This book highlights the myriad factors that can impact the children of incarcerated parents. It is no secret that the United States continues to be the leading nation for the incarceration of men and women, and this this large prison population includes approximately 120,000 incarcerated mothers and 1.1 million incarcerated fathers. Incarceration of a parent is recognized as an 'adverse childhood experience', an acute or chronic situation that for most people is stressful and potentially traumatic. Children of incarcerated parents may experience other adverse childhood experiences such as poverty, homelessness, parental substance abuse and other mental health problems, and family violence. The chapters in this book document some of the challenges as well as some promising ways that can help parents and families begin to meet these challenges. It is our hope that the compendium of chapters presented in this book will be a resource for practitioners, policy makers, educators, researchers, and advocates in their work to ensure that the children of incarcerated parents, their caregivers, and their mothers and fathers, are provided the support they need to address the challenges they face during and after parental incarceration. This book was originally published as a special issue of Smith College Studies in Social Work.

Volume 17, Number 2 of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons is a special collection based on the theme "Abolition and the Universal Carceral." Edited by Mike Larsen, many of the included articles were presented in London, England in late July 2008 at the Colloquium on the Universal Carceral - part of the 12th International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA XII). The Colloquium focused on the "proliferation of new forms of carceral control" (Gaucher, 2007) and on those aspects of the carceral experience that seem to remain constant across geography and time. Unified by a "politics of hope and a] rejection of the position that imprisonment need be viewed as a normal and inevitable part of our future" (Larsen, 2008), the articles included in JPP 17(2) cover a variety of topics and represent a range of voices, from around the world. Major themes include critical reflections on health and mental heath 'services' in prisons, immigration and security certificate detention, and political imprisonment. The issue concludes with a "Response "piece on "The Abolitionist Stance" by Thomas Mathiesen, which offers both a call to action and a theoretical grounding for a renewed spirit of penal abolitionism.

Since its first use in 1890, the electric chair has been the means of legal execution for over 4,300 individuals in 23 states. Its use in recent years has steadily declined, and nowadays many states use the chair only as a museum display. This book provides a history of the electric chair and analyzes its features, its development, and the manner of its use. Chapters cover the early conceptual stages as a humane alternative to hanging, and the rivalry between Edison and Westinghouse that was one of the main forces in the chair's adoption as a mode of execution. Also presented are an account of the terrible first execution and a number of the subsequent gruesome employments of the chair. The text explores the changing attitudes toward the chair as state after state replaces it with lethal injection.

The expansion and intensification of coercive powers is a global phenomenon, reflecting the fragility of social order and the authority of ruling elites in the 21st century.Relationships of domination, powerlessness and resistance, still characterize the carceral experience.

Most people assume that criminal offenders have only been convicted of a single crime. However, in reality almost half of offenders stand to be sentenced for more than one crime.The high proportion of multiple crime offenders poses a number of practical and theoretical challenges for the criminal justice system. For instance, how should courts punish multiple offenders relative to individuals who have been sentenced for a single crime? How should they be punished relative to each other? Sentencing for Multiple Crimes discusses these questions from the perspective of several legal theories. This volume considers questions such as the proportionality of the crimes committed, the temporal span between the crimes, and the relationship between theories about the punitive treatment of recidivists and multiple offenders. Contributors from around the world and in the fields of legal theory, philosophy, and psychology offer their perspectives to the volume. A comprehensive examination of the dynamics involved with sentencing multiple offenders has the potential to be a powerful tool for legal scholars and professionals, particularly given the practical importance of the topic and the relative dearth of research about punishment of multiple offense cases.

Women and families within the criminal justice system (CJS) are increasingly the focus of research and this book considers the timely issues of intersectionality, violence and gender. With insights from frontline practice and from the lived experiences of women, the collection examines prison experiences in a post-COVID-19 world, domestic violence and the successes and failures of family support. A companion to the first edited collection, Critical Reflections on Women, Family, Crime and Justice, the book sheds new light on the challenges and experiences of women and families who encounter the CJS. Accessible to both academics and practitioners and with real-world policy recommendations, this collection demonstrates how positive change can be achieved.

The contributions of the writers attest to the immediacy of the many questions that have arisen concerning "political prisoners and detainees," across the globe. The insecurity narratives of the neo-conservative politics and state institutions of control that grip much of the West, would have us believe that the attacks of September 11, 2001, constitute a breach with the past that has moved us to a new reality, exemplified by the need for a war on terror. Indeed in U.S.A., with its global imperialist entanglements, the public and private narratives appear to assume that a new world order has emerged. The benefits of this conclusion for established criminal justice and carceral industries are considerable. Roll backs of human and civil rights, the suspension of the rule of law, abrogation of the United Nations' Minimum Rules of Imprisonment, career advancement, and profit for industrial players, all serve established interests of the prison-industrial complex.

How did ideas about crime and criminals change in Europe from around 1750 to 1940? How did European states respond to these changes with the development of police and penal institutions? Clive Emsley attempts to address these questions using recent research on the history of crime and criminal justice in Europe. Exploring the subject chronologically, he addresses the forms of offending, the changing interpretations and understandings of that offending at both elite and popular levels, and how the emerging nation states of the period responded to criminal activity by the development of police forces and the refinement of forms of punishment.
The book focuses on the comparative nature in which different states studied each other and their institutions, and the ways in which different reformers exchanged ideas and investigated policing and penal experiments in other countries. It also explores the theoretical issues underpinning recent research, emphasising that the changes in ideas on crime and criminals were neither linear nor circular, and demonstrating clearly that many ideas hailed as new by contemporary politicians and in current debate on crime and its 'solutions', have a very long and illustrious history.

Corruption is a problem in prisons about which we hear very little, except when there is an escape from custody or other scandal that makes the media. The closed nature of correctional institutions has made the activities that go on within them less visible to the outside world. While some persons might be inclined to dismiss correctional corruption as an issue, this view ignores the scale of criminality and misconduct that can go on in prison and the impact it can have upon not just the good order of the prison or the rights of prisoners but on the prospects for successful reintegration of ex-prisoners into society. This book is the first to examine the phenomenon in any detail or to suggest what might be done to reduce its incidence and the harms that can arise from it. Andrew Goldsmith, Mark Halsey and Andrew Groves argue that it is not enough to tackle corruption alone. Rather there should be a broader attempt to promote what the authors call 'correctional integrity'.

More than 30 years after the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, it is still plagued with egregious problems. Issues of wrongful conviction, inhumane practices, and its efficacy as a deterrent are hotly debated topics. As of August 2007, two-thirds of the world's countries have abolished the death penalty. Today, the US falls alongside Iran, Iraq, Sudan, China, and Pakistan as countries that continue to believe the death penalty is a necessary and productive practice.
Compiling articles and essays from leading experts, The Death Penalty Today presents an in-depth examination of the current points of debate. The first of two sections focuses on miscarriages of justice, including errors in conviction and possible remedies. It reviews 13 death penalty study commissions that reveal potential causes of wrongful conviction and discusses relevant factors such as geography, timeframe, and race. The first section also considers the responsibility of the state for reintegration of the wrongfully convicted after exoneration, as well as flaws with the ability of lethal injections to produce a "humane" and "painless" death.
The second section addresses death penalty opinion with a survey of scholarly experts as well as a survey of mid-level police managers. It considers the criminalization of reporting, televising, and photographing executions and the implications to the first amendment and government accountability. It reveals the phenomenon of consensual executions as assisted suicide and the curious dichotomy in logic between the reviled practice of lynching and its close cousin-the government sanctioned execution.
With lucid arguments supported by verifiable statisticsand expert opinion, The Death Penalty Today provides a sober look at the death penalty in the US and begs the question of when, not if, the US will join the majority of the civilized world in its abolition.

This volume of the JPP looks at the aging process inside prisons, where every problem is amplifi ed by the prisoner's age. From the changing nature of dreams, valiant attempts to forestall mental decline, and thwarted attempts to access education, to the pain of watching children grow up without them, and the impossibility of adequate care in their declining years, prisoners share the desperation of growing old behind bars. Even in the stultifying environment of prison, however, personal growth can and does fl ourish and prisoners can contribute in many ways. Is the person who committed a crime in 1965 or 1985 still the same person in 2005? The resilience of the human spirit and the power of time, even in the absence of any other encouragement towards rehabilitation, have proven themselves over and over again. But even "model prisoners" are permanently held suspect. What kind of justice system have we constructed when even professed Christians no longer believe in redemption and forgiveness? "Godot never arrived, and Vladimir and Estragon only grew older while they waited."

View the Table of Contents.
Read Chapter 1.

"Best work of non-fiction about Virginia or by a Virginia author."
--"Manasas Journal Messenger"

"Edds's powerful telling of Washington's experience uses court documents, personal interviews, and a variety of other sources to illustrate the political and social circumstances surrounding this extraordinary case. This book invites the reader to think about how due process is carried out and implemented. An Expendable Man is a valuable study of not only the Virginia legal system, but also that of the United States."
--"Virginia Libraries"

"Explores the dark side of the system of capital punishment. The book not only goes into great detail in recording Earl Washington, Jr.'s near-execution but also incorporates some history of the Virginia legal system."
--"Criminal Justice Review"

"The book is provocative for its vivid characterization and its study of the death penalty's inherent flaws."
--" Newport News Press"

"Somewhere between the personal narratives found in H. Bruce Franklin's collection "Prison Writing in 20th-Century America," the critical work of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the recent profusion of sociological studies of America's accelerated prison economy, An Expendable Man gives us a moving portrait of a broad-based struggle on behalf of one man, and implies ways in which the halls of justice might become more just."
--"Trial & Error"

"Careful documentation. Edge-of-the-seat human drama. An exploration of loopholes in judicial safeguards against wrongful executions. An Expendable Man contains all of these--and more."
--"The Virginian-Pilot"

"An Expendable Man forcefully describes how anumber of deeply committed people resurrected the hope of an innocent man. Edds's narrative painstakingly follows the sinuous protocols of due process in America. An Expendable Man gives us a moving portrait of a broad-based struggle on behalf of one man, and implies ways in which the halls of justice might become more just."
--"Rain Taxi"

"One of the unique features of the book is its detailed explanation of the death penalty procedure in Virginia, which is second only to Texas in its number of executions."
--"Library Jounal"

"A fascinating story, told colorfully and with the law and justice the final victor."
--"New York Law Journal"

"With chilling clarity, Margaret Edds peels back the layers of the legal, judicial and social orders to explain how an innocent man comes within nine days of execution."
--William Raspberry, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for "The Washington Post"

"Earl Washington's story reveals the dark side of a system that is not known for admitting its mistakes. We have a lot to learn from this case, which highlights many of the problems we see over and over again in cases of wrongful conviction."
--Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chief sponsor of The Innocence Protection Act

"Margaret Edds' book on Earl Washington shows the heavy handedness with which our society deals with those it deems expendable. It demonstrates how the politics of the death penalty skews our moral compass and how a small group of volunteers toiled for many years to set it straight for one expendable man. Whatever your position on the death penalty, if you want to know how it actually works, read this book."
--Sister Helen Prejean

"In An ExpendableMan, Margaret Edds gives a whole new meaning to the 'Virginia Reel, ' sending the reader spinning off into dizzying fits of confusion and rage. As she carries us deeper and deeper into the Virginia justice system, one almost understands how helpless Earl Washington must have felt in the hands of those intent on killing him for something he didn't do. Edds here exposes criminal justice in Virginia as a triumph of style over substance, laying bare the ease with which the aseat of democracy' became a fortress of hypocrisy."
--Mike Farrell, actor and human rights activist

"Whether you support or oppose the death penalty, you need to understand what almost happened to a man named Earl Washington. Margaret Edds tells his tragic, arresting story with remarkable sensitivity and a clear-eyed understanding of the stakes not just for Earl Washington, but for all of us."
--Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics, University of Virginia

How is it possible for an innocent man to come within nine days of execution? An Expendable Man answers that question through detailed analysis of the case of Earl Washington Jr., a mentally retarded, black farm hand who was convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of a 19-year-old mother of three in Culpeper, Virginia. He spent almost 18 years in Virginia prisons--9 1/2 of them on death row--for a murder he did not commit.

This book reveals the relative ease with which individuals who live at society's margins can be wrongfully convicted, and the extraordinary difficulty of correcting such a wrong once it occurs.

Washington was eventually freed in February 2001 not because of the legal and judicial systems, but in spite of them. WhileDNA testing was central to his eventual pardon, such tests would never have occurred without an unusually talented and committed legal team and without a series of incidents that are best described as pure luck.

Margaret Edds makes the chilling argument that some other "expendable men" almost certainly have been less fortunate than Washington. This, she writes, is "the secret, shameful underbelly" of America's retention of capital punishment. Such wrongful executions may not happen often, but anyone who doubts that innocent people have been executed in the United States should remember the remarkable series of events necessary to save Earl Washington Jr. from such a fate.

This book analyses Labour's policies of local crime control from 1997 through to 2006. Picking up on the Conservative legacy, it follows the establishment of local crime and disorder reduction partnerships and tracks developments from Labour's attempts to subject them to a centrally-imposed performance management regime, through to the emergence of a strong neighbourhoods agenda, combined with the imposition of a largely enforcement-oriented attack on anti-social behaviour. It also explores Labour's attempts to address the causes of crime through a policy agenda that has crystallised around themes of social exclusion, social capital, community cohesion and civil renewal; and that operates through an architecture that aspires to be joined up centrally and locally, and neighbourhood-based. The main focus of the book is upon the unfolding of Labour's 'third way' political project from the centre downwards, but the limitations of this project are exposed through an exploration of a number of key themes. These include Labour's dependence upon the different translations of local practitioners, with whom it engages in a discursive politics of crime reduction versus community safety, and through whom the conceptual and practical weaknesses of evidence-based practice, performance management and joined-up government are revealed.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Chapter One.

"A book that can spur good discussion and stimulate critical thinking."
--"Law and Politics Book Review"

"A finely reasoned argument on the ills of punishment. . . . An informative and thought provoking read."
--"New York Law Journal"

"Philosophers of law too often assume that criminal punishment is of course justified and then argue over exactly what is the best justification for the practice--utilitarian deterrence, retribution, moral education, etc. It is important that this shared assumption be challenged and that serious consideration be given to the possibility that criminal punishment may not be justified at all. Although Professor Golash has by no means persuaded me that all criminal punishment should be totally abolished, her book is to be welcomed as an attempt to provoke serious reflection on this basic issue."
--Jeffrie G. Murphy, Regents' Professor of Law, Philosophy, and Religious Studies, Arizona State University

"A work of sweeping vision and profound insight. Punishment, Golash demonstrates convincingly, is wrong in itself and counterproductive as well. That her fine book closes with a thoughtful sketch of a world without punishment is a testament to the author's intellectual range and originality."
--Robert Johnson, author of "Hard Time: Understanding and Reforming the Prison"

What ends do we expect and hope to serve in punishing criminal wrongdoers? Does the punishment of offenders do more harm than good for American society? In The Case against Punishment, Deirdre Golash addresses these and other questions about the value of punishment in contemporary society.

Drawing on bothempirical evidence and philosophical literature, this book argues that the harm done by punishing criminal offenders is ultimately morally unjustified. Asserting that punishment inflicts both intended and unintended harms on offenders, Golash suggests that crime can be reduced by addressing social problems correlated with high crime rates, such as income inequality and local social disorganization. Punishment may reduce crime, but in so doing, causes a comparable amount of harm to offenders. Instead, Golash suggests, we should address criminal acts through trial, conviction, and compensation to the victim, while also providing the criminal with the opportunity to reconcile with society through morally good action rather than punishment.

Popular Injustice focuses on the spread of highly punitive forms of social control (known locally as mano dura) in contemporary Latin America. Many people have not only called for harsher punishments, such as longer prison sentences and the reintroduction of capital punishment, but also support vigilante practices like lynchings. In Guatemala, hundreds of these mob killings have occurred since the end of the country's armed conflict in 1996. Drawing on dozens of interviews with residents of lynching communities, Godoy argues that while these acts of violence do reveal widespread frustration with the criminal justice system, they are more than simply knee-jerk responses to crime. They demonstrate how community ties have been reshaped by decades of state violence and by the social and economic changes associated with globalization.

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.

aExpertly dissects the racist underpinnings of capital punishment while pushing some intellectual boundaries.a
--"International Socialist Review"

aThe authors give the nation an unflinching view of the shameful influence of racism in death penalty cases. This is a must read for anyone who cares about fairness in application of the death penalty and respect for the rule of law in our modern society.a
--Senator Edward M. Kennedy

aOgeltree and Sarat combine the most severe criminal punishment with the bugaboo of racial class and prejudice in their book From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State. The professors astutely note that the death penalty is often used as a club to keep poor and desperate minorities in line in the larger white society.a
--"Black Issues Book Review"

aAn elegant compendium of essays written by sociologists, historians, criminologists, and lawyers. The essays starkly reveal how this countryas death penalty has its roots in lynchings, and how it operates to sustain a racist agenda.a
--"The Federal Lawyer"

"This book offers thoughtful and wide-ranging assessments of how America's most dramatic punishment intersects with America's deepest and most divisive social problem. These essays go far beyond the obvious and offer much of interest both for those with a particular interest in the death penalty and for those who seek to understand and to ameliorate our country's shameful legacy of racial inequality. This is the rare book that will be helpful to the student, the scholar, and the activist alike."
--Carol Steiker, Harvard Law School

"Essential reading for all who are seeking to understand thecontemporary American death penalty or to imagine an America without one."
--Jonathan Simon, School of Law-Boalt Hall, University of California, Berkeley

"A major contribution."
--Randy A. Hertz, NYU School of Law

"Riveting and very timely. Remarkably, the book creatively assembles social history, demographic and statistical analysis, experimental psychology, and legal history and finds a common truth: the death penalty may be one of the most persistent, self-reinforcing ways we uphold racial division."
--Robert Weisberg, Stanford University Law School

"The book is bound to influence the thinking of many who tolerate if not actively support the death penalty because of the way it shows how deeply entrenched are the shameful racist attitudes and practices in our nation's dominant (white) culture."
--Hugo Adam Bedau, editor of "The Death Penalty in America"

"This is the first recent volume to address race and capital punishment in such a broad, systematic, and--perhaps most importantly--multi-disciplinary fashion."
--David R. Dow, University of Houston Law Center

Since 1976, over forty percent of prisoners executed in American jails have been African American or Hispanic. This trend shows little evidence of diminishing, and follows a larger pattern of the violent criminalization of African American populations that has marked the country's history of punishment.

In a bold attempt to tackle the looming question of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, Ogletree and Sarat headline an interdisciplinary cast of experts in reflecting on this disturbing issue. Insightful original essaysapproach the topic from legal, historical, cultural, and social science perspectives to show the ways that the death penalty is racialized, the places in the death penalty process where race makes a difference, and the ways that meanings of race in the United States are constructed in and through our practices of capital punishment.

From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State not only uncovers the ways that race influences capital punishment, but also attempts to situate the linkage between race and the death penalty in the history of this country, in particular the history of lynching. In its probing examination of how and why the connection between race and the death penalty has been so strong throughout American history, this book forces us to consider how the death penalty gives meaning to race as well as why the racialization of the death penalty is uniquely American.

"Popular Injustice" focuses on the spread of highly punitive forms of social control (known locally as "mano dura") in contemporary Latin America. Many people have not only called for harsher punishments, such as longer prison sentences and the reintroduction of capital punishment, but also support vigilante practices like lynchings. In Guatemala, hundreds of these mob killings have occurred since the end of the country's armed conflict in 1996. Drawing on dozens of interviews with residents of lynching communities, Godoy argues that while these acts of violence do reveal widespread frustration with the criminal justice system, they are more than simply knee-jerk responses to crime. They demonstrate how community ties have been reshaped by decades of state violence and by the social and economic changes associated with globalization.

The Government has embarked on a programme of radical reform for the probation and prison services with the setting up of a National Offender Management Service (NOMS). The aim is to make the two services work more effectively together, and to promote private sector involvement in 'corrections' work. This groundbreaking volume takes a critical look at the different aspects of the NOMS proposals, at a time when the Government is still working out the detail of its reforms. No other academic publication has scrutinised the NOMS proposals so closely. Through six contributions from leading experts on probation and criminal justice the report identifies the risks attached to NOMS; assesses the prospects of success; provides ideas for reshaping government plans and presents an authoritative critique of a set proposals that could go badly wrong. The report will be crucial reading for politicians, civil servants and criminal justice managers. Senior probation and prison staff will find it of particular value.

Can offenders be rehabilitated? Can this be done in ways that benefit the community as a whole, as well as offenders? This book is about the history, theory, practice and effectiveness of rehabilitation. It shows how different beliefs about the value of rehabilitation and about 'what works' have influenced criminal justice policy and practice at different times, and it identifies a number of promising approaches for the future. Everyone interested in the rehabilitation of offenders should read this book.

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? After centuries during which capital punishment was a normal and self-evident part of criminal punishment, it has now taken on a life of its own in various arenas far beyond the limits of the penal sphere. In this volume, the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty, we need to know more about the "cultural lives"-past and present-of the state's ultimate sanction. They undertake this "cultural voyage" comparatively-examining the dynamics of the death penalty in Mexico, the United States, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea-arguing that we need to look beyond the United States to see how capital punishment "lives" or "dies" in the rest of the world, how images of state killing are produced and consumed elsewhere, and how they are reflected, back and forth, in the emerging international judicial and political discourse on the penalty of death and its abolition. Contributors: Sangmin Bae Christian Boulanger Julia Eckert Agata Fijalkowski Evi Girling Virgil K.Y. Ho David T. Johnson Botagoz Kassymbekova Shai Lavi Jurgen Martschukat Alfred Oehlers Judith Randle Judith Mendelsohn Rood Austin Sarat Patrick Timmons Nicole Tarulevicz Louise Tyler

Prisons and AIDS is the first book to offer critical information on the proliferation of HIV and AIDS among prison populations and to provide a much needed resource for the design and implementation of education and prevention programs within correctional facilities. Written by experts in the field - including lead author Ronald L. Braithwaite, one of the foremost authorities on public health in the United States - this comprehensive resource is grounded in solid research, including survey information funded by the National Institute of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control. The book details numerous case studies from a variety of correctional facilities that reveal compelling information on frequency of sexual contact, drug use, needle sharing, tattooing, and the lack of access to condoms among inmates. In response to the disproportionately high incarceration rate of ethnic minorities, the authors provide strategies for developing culturally sensitive HIV/AIDS prevention programs in correctional settings. The book also documents differences in the patterns of HIV/AIDS cases among adult and juvenile and male and female inmates and explores policies and programs relevant to these populations, including education and prevention, testing and disclosure, partner notification, and housing. Written for policymakers, researchers, educators, health and human service providers, managers, and administrators of correctional institutions and community-based organizations, Prisons and AIDS provides the essential information for making informed decisions concerning this growing public health crisis.

Why does the United States continue to employ the death penalty when fifty other developed democracies have abolished it? Why does capital punishment become more problematic each year? How can the death penalty conflict be resolved?
In The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment, Frank Zimring reveals that the seemingly insoluble turmoil surrounding the death penalty reflects a deep and long-standing division in American values, a division that he predicts will soon bring about the end of capital punishment in our country. On the one hand, execution would seem to violate our nation's highest legal principles of fairness and due process. It sets us increasingly apart from our allies and indeed is regarded by European nations as a barbaric and particularly egregious form of American exceptionalism. On the other hand, the death penalty represents a deeply held American belief in violent social justice that sees the hangman as an agent of local control and safeguard of community values. Zimring uncovers the most troubling symptom of this attraction to vigilante justice in the lynch mob. He shows that the great majority of executions in recent decades have occurred in precisely those Southern states where lynchings were most common a hundred years ago. It is this legacy, Zimring suggests, that constitutes both the distinctive appeal of the death penalty in the United States and one of the most compelling reasons for abolishing it.
Impeccably researched and engagingly written, Contradictions in American Capital Punishment casts a clear new light on America's long and troubled embrace of the death penalty.

Despite plentiful discussion at various times, the personal victim has traditionally been afforded almost no formal role in the criminal justice process. Victims' rights have always met with stout opposition from both judges and the Lord Chancellor, who have guarded defendants' rights; the maintenance of professionally-controlled and emotionally unencumbered trials; and the doctrine that crime is at heart an offence against society, State, or Sovereign. Constructing Victims' Rights provides a detailed account of how this opposition was overcome, and of the progressive redefinition of victims of crime, culminating in 2003 in proposals for awarding near-rights to victims of crime. Based upon extensive observation, primary papers, and interviews, Paul Rock examines changes in the forms of criminal justice policy-making within the New Labour Government, observing how they shaped political representations and activities centred on victims of crime. He reveals how the issues of new managerialism, restorative justice, human rights, race and racism (after the death of Stephen Lawrence), and the treatment of rape victims after the trial of Ralston Edwards came to form a critical mass that required ordering and reconstruction. Constructing Victims' Rights unpicks and explains the resultant battery of proposals and the deft policy manoeuvre contained in the Domestic Violence, Crime, and Victims Bill of 2003. This, the solution to a seemingly intractable problem, was a work of finesse, proposing on the one hand, the imposition of statutory duties on criminal justice agencies and the granting of access to an Ombudsman, and on the other, a National Victims' Advisory Panel that would afford victims a symbolic voice, and a symbolic champion: a Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses.

This book examines the relationship between international human rights discourse and the justifi cations for criminal punishment. Using interdisciplinary discourse analysis, it exposes certain paradoxes that underpin the 'International Bill of Human Rights', academic commentaries on human rights law, and the global human rights monitoring regime in relation to the aims of punishment in domestic penal systems. It argues that human rights discourse, owing to its theoretical kinship with Kantian philosophy, embodies a paradoxical commitment to human dignity on the one hand, and retributive punishment on the other. Further, it sustains the split between criminal justice and social justice, which results in a sociologically ill-informed understanding of punishment. Human rights discourse plays a paradoxical role vis-a-vis the punitive power of the state as it seeks to counter criminalisation in some areas and backs the introduction of new criminal offences - and longer prison sentences - in others. The underlying priorities, it is argued, have been shaped by a number of historical circumstances. Drawing on archival material, the study demonstrates that the international penal discourse produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century laid greater emphasis on offender rehabilitation and was more attentive to the social context of crime than is the case with the modern human rights discourse.

Corrections in the Community, Seventh Edition, examines the current state of community corrections and proposes an evidence-based approach to making programs more effective. As the U.S. prison and jail systems continue to struggle, options like probation, parole, alternative sentencing, and both residential and non-residential programs in the community continue to grow in importance. This text provides a solid foundation and includes the most salient information available on the broad and dynamic subject of community corrections. Authors Latessa and Lovins organize and evaluate the latest data on the assessment of offender risk/need/responsivity and successful methods that continue to improve community supervision and its effects on different types of clients, from those with mental illness or substance abuse problems to juveniles. This book provides students with a thorough understanding of the theoretical and practical aspects of community corrections and prepares them to evaluate and strengthen these crucial programs. This seventh edition includes new chapters on pretrial, and graduated responses as well as updated information on specialty drug and other problem-solving courts. Now found in every state, these specialty courts represent a way to deal with some of the most devastating problems that face our population, be it substance abuse or re-entry to the community from prison. Chapters contain key terms, boxed material, review questions, and recommended readings, and a glossary is provided to clarify important concepts. The instructor's guide is expanded, offering sample syllabi for semester, quarter, and online classes; student exercises; research and information links; and a transcription of the Bill of Rights. A test bank and lecture slides are also available at no cost.