Key Issues in Corrections is an engaging textbook critically analyzing the most important challenges affecting the correctional system in the USA. Written by a highly respected expert in the field, and building on his best-selling book Special problems in corrections, it examines long-standing and emerging issues, grounding the discussion in empirical research and current events. Updates to this edition include: * Integrating new scholarship, lawsuits, and the use of technology * The introduction and evaluation of new policies and practices * New sections on "The Privatization of Prisons" and "The Death Penalty" Primarily written for undergraduate students who have already had an introduction to the topic, the book offers a no-nonsense approach to explaining the problems of correctional officers, correctional managers, prisoners, and the public.

Key Issues in Corrections is an engaging textbook critically analyzing the most important challenges affecting the correctional system in the USA. Written by a highly respected expert in the field, and building on his best-selling book Special problems in corrections, it examines long-standing and emerging issues, grounding the discussion in empirical research and current events. Updates to this edition include: * Integrating new scholarship, lawsuits, and the use of technology * The introduction and evaluation of new policies and practices * New sections on "The Privatization of Prisons" and "The Death Penalty" Primarily written for undergraduate students who have already had an introduction to the topic, the book offers a no-nonsense approach to explaining the problems of correctional officers, correctional managers, prisoners, and the public.

This book explores California's prison system in the context of vocational education reform. For prisons in the early twenty-first century, ideologies of evidence-based management meant that reform efforts to change the purpose of prisons from punishment to rehabilitation through vocational education required "evidence" to justify policy prescriptions. Yet who determines what constitutes evidence? In political environments, solutions are typically pre-conceived, which means that the nature of the evidence collected is also preconceived. As a result, key assumptions about outcomes are often wished away to show improvement and be accountable. Through a detailed analysis interspersed with stories from the authors' experiences "behind the wall" among California's prison population, the authors challenge the nature of evidence-based research as used in the prison environment. In the process they describe the thorny problems facing reformers.

Leading crime expert Christopher Berry-Dee gained the trust of some of the most infamous convicted killers, having corresponded with them and even entered their prison lairs to discuss their horrific crimes in detail. In this book, he presents six unforgettable prisoners and allows them to tell their stories, as well as giving the details and background of their terrifying cases - making this a must-read for aficionados of the genre and anyone fascinated by the extremes of human behaviour. Beyond the headlines, once the drama of the courtroom has subsided and the prison gates have been locked behind these killers for good, Talking With Serial Killers: Dead Men Talking allows the reader to get up close and personal with torturers, sexual psychopaths and mass murderers, to read the stories that are rarely heard and get the last word from some of the world's most pitiless killers.

This unique collection brings together international contributors from a range of disciplines to explore crime and responses to crime through a religious/faith-based lens. At a time when religion is under the media spotlight in terms of religiously-motivated hate crime, terrorism and child abuse this book provides an important platform for academic debate. It examines these and other key issues including: faith as a coping strategy, religion as a motivating factor and the role of religion and morality in shaping criminal justice responses. This collection clearly places religion/faith at the heart of criminological enquiry and illustrates its relevance in addressing wider social issues and would be of benefit to students and academics researching or studying in these areas. It will also be of interest to community and criminal justice practitioners and those with an interest in community engagement and multi-faith work.

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'.

In this pathbreaking book, Dan Berger offers a bold reconsideration of twentieth century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration. Throughout the civil rights era, black activists thrust the prison into public view, turning prisoners into symbols of racial oppression while arguing that confinement was an inescapable part of black life in the United States. Black prisoners became global political icons at a time when notions of race and nation were in flux. Showing that the prison was a central focus of the black radical imagination from the 1950s through the 1980s, Berger traces the dynamic and dramatic history of this political struggle. The prison shaped the rise and spread of black activism, from civil rights demonstrators willfully risking arrests to the many current and former prisoners that built or joined organizations such as the Black Panther Party. Grounded in extensive research, Berger engagingly demonstrates that such organizing made prison walls porous and influenced generations of activists that followed.

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.

At the height of the Middle Ages, a peculiar system of perpetual exile--or abjuration--flourished in western Europe. It was a judicial form of exile, not political or religious, and it was meted out to felons for crimes deserving of severe corporal punishment or death. From England to France explores the lives of these men and women who were condemned to abjure the English realm, and draws on their unique experiences to shed light on a medieval legal tradition until now very poorly understood. William Chester Jordan weaves a breathtaking historical tapestry, examining the judicial and administrative processes that led to the abjuration of more than seventy-five thousand English subjects, and recounting the astonishing journeys of the exiles themselves. Some were innocents caught up in tragic circumstances, but many were hardened criminals. Almost every English exile departed from the port of Dover, many bound for the same French village, a place called Wissant. Jordan vividly describes what happened when the felons got there, and tells the stories of the few who managed to return to England, either illegally or through pardons. From England to France provides new insights into a fundamental pillar of medieval English law and shows how it collapsed amid the bloodshed of the Hundred Years' War.

This book explores the role that religion plays in the lives of imprisoned homicide offenders. Drawing on interviews in an English prison, the author examines how they narrate their life stories and how religion intersects with other categories to rebuild their personal identities after committing a crime and being labelled as murderers or killers. This book seeks to bridge the gap between macro and micro phenomena, examining religion as both a social institution and a personal experience. It also explores the mediating role of institutions with regards to the nature and extent of their influence upon individual choices and actions, and provides insights into the nature of the therapeutic prison. It seeks to create some clarity of understanding the complex nature of religiosity, narrative, identity, desistance and rehabilitation whilst critically examining elements of social identity that may restrict or enhance this process. It provides a series of recommendations for organisations working with convicted homicide offenders/offenders and speaks to academics and practitioners in the fields of criminology, sociology, psychology and religious/theological studies.

The resurrection of former prisons as museums has caught the attention of tourists along with scholars interested in studying what is known as dark tourism. Unsurprisingly, due to their grim subject matter, prison museums tend to invert the Disneyland "experience, becoming the antithesis of the happiest place on earth." In Escape to Prison, the culmination of years of international research, noted criminologist Michael Welch explores ten prison museums on six continents, examining the complex interplay between culture and punishment. From Alcatraz to the Argentine Penitentiary, museums constructed on the former locations of surveillance, torture, colonial control, and even rehabilitation tell unique tales about the economic, political, religious, and scientific roots of each site's historical relationship to punishment.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the methods used in the Criminal Justice system in the United States to counsel and treat offenders. It is aimed at advanced undergraduate and early graduate-level students for courses in Correctional Treatment or Rehabilitation, or Community Corrections more broadly. The sections in the book provide: - Aims and Scope of Correctional Counseling and Treatment -Tools that Corrections Workers Use (including counseling and case management) - Behavioral Modification Treatments: Examples and Applications - Cognitive Therapies: Examples and Applications Throughout the text, there is an emphasis on the big picture: the interaction of the correctional component of the justice system with other components, particularly courts (including special courts like family courts, drug courts, veterans courts and other programs). Chapters in this book address the diverse population of correctional facilities, including juvenile offenders; those with mental illness, addiction and substance abuse problems, physical and mental disabilities; and homeless populations. The author also provides analysis of how legislation influences the corrections process. This work is also enhanced by providing comparative analysis of the criminal and juvenile justice systems: their goals, objectives, and how these can affect counseling and treatment available within these two systems. This pedagogical features of this engaging text include: excerpted interviews with correctional practitioners about the problems and challenges they encounter, discussion questions, classification instruments and real-world examples of specific treatments programs, and case studies that give students the chance to select the appropriate interviewing, counseling or treatment approach to deal with the problem/ issues of the case. This work provides students with an overview of the methods used for Correctional Treatment and Counseling, and the tools to begin to think critically about how and when to apply these methods.

This edition includes a translator's preface, note on the text, and suggestions for further reading.

"Death and Redemption" offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag--the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons--in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. In this provocative book, Steven Barnes argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed "reeducated" through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who "failed" never got out alive.

Drawing on newly opened archives in Russia and Kazakhstan as well as memoirs by actual prisoners, Barnes shows how the Gulag was integral to the Soviet goal of building a utopian socialist society. He takes readers into the Gulag itself, focusing on one outpost of the Gulag system in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, a location that featured the full panoply of Soviet detention institutions. Barnes traces the Gulag experience from its beginnings after the 1917 Russian Revolution to its decline following the 1953 death of Stalin.

"Death and Redemption" reveals how the Gulag defined the border between those who would reenter Soviet society and those who would be excluded through death.

The criminal justice system now serves as the chief provider of health care services to a significant portion of society. This includes the provision of physical and mental health care for offender populations who require substantial health care resources. To date, little is known or understood with regard to how these services and programs are being delivered. This book addresses the gaps in our knowledge by presenting a range of studies detailing the daily practices that occur in places where criminal justice and public health systems intersect. This includes an assessment of sheriff agency emergency communication systems, a study of problem behaviours and health using a juvenile sample, the challenge of treating mentally ill prison inmates with note of important gender differences, the impact of case management on justice systems, and a review of substance abuse cessation programs among pregnant women currently serving probation and parole sentences. Also included is a policy piece in which the authors call for an integrated model that is neither criminological nor public health specific. These readings provide a range of empirical examples that highlight important successes and challenges facing the criminal justice and public health systems. They suggest that integration and partnerships represent the most efficacious means to reduce critical social problems such as violence, poor health, and criminality. This book was originally published as a special issue of Criminal Justice Studies.

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.

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?

The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political culture among dissidents since the 1970s-a culture that laid the foundation for the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The emergence of prison literature as a specific genre helped articulate opposition to authoritarian states, including the Assad regime. However, the significance of Syrian prison literature goes beyond a form of witnessing, expressing creative opposition, and illuminating the larger cultural and historical backstory of the Syrian uprising. Prison literature, in all its diversity, challenges the narrative structures and conventional language of human rights. In doing so, prison literature has played an essential role in generating the "experimental shift" in Arabic literature since the 1960s. Taleghani's groundbreaking work explores prison writing's critical role in resistance movements in Syria, the evolution of Arabic literature, and the development of a global human rights.

Most people in jail have not been convicted of a crime. Instead, they have been accused of a crime and cannot afford to post the bail amount to guarantee their freedom until trial. Punishing Poverty examines how the current system of pretrial release detains hundreds of thousands of defendants awaiting trial. Tracing the historical antecedents of the US bail system, with particular attention to the failures of bail reform efforts in the mid to late twentieth century, the authors describe the painful social and economic impact of contemporary bail decisions. The first book-length treatment to analyze how bail reproduces racial and economic inequality throughout the criminal justice system, Punishing Poverty explores reform efforts, as jurisdictions begin to move away from money bail systems, and the attempts of the bail bond industry to push back against such reforms. This accessibly written book gives a succinct overview of the role of pretrial detention in fueling mass incarceration and is essential reading for researchers and reformers alike.

Civilian Internment in Canada examines abuse of the civil rights and liberties of tens of thousands of Canadians and Canadian residents via internment from 1914 to the present day. This ongoing story spans both war and peacetime and has affected people from a wide variety of political backgrounds and ethno-cultural communities, bequeathing a complex legacy for survivors and their descendants. Despite the well-known impounding of tens of thousands of Japanese, Ukrainians, assorted eastern Europeans, Germans, and Italians as 'enemy aliens' during the two World Wars, civilian internment in this country has not been widely discussed, particularly in comparative ways. Indeed, there has been a propensity to sweep these events under the proverbial rug, keeping them out of the national discourse. Civilian Internment in Canada brings together senior scholars in the field of internment and civil liberties studies with emerging scholars, graduate students, community members, teachers, public historians, artists, former internees, descendants of internees, and redress activists to examine the processes and consequences of civilian internment during real and perceived wartime contexts, ranging from the Great War to the Cold War to the 'War on Terror.' It demonstrates the ways in which 'shared authority' between scholars and subjects can both reshape our understanding of crucial episodes in Canada's history and bring a sense of vibrancy and immediacy to the all-too current question of civil liberties and minority rights in today's security state.

Tyburn Fields is the best known site of execution in London, but London may be aptly named the executioner's city, so many were the places where executions could and did occur. "London: The Executioner's City" reveals the capital as a place where the bodies of criminals defined the boundaries of the city and heads on poles greeted patrons on London Bridge. The ubiquity of crime and punishment was taken for granted by countless generations of the capital's inhabitants, though it seems to have done little to stem the tide of criminality that has always threatened to engulf the city. The book is a powerful evocation of the dark side of London's history, where the great and not so good, the poor and helpless, the cruel and the idealistic crowd together to be punished in public. A king and more than one queen, heretics, archbishops, pirates, poisoners, plotters, murderers, and a cook executed for selling putrid fish met death by hanging, beheading, burning, or boiling in London, and on most occasions the crowd roared its approval.

"Although the topics dealt with are complex, the author has been very successful in presenting and exploring them clearly. Students may find particularly helpful the summary at the end of each chapter of the main points covered in that section. The Legal Executive"...the real strength of this book lies in the critical thinking that arises from the juxtaposition of two very much unfinished debates: the question of how victims are treated by the justice system, and the practices and implications of restorative justice. "...I feel this book is particularly important because it reframes a whole series of debates and practices which, otherwise, might be in danger of getting 'stuck'. That this is also undertaken by someone who is extremely knowledgeable about the subject matter and perceptive in relation to key issues is an added bonus." VistaTwo of the principal and most influential developments within criminal justice policy - taking in a variety of common law jurisdictions during the past thirty years - have been the rise of the 'victim movement' and the emergence of a distinctive set of practices that have become associated with the term 'restorative justice'. Understanding Victims and Restorative Justice examines the origins of and the relationship between these two sets of developments, and seeks to assess their strengths and weaknesses in meeting the needs of victims as part of the overall response to crime. Written in a lively and accessible style this book is of benefit to students from a range of disciplines including criminology, sociology and the law. Also helpful to professionals, practitioners and policymakers working in voluntary agencies within the criminal justice system.

A provocative analysis of how Christianity helped legitimize the death penalty in early modern Europe, then throughout the Christian world, by turning execution into a great cathartic public ritual and the condemned into a Christ-like figure who accepts death to save humanity. The public execution of criminals has been a common practice ever since ancient times. In this wide-ranging investigation of the death penalty in Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, noted Italian historian Adriano Prosperi identifies a crucial period when legal concepts of vengeance and justice merged with Christian beliefs in repentance and forgiveness. Crime and Forgiveness begins with late antiquity but comes into sharp focus in fourteenth-century Italy, with the work of the Confraternities of Mercy, which offered Christian comfort to the condemned and were for centuries responsible for burying the dead. Under the brotherhoods' influence, the ritual of public execution became Christianized, and the doomed person became a symbol of the fallen human condition. Because the time of death was known, this "ideal" sinner could be comforted and prepared for the next life through confession and repentance. In return, the community bearing witness to the execution offered forgiveness and a Christian burial. No longer facing eternal condemnation, the criminal in turn publicly forgave the executioner, and the death provided a moral lesson to the community. Over time, as the practice of Christian comfort spread across Europe, it offered political authorities an opportunity to legitimize the death penalty and encode into law the right to kill and exact vengeance. But the contradictions created by Christianity's central role in executions did not dissipate, and squaring the emotions and values surrounding state-sanctioned executions was not simple, then or now.

Digul was an internment colony for political prisoners that was established in 1926 in West Papua. This book argues that Digul is the key to understanding Indonesia's colonial governance between the failed communist rebellion of late 1926 and the declaration of independence in 1945, a time when the Dutch regime attempted to impose what they called "rust en orde," or peace and order, on the Indonesian people via the suppression of politics by the police. The political policing regime the Dutch Indies state created, Takashi Shiraishi shows, was simultaneously a success and a failure. While unrest was to some degree put down, the native terrain was never completely pacified, as activists linked up with each other in fluid networks that cut across spatial and ideational boundaries. How did the government deploy political policing to achieve its policy objectives? What were the consequences and challenges for Indonesian activists? How was the government able to fashion its policing apparatus as the most potent instrument to achieve peace and order when the Great Depression hit the Indies, nationalist and communist forces were gaining strength in other places of the world, and war was coming both in Europe and Asia? This book answers those questions and more, breaking new ground for our understanding of the history of the Dutch Indies state in the early part of the twentieth century.