This book explores the origins of the so-called 'punitive turn' in penal policy across Western nations over the past two decades. It demonstrates how the context of neoliberalism has informed penal policy-making and argues that it is ultimately neoliberalism which has led to the recent intensification of punishment.

Roman senators and equestrians were always vulnerable to prosecution for their official conduct, especially since politically motivated accusations were common. When charged with a crime in Republican Rome, such men had a choice concerning their fate. They could either remain in Rome and face possible conviction and punishment, or go into voluntary exile and avoid legal sentence. For the majority of the Republican period, exile was not a formal legal penalty contained in statutes, although it was the practical outcome of most capital convictions. Despite its importance in the political arena, Roman exile has been a neglected topic in modern scholarship. This 2006 study examines all facets of exile in the Roman Republic: its historical development, technical legal issues, the possibility of restoration, as well as the effects of exile on the lives and families of banished men.

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration," and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

Restorative justice has made significant progress in recent years and now plays an increasingly important role in and alongside the criminal justice systems of a number of countries in different parts of the world. In many cases, however, successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses have not been evaluated sufficiently systematically and comprehensively, and it has been difficult to gain an accurate picture of its implementation and the lessons to be drawn from this. Restorative Justice in Practice addresses this need, analyzing the results of the implementation of three restorative justice schemes in England and Wales in the largest and most complete trial of restorative justice with adult offenders worldwide. It aims to bring out the practicalities of setting up and running restorative justice schemes in connection with criminal justice, the costs of doing so and the key professional and ethical issues involved. At the same time the book situates these findings within the growing international academic and policy debates about restorative justice, addressing a number of key issues for criminal justice and penology, including: how far victim expectations of justice are and can be met by restorative justice aligned with criminal justice whether 'community' is involved in restorative justice for adult offenders and how this relates to social capital how far restorative justice events relate to processes of desistance (giving up crime), promote reductions in reoffending and link to resettlement what stages of criminal justice may be most suitable for restorative justice and how this relates to victim and offender needs the usefulness of conferencing and mediation as forms of restorative justice with adults. Restorative Justice in Practice will be essential reading for both students and practitioners, and a key contribution to the restorative justice debate.

Edited by Bell Gale Chevigny, this issue of the JPP features non-fiction pieces by winners of the annual PEN American Center's Prison Writing Contest that address issues of punishment and creative resistance. Many contributors describe punishment that extends beyond the loss of liberty, and the issue features articles on three strikes policies, death row, the AIDS epidemic, murderous violence, suicide, incarceration of prisoners with mental health needs, as well as the maddening absurdity of contraband laws. Others describe creative resistance directly, focusing on proposed non-prisoner involvement in promoting critical thinking among prisoners, teaching English as a Second Language, the community model of prison, and Michigan's Prison Creative Arts Project (described both by its founder and a female prisoner transformed by PCAP). The issue also features articles from three documentary film-makers who describe their efforts to break through prison walls. In the Prisoners' Struggles section, two former prisoners, an artist and a writer, detail their activism in fighting the Rockefeller drug laws and felon disenfranchisement in Rhode Island. A prisoner and two prison justice activists describe an online magazine written by activists on both sides of the wall. Another advocate lays out the large objectives and achievements of the Coalition for Women Prisoners in New York. The writers welcome this opportunity to reach an international audience and the PEN Prison Writing Program members hope that these pieces will stimulate an exchange with people elsewhere who participate in - or are interested in developing - similar writing programs.

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

This book explores the identity of Texas as a state with a large and severe penal system. It does so by assessing the narratives at work in Texas museums and tourist sites associated with prisons and punishment. In such cultural institutions, complex narratives are presented, which show celebratory stories of Texan toughness in the penal sphere, as well as poignant stories about the witnessing of executions, comical stories that normalize the harsher aspects of Texan punishment, and presentations about prison officers who have lost their lives in the war on crime. In analysing these representations, the book shows that Texan history plays an important role in the production of Texan self-identity, and that to understand the Texan commitment to harsh punishment we must be prepared to focus on Texan myths and memories. Prisons and Punishment in Texas draws on diverse interdisciplinary work, including criminology, cultural studies about Southern values, as well as research on cultural memory and dark tourism. Museums are shown to be under-researched sites of criminological significance, which offer rich evidence through which penal imaginaries and the cultural role of punishment can be explored. The book will be of great interest to criminologists as well as scholars of sociology, cultural studies, museum studies and politics.

Volume 18(1&2) is a special double issue of the "Journal of Prisoners on Prisons." Edited by Mike Larsen and Justin Pich?, and dedicated to the memory of Louk Hulsman, the articles examine a range of topics, including how language structures relations in prison, the incarceration of veterans in the USA, life without parole sentences for both adults and juveniles, three strikes policies and legal self-representation, the psychological impact of solitary confinement, prisoners' families, and post-release adjustment. Running themes include reflections on the relationship between life and death in carceral settings, as well as critiques of policies that produce 'disposable' human beings. The issue continues with a revived Dialogues section featuring five articles discussing the scholarly merits, limitations, and ethics of prison ethnography and carceral tours. An extended Prisoners' Struggles section includes material on a variety of resources, organizations and events of interest, including reports by the MTL Trans Support Group, the UN Special Rapporteur on Education, and Julia Sudbury of Critical Resistance. The issue closes with Book Reviews of works by Deena Rhymes, Elizabeth Comack and Loic Wacquant.

Prisons and the multiple ways that Latino/as have developed to combat the pervasive inhumane acts visited on them are the core of this anthology. Its combination of scholarly presentations, interviews, poetry, visual arts, and narratives of the inmates' lived experiences situates the realities of prison and its aftermath in the discussion about the ideals of individual freedom and rights. The authors highlight the attempts to normalize the systematic dehumanization of incarcerated Latino/as by "walling off" and sanitizing the urgent problems their very presence inevitably poses. This book argues for the societal responsibility to uphold the dignity of all peoples, irrespective of their histories and status in their respective societies.

While state and federal prisons like Attica and Alcatraz occupy a central place in the national consciousness, most incarceration in the United States occurs within the walls of local jails. In This Is My Jail, Melanie D. Newport situates the late twentieth-century escalation of mass incarceration in a longer history of racialized, politically repressive jailing. Centering the political actions of people until now overlooked-jailed people, wardens, corrections officers, sheriffs, and the countless community members who battled over the functions and impact of jails-Newport shows how local, grassroots contestation shaped the rise of the carceral state. As ground zero for struggles over criminal justice reform, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, jails in Chicago and Cook County were models for jailers and advocates across the nation who aimed to redefine jails as institutions of benevolent transformation. From a slave sale on the jail steps to new jail buildings to electronic monitoring, from therapy to job training, these efforts further criminalized jailed people and diminished their capacity to organize for their civil rights. With prisoners as famous as Al Capone, Dick Gregory, and Harold Washington, and a place in culture ranging from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to B. B. King's Live in Cook County Jail, This Is My Jail places jails at the heart of twentieth-century urban life and politics. As a sweeping history of urban incarceration, This Is My Jail shows that jails are critical sites of urban inequality that sustain the racist actions of the police and judges and exacerbate the harms wrought by housing discrimination, segregated schools, and inaccessible health care. Structured by liberal anti-Blackness and legacies of violence, today's jails reflect longstanding local commitments to the unfreedom of poor people of color.

Between 1850 and 1950, at least 115 women were lynched by mobs in the United States. The majority of these women were black. This book examines the phenomenon of the lynching of women, which was a much more rare experience than the lynching of men. Over the same hundred-year period covered in this text, more than 1,000 white men were lynched, while thousands of black men were murdered by mobs. Of particular importance in this examination is the role of race in lynching, particularly the increase in the number of black lynchings as the century progressed. Details are provided--when available--for the lynchings in an attempt to shine a light on this form of mob violence.

Punishment is the common response to crime and deviance in all societies. However, its particular form and purpose are also linked to specific features of the structure of these societies at a particular time and place. Through a comparative historical analysis of punishment, this 2005 book is designed to identify and examine the sources of similarity and differences in types of economic punishments, incapacitation devices and structures, and lethal and non-lethal forms of corporal punishment over time and place. We will look closely at punishment responses to crime and deviance across different regions of the world and in specific countries like the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia. It is hoped that the reader will gain an appreciation for both the universal and context-specific nature of punishment and its use for purposes of social control, social change, and the elimination of threat to the prevailing authorities.

n Many people across the world know Antonio Negri as an internationally renowned political thinker whose book, Empire, co-authored with Michael Hardt, is an international bestseller.

Much less well known is the fact that, up until 1979, Negri was a university professor teaching in Paris and Padova. On April 7th, 1979 he was arrested, charged with the murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro, accused of 17 other murders, of being the head of the Red Brigades and of fomenting insurrection against the state. He has since been absolved of all these accusations, but thanks to the emergency laws in Italy at the time, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Then, in July 1983, he was elected as a member of parliament, which meant that he was released from prison after four and a half years of preventive detention. After months of debate, the Lower House decided to strip him of his parliamentary immunity o by 300 votes in favour and 293 against. At that point he left Italy for exile in France where he remained until 1997 and continued to maintain his innocence of all the crimes of which he was accused.

This book is Negri's diary in which he tells of his imprisonment, trial, the elections, and his escape to and exile in France. Both personal and political, it recounts a little known aspect of Negri's life and will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the work of this enormously influential political thinker.

Considering the question of how levels of security allow state power to be increased to the point at which it infringes essential civil liberties, this book explores the creeping power of the executive and the unfeasibility of widespread use of the Human Rights Act as a bulwark against the oppressive use of state power.

Limited critical evaluation on the societal effect of rising incarceration rates and construction of new facilities has been available. Crime is not at an alltime high in America or uniquely an American problem, yet no other country relies on incarceration as much as the United States. In this book, knowledgeable professionals show how current policy can create more violence instead of reducing it. The consensus of 26 contributors, disciplines including correctional administrators, physicians, criminologists, lawyers, and volunteers, is that mass incarceration propagates the violent subculture of prison on the streets. Editor John P. May, a practicing physician and leading expert in correctional health care, suggests that perhaps the best service people can do for some caught in the criminal justice system is to get them out as soon as possible, and the best service for society is to incarcerate fewer. Building Violence urges readers to rethink the incarceration policy, especially as it intersects with race, social class, gender, morality, technology, the media, profiteering, and legislated messages of prejudice, fear, and violence. This crisply written book is ideal for interdisciplinary study and reference in the fields of criminal justice, criminology, corrections, sociology, mental health, human rights, education, law, and administration.

Volume 17, Number 1 of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons focuses on the theme of education inside American and Canadian prisons. Edited by Justin Pich?, the articles focus on a number of topics including the barriers to education faced by prisoners, the obstacles faced by those who wish to develop scholarly knowledge on imprisonment and the vital role prison writing plays in knowing inside in the contemporary context.? The "Response "to the issue by Jon Marc Taylor, who earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees while behind bars through correspondence courses, encourages prisoners and fellow travellers to continue to "fight the good fight" through prison writing. The "Prisoners' Struggles" and "Book Reviews" sections include resources for prisoners, along with contributions from individuals and groups working towards expanding knowledge inside including Seth Ferranti, Eugene Dey, books2prisoners Ottawa and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Education.

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.

Over the last quarter of a century a new system of global criminal justice has emerged; national judges have become bolder in prosecuting crimes committed abroad, special tribunals have been able to target national leaders as well as their henchmen, and a permanent International Criminal Court has been established. But how successful have these ambitious transformations been? Have they ushered in a new era of cosmopolitan justice or are the old principles of victors justice still in play? In this book, Daniele Archibugi and Alice Pease offer a vibrant and thoughtful analysis of the successes and shortcomings of the global justice system from 1945 to the present day. Part I traces the evolution of this system and the cosmopolitan vision enshrined within it. Part II looks at how it has worked in practice - focusing on the trials of some of the world s most notorious war criminals, including Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milo evi , Radovan Karad i , Saddam Hussein and Omar al-Bashir, to assess the efficacy of the new dynamics of international punishment and the extent to which they can operate independently, without the interference of powerful governments and their representatives. Looking to the future, Part III asks how the system s failings can be addressed. What actions are required for cosmopolitan values to become increasingly embedded in the global justice system in years to come?

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.

Drawing on Foucauldian theory and 'social harm' paradigms, Naughton offers a radical redefinition of miscarriages of justice from a critical perspective. This book uncovers the limits of the entire criminal justice process and challenges the dominant perception that miscarriages of justices are rare and exceptional cases of wrongful imprisonment.

A Special Issue of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons dedicated to the Political Prisoners of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, in the words of the political prisoners themselves, along with those in exile and former political prisoners. Despite the criminal justice system's attempts to thwart the content of this publication, submissions were collected, experiences were recorded, and events, experiences and thoughts occurring over the 40 years that have passed since the forming of the Black Panther Party have been addressed in this issue of the JPP.

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.

The Oxford Monographs On Criminal Law And Justice series aims to cover all aspects of criminal law and procedure including criminal evidence. the scope of the series is wide, encompassing both practical and theoretical works. Series Editor: Professor Andrew Ashworth, Vinerian Professor of English Law, All Souls College, Oxford. This volume is a thematic collection of essays on sentencing theory by leading writers. The essays fall into three groups. Part I considers the underlying justifications for the imposition of punishment by the State, and examines the relationship between victims, offenders and the State. Part II addresses a number of areas of sentencing policy that have given rise to particular difficulty, such as the sentencing of drug offenders, the rationale for discounting sentences for multiple offenders, the existence of special sentencing for young offenders, and cases where the injury done to the victim is of a different magnitude from what might have been expected. Part III raises various questions about the unequal impact on offenders of different sentencing measures, and examines the extent to which sentences should be adjusted to take account of these different impacts and of broader social inequalities. This volume is dedicated to Professor Andrew von Hirsch, whose continuing work on sentencing theory provided the stimulus for the collection.

The Cincinnati Penal Congress of 1870 ushered in the era of "progressive" penology: the use of statistical and social scientific methodologies, commitment to psychiatric and therapeutic interventions, and a new innovation-the reformatory-as the locus for the application of these initiatives. The prisoner was now seen as a specimen to be analyzed, treated, and properly socialized into the triumphal current of American social and economic life. Of course, the Progressive rehabilitative initiatives succumbed in the 1970s to withering criticism from the proponents of equally futile strategies for addressing "the crime problem": retribution, deterrence, and selective incapacitation. The early Christian community developed a methodology for correcting human error that featured the unprecedented belief that a period of time spent in a given penitential locale, with the aid and encouragement of the community, was sufficient in and of itself to heal the alienation and self-loathing caused by sin and to lead an individual to full reincorporation into the community. The "correctional" practice was based upon the conviction that cooperative sociability-or conversion-is possible, regardless of the specific offense and that there is no need to inflict suffering or use the act of punishment as a warning to potential offenders or to intervene in the life of the offender with rehabilitation. Andrew Skotnicki contends that the modern practice of criminal detention is a protracted exercise in needless violence predicated upon two foundational errors. The first is an inability to see the imprisoned as human beings fully capable of responding to an affirmative accompaniment rather than maltreatment and invasive forms of therapy. The second is a pervasive dualism that constructs a barrier between the detainee and those empowered to supervise, rehabilitate, and punish them. In this book, Skotnicki argues that the criminal justice system can only be rehabilitated by eliminating punishment and policies based upon deterrence, rehabilitation, and the incapacitation of the urban poor and returning to the original justification for the practice of confinement: conversion.