who regarded them, in the words of Wheeler and his co-authors, as 'a miscellany of individuals each heading off in his or her own ideological or emotional direction.' And it is valuable in presenting, in their own words, the views of the judges as to how they arrive at the sentences they give to white-collar criminals."-Gilbert Geis, Judicature "Unique and invaluable as a resource for social theory, the book is also quite provocative for policy development. Nonlawyers will not have the slightest difficulty in reading this book."-Jack Katz, Contemporary Sociology