Sentencing Policy and Social Justice argues that the promotion of social justice should become a key objective of sentencing policy, advancing the argument that the legitimacy of sentencing ultimately depends upon the strength of the relationship between social morality and penal ideology. It sheds light on how shared moral values can influence sentencing policy at a time when relationships of community appear increasingly fragmented, arguing that sentencing will be better placed to make a positive contribution to social justice if it becomes more sensitive to the commonly-accepted moral boundaries that underpin adherence to the 'rule of law'. The need to reflect public opinion in sentencing has received significant attention more recently, with renewed interest in jury sentencing, 'stakeholder sentencing', and the involvement of community views when regulating policy. The author, however, advocates a different approach, combining a new theoretical focus with practical suggestions for reform, and arguing that the contribution sentencing can make to social justice necessitates a fundamental change in the way shared values about the advantages of punishment are reflected in penal ideology and sentencing policy. Using examples from international, comparative and domestic contexts to advance the moral and ethical case for challenging the existing theories of sentencing, the book develops the author's previous theoretical ideas and outlines how these changes could be given practical shape within the context of sentencing in England and Wales. It assesses the consequences for penal governance due to increased state regulation of discretionary sentencing power and examines the prospects for achieving the kind of moral transformation regarded as necessary to reverse such a move. To illustrate these issues each chapter focuses on a particularly problematic area for contemporary sentencing policy; namely, the sentencing of women; the sentencing of irregular migrants; sentencing for offences of serious public disorder; and sentencing for financial crime.

In 1989, the first drug-treatment court was established in Florida, inaugurating an era of state-supervised rehabilitation. Such courts have frequently been seen as a humane alternative to incarceration and the war on drugs. Enforcing Freedom offers an ethnographic account of drug courts and mandatory treatment centers as a system of coercion, demonstrating how the state uses notions of rehabilitation as a means of social regulation. Situating drug courts in a long line of state projects of race and class control, Kerwin Kaye details the ways in which the violence of the state is framed as beneficial for those subjected to it. He explores how courts decide whether to release or incarcerate participants using nominally colorblind criteria that draw on racialized imagery. Rehabilitation is defined as preparation for low-wage labor and the destruction of community ties with "bad influences," a process that turns participants against one another. At the same time, Kaye points toward the complex ways in which participants negotiate state control in relation to other forms of constraint in their lives, sometimes embracing the state's salutary violence as a means of countering their impoverishment. Simultaneously sensitive to ethnographic detail and theoretical implications, Enforcing Freedom offers a critical perspective on the punitive side of criminal-justice reform and points toward alternative paths forward.

Holding On reveals the results of an unprecedented ten-year study of justice-involved families, rendering visible the lives of a group of American families whose experiences are too often lost in large-scale demographic research. Using new data from the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering-a groundbreaking study of almost two thousand families, incorporating a series of couples-based surveys and qualitative interviews over the course of three years-Holding On sheds rich new light on the parenting and intimate relationships of justice-involved men, challenging long-standing boundaries between research on incarceration and on the well-being of low-income families. Boldly proposing that the failure to recognize the centrality of incarcerated men's roles as fathers and partners has helped to justify a system that removes them from their families and hides that system's costs to parents, partners, and children, Holding On considers how research that breaks the false dichotomy between offender and parent, inmate and partner, and victim and perpetrator might help to inform a next generation of public policies that truly support vulnerable families.

Intellectual disabilities have long been a concern for both practitioners and academics alike. With the introduction and advocacy of concepts to the public in recent decades, and the normalization and valorization of intellectual disabilities, humanistic concern has become the dominant trend in providing interventions and services for people with these issues.Today, various ideas for societal inclusion of those with intellectual disabilities have been introduced. However, many practitioners and academics have criticized these ideas as idealistic, and in many ways, inapplicable for actual social inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities.The situation is particularly serious regarding those intellectually disabled individuals presenting various forms of self-harm, aggression, disturbing behaviors, and emotional fluctuation (SADE: S =Self harm, A = Aggression, D = Disturbing behaviors, E = Emotional fluctuation). In many instances, social exclusion, labelling, punishments, deprivation of rights, physical restraints, as well as psychiatric medications are commonly used in controlling intellectual disabled clients with SADE.A thorough understanding of intellectually disabled clients has revealed that their self-harm, aggression, disturbing behaviors, and emotional fluctuations (SADE) are closely related to their unfulfilled needs, developmental traumas, abuse, neglect, and abandonment in their lives. These individuals have problems in expressing their views and emotions, as well as having severe attachment needs.Based on the writers substantial experience, clinical practice, and supervision in working with intellectual disabled clients with SADE, this book is the first to formulate and consolidate the communication, emotionality, intimacy, and trauma based interpretation and intervention for intellectually disabled clients with SADE. This book provides methods for effective, humanistic, normalized, and integrated recovery of these individuals.

This volume considers the interconnection of racial oppression in the U.S. South and West, presenting thirteen case studies that explore the ways in which people have been caged and incarcerated, and what these practices tell us about state building, coercive legal powers, and national sovereignty. As these studies depict the institutional development and state scaffolding of overlapping carceral regimes, they also consider how prisoners and immigrants resisted such oppression and violence by drawing on the transnational politics of human rights and liberation, transcending the isolation of incarceration and the boundaries of domestic law. Contributors: Dan Berger, Ethan Blue, George Diaz, David Hernandez, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Pippa Holloway, Volker Janssen, Talitha LeFlouria, Heather McCarty, Douglas Miller, Vivien Miller, Donna Murch, and Keramet Ann Reiter

Celebrated prison reformer Miriam Van Waters made history for her sensational battle to retain the superintendency of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women in 1949. Maternal Justice provides a compelling biography of this early lesbian activist by moving beyond the controversy to tell the story of a remarkable woman whose success rested upon the power of her own charismatic leadership. Estelle B. Freedman draws from Van Waters's diaries, letters, and personal papers to recreate her complex personal life, unveiling the disparity between Van Waters's public persona and her agonized private soul. With the power and elegance of a novel, Maternal Justice illuminates this historical context, casting light on the social welfare tradition, on women's history, on the American feminist movement, and on the history of sexuality. Maternal Justice is as much a work of history as it is biography, bringing to life not only a remarkable woman but also the complex political and social milieu within which she worked and lived.--Kelleher Jewett, The Nation This sympathetic biography reclaims Van Waters for history.--Publishers Weekly The Van Waters legacy, as Freedman gracefully presents, is that she cared about the lives of women behind bars. It is a strikingly unfashionable sentiment today.--Jane Meredith Adams, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Editor's Recommended Selection This finely crafted biography is both an engrossing read and a richly complicated account of a reformer whose work . . . bridged the eras of voluntarist charitable activism and professional social service.--Sherri Broder, Women's Review of Books This is a sympathetic, highly personal biography, revealing of both the author's responses to her subject's life and, in considerable detail, Van Waters's family traumas, illnesses, and love affairs.--Elizabeth Israels Perry, Journal of American History

Two of the nation's foremost criminal justice scholars present a comprehensive assessment of the factors behind the growth and subsequent overcrowding of American prisons. By critiquing the existing scholarship on prison scale from sociology and history to correctional forecasting and economics, they both reveal that explicit policy changes have had little influence on the increases in imprisonment in recent years and analyze whether it is possible to place limits effectively on prison population.
""The Scale of Imprisonment" has an exceptionally well designed literature review of interest to public policy, criminal justice, and public law scholars. Its careful review, analysis, and critique of research is stimulating and inventive."--"American Political Science Review"
"The authors fram our thoughts about the soaring use of imprisonment and stimulate our thinking about the best way we as criminologists can conduct rational analysis and provide meaningful advice."--Susan Guarino-Ghezzi, "Journal of Quantitative Criminology"
"Zimring and Hawkins bring a long tradition of excellent criminological scholarship to the seemingly intractable problems of prisons, prison overcrowding, and the need for alternative forms of punishment."--J. C. Watkins, Jr., "Choice
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"Sharp's book reemphasizes the tremendous costs of maintaining the death penalty--costs to real people and real families that ripple throughout generations to come."--Saundra D. Westervelt, author of Shifting the Blame: How Victimization Became a Criminal Defense "Everyone concerned with the effects of capital punishment must have this book."--Margaret Vandiver, professor, department of criminology and criminal justice, University of Memphis Murderers, particularly those sentenced to death, are considered by most to be unusually heinous, often sub-human, and entirely different from the rest of us. In Hidden Victims, sociologist Susan F. Sharp challenges this culturally ingrained perspective by reminding us that those individuals facing a death sentence, in addition to being murderers, are brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers, daughters or sons, relatives or friends. Through a series of vivid and in-depth interviews with families of the accused, she demonstrates how the exceptionally severe way in which we view those on death row trickles down to those with whom they are closely connected. Sharp shows how family members and friends--in effect, the indirect victims of the initial crime--experience a profoundly complicated and socially isolating grief process. Departing from a humanist perspective from which most accounts of victims are told, Sharp makes her case from a sociological standpoint that draws out the parallel experiences and coping mechanisms of these individuals. Chapters focus on responses to sentencing, the particular structure of grieving faced by this population, execution, aftermath, wrongful conviction, family formation after conviction, and the complex situation of individuals related to both the killer and the victim. Powerful, poignant, and intelligently written, Hidden Victims challenges all of us--regardless of which side of the death penalty we are on--to understand the economic, social, and psychological repercussions that shape the lives of the often forgotten families of death row inmates. Susan F. Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma.

This book presents and discusses information in the study of criminal justice and law enforcement. Topics discussed include capital punishment; juvenile justice; the use of DNA in cold cases; statutes of limitation in federal criminal cases; the illicit drug market in Taiwan and leadership in police organisations.

Girls' delinquency has attracted the attention of federal, state, and local policymakers for more than a decade as girls have increasingly become involved in the juvenile justice system. For girls, the key risk factors for delinquency and incarceration are family dysfunction, trauma and sexual abuse, mental health and substance abuse problems, high-risk sexual behaviours, school problems and affiliation with deviant peers. The authors of this book examine the developmental sequences of girls' delinquent behaviour, as well as the factors that protect girls against delinquency. In addition, issues such as patterns of offending among adolescents are explored and how they differ for girls and boys. The causes and correlates of girls' delinquency are discussed as well. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

Administering justice to juvenile offenders has largely been the domain of the states, and as a result of this the laws that pertain to juvenile offenders can vary widely from state to state. This book analyses the current federal legislation that impacts the state juvenile justice systems. It also provides an overview of research on the deterrent effects of transferring youth from juvenile to criminal courts. In addition, this book examines juvenile suicides that occurred in confinement. It describes the demographic characteristics and social history of victims and examines the characteristics of the facilities in which the suicides took place. Drawing on this data, the researchers offer recommendations to prevent suicides in juvenile facilities. Moreover, this book analyses the prevalence and overlap of substance-related behaviours among youth, with comparisons by age group, gender and race/ethnicity. The analysis shows that a youth who engages in one substance-related behaviour is much more likely to engage in another. This book presents information that can help the juvenile justice system detect youth with psychiatric disorders and respond with an integrated system of services. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

Suicide-proofing a room can prevent suicidal behaviour in incarcerated prisoners and in psychiatric patients. The question addressed is this book is whether suicide-proofing the general environment prevents suicide in the general population. The final chapter sums up the results and discusses the issues stimulated by this body of research.

Over the last 10 years, the cost to confine federal Bureau of Prison (BOP) inmates in non-BOP facilities has nearly tripled from about $250 million in fiscal year 1996 to about $700 million in fiscal year 2006. Proponents of using contractors to operate prisons claim it can save money; others question whether contracting is a cost-effective alternative. This book discusses the feasibility and implications of comparing the costs for confining federal inmates in low and minimum security BOP facilities with those managed by private firms for BOP.

Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation's jails every year. What happens to them as they carry their pregnancies in a space of punishment? In this time when the public safety net is frayed, incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor. Using her ethnographic fieldwork and clinical work as an ob-gyn in a women's jail, Carolyn Sufrin explores how jail has, paradoxically, become a place where women can find care. Focusing on the experiences of incarcerated pregnant women as well as on the practices of the jail guards and health providers who care for them, Jailcare describes the contradictory ways that care and maternal identity emerge within a punitive space presumed to be devoid of care. Sufrin argues that jail is not simply a disciplinary institution that serves to punish. Rather, when understood in the context of the poverty, addiction, violence, and racial oppression that characterize these women's lives and their reproduction, jail can become a safety net for women on the margins of society.

A compelling personal memoir and a scathing indictment of bureaucratic indifference and agenda-driven government policies.In his thirty years in the Canadian prison system, Robert Clark rose from student volunteer to deputy warden. He worked with some of Canada's most dangerous and notorious prisoners, including Paul Bernardo and Tyrone Conn. He dealt with escapes, lockdowns, prisoner murders, prisoner suicides, and a riot. But he also arranged ice-hockey games in a maximum-security institution, sat in a darkened gym watching movies with three hundred inmates, took parolees sightseeing, and consoled victims of violent crimes. He has managed cellblocks, been a parole officer, and investigated staff corruption. Clark takes readers down inside a range of prisons, from the minimum-security Pittsburgh Institution to the Kingston Regional Treatment Centre for mentally ill prisoners and the notorious (and now closed) maximum-security Kingston Penitentiary. In Down Inside, he challenges head-on the popular belief that a "tough-on-crime" approach makes prisons and communities safer, arguing instead for humane treatment and rehabilitation. Wading into the controversy about long-term solitary confinement, Clark draws from his own experience managing solitary-confinement units to continue the discussion begun by the headline-making Ashley Smith case and to join the chorus of voices calling for an end to the abuse of solitary confinement in Canadian prisons.

Public schools across the nation have turned to the criminal justice system as a gold standard of discipline. As public schools and offices of justice have become collaborators in punishment, rates of African American suspension and expulsion have soared, drop out rates have accelerated, and prison populations have exploded. Nowhere, perhaps, has the War on Crime been more influential in broadening racialized academic and socioeconomic disparity than in New Orleans, Louisiana, where in 2002 the criminal sheriff opened his own public school at the Orleans Parish Prison. "The Prison School," as locals called it, enrolled low-income African American boys who had been removed from regular public schools because of nonviolent disciplinary offenses, such as tardiness and insubordination. By examining this school in the local and national context, Lizbet Simmons shows how young black males are in the liminal state of losing educational affiliation while being caught in the net of correctional control. In The Prison School, she asks how schools and prisons became so intertwined. What does this mean for students, communities, and a democratic society? And how do we unravel the ties that bind the racialized realities of school failure and mass incarceration?

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.

A groundbreaking examination of our system of imprisonment, revealing the true causes of mass incarceration as well as the best path to reform In the 1970s, the United States had an incarceration rate comparable to those of other liberal democracies-and that rate had held steady for over 100 years. Yet today, though the US is home to only about 5 percent of the world's population, we hold nearly one quarter of its prisoners. Mass incarceration is now widely considered one of the biggest social and political crises of our age. How did we get to this point? Locked In is a revelatory investigation into the root causes of mass incarceration by one of the most exciting scholars in the country. Having spent fifteen years studying the data on imprisonment, John Pfaff takes apart the reigning consensus created by Michelle Alexander and other reformers, revealing that the most widely accepted explanations-the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons-tell us much less than we think. Pfaff urges us to look at other factors instead, including a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before. He describes a fractured criminal justice system, in which counties don't pay for the people they send to state prisons, and in which white suburbs set law and order agendas for more-heavily minority cities. And he shows that if we hope to significantly reduce prison populations, we have no choice but to think differently about how to deal with people convicted of violent crimes-and why some people are violent in the first place. An authoritative, clear-eyed account of a national catastrophe, Locked In transforms our understanding of what ails the American system of punishment and ultimately forces us to reconsider how we can build a more equitable and humane society.

The public execution at Tyburn is one of the most evocative and familiar of all eighteenth-century images. Whether it elicits horror or prurient fascination - or both - the Tyburn hanging day has become synonymous with the brutality of a bygone age and a legal system which valued property over human life.But, as this fascinating cultural and social history of the gallows reveals, the early modern execution was far more than just a debased spectator sport. The period between the Restoration and the American Revolution witnessed the rise and fall of a vast body of execution literature - last dying speeches and confessions, criminal trials and biographies - featuring the criminal as an Everyman (or Everywoman) holding up a mirror to the sins of his readers. The popularity of such publications reflected the widespread, and persistent, belief in the gallows as a literal preview of 'God's Tribunal': a sacred space in which solemn oaths, supernatural signs and, above all, courage, could trump the rulings of the secular courts. Here the condemned traitor, "game" highwayman, or model penitent could proclaim not only his or her innocence of a specific crime, but raise larger questions of relative societal guilt and social justice by invoking the disparity between man's justice and God's.

Written by two academic scholars and former practitioners, Corrections: From Research, to Policy, to Practice, Second Edition offers students a 21st-century look into the treatment and rehabilitative themes that drive modern-day corrections. Authors Mary K. Stohr and Anthony Walsh expertly weave together research, policy, and practice to give readers a foundational understanding of the field of corrections.

From battlefields, boxcars, and forgotten warehouses to notorious prison camps like Andersonville and Elmira, prisoners seemed to be everywhere during the American Civil War. Yet there is much we do not know about the soldiers and civilians whose very lives were in the hands of their enemies. Living by Inches is the first book to examine how imprisoned men in the Civil War perceived captivity through the basic building blocks of human experience--their five senses. From the first whiffs of a prison warehouse to the taste of cornbread and the feeling of lice, captivity assaulted prisoners' perceptions of their environments and themselves. Evan A. Kutzler demonstrates that the sensory experience of imprisonment produced an inner struggle for men who sought to preserve their bodies, their minds, and their sense of self as distinct from the fundamentally uncivilized and filthy environments surrounding them. From the mundane to the horrific, these men survived the daily experiences of captivity by adjusting to their circumstances, even if these transformations worried prisoners about what type of men they were becoming.

This title was first published in 2000: Between 1900 and 1950 130 women were sentenced to death for murder in England and Wales. Only 12 of these women were actually executed. Thus, 91 per cent of women murderers had their sentence commuted, whereas if we examine the corresponding figures for men, only 39 per cent had their sentence commuted. It would appear that state servants working within the criminal justice system were far more reluctant to hang women than men. However, this text argues that a closer examination of this apparent discrepancy reveals it to be a misconception which has come about as a result of the statistics regarding infanticide. That is to say - unlike men - the vast majority of women murderers have killed their own child or children. Once this is taken into account we find that women who had murdered an adult had less hope of a reprieve than men. Thus, the author shows that the large proportion of women murderers as killers of their own children has created a false impression of how female murderers fared inside the criminal justice system.

By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nation's two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? "Doing Time Together" vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiances, and boyfriends on the inside.
Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison's intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into "quasi-inmates," eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives.
An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America's massive prison system, Comfort's book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.

Why have generations of philosophers failed or refused to articulate a rigorous challenge to the death penalty, when literature has been rife with death penalty abolitionism for centuries? In this book, Peggy Kamuf explores why any properly philosophical critique of capital punishment in the West must confront the literary as that which exceeds the logical demands of philosophy. Jacques Derrida has written that "the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty." How, Kamuf asks, does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind in a Western nation that professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? Following a lucid account of Derrida's approach to the death penalty, Kamuf pursues this question across several literary texts. In reading Orwell's story "A Hanging," Kamuf explores the relation between literary narration and the role of the witness, concluding that such a witness needs the seal of literary language in order to account for the secret of the death penalty. The next chapter turns to the American scene with Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as an outlandish public spectacle in Times Square. Because this fictional device reverses the drive toward secrecy that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, put an end to public executions in the West, Kamuf reads the novel in a tension with the current tendency in the U.S. to shore up and protect remaining death penalty practices through increasingly pervasive secrecy measures. A reading of Norman Mailer's 1979 novel The Executioner's Song, shows the breakdown of any firm distinction between suicide and capital execution and explores the essential affinity between traditional narrative structure, which is plotted from the end, and the "plot" of a death penalty. Final readings of Kafka, Derrida, and Baudelaire consider the relation between literature and law, showing how performative literary language can "play the law. "A brief conclusion, titled "Postmortem," reflects on the condition of literature as that which survives the death penalty. A major contribution to the field of law and society, this book makes the case for literature as a space for contesting the death penalty, a case that scholars and activists working across a range of traditions will need to confront.