"Offending Women" is an eye-opening journey into the lived reality of prison for women in the United States today. Lynne Haney looks at incarcerated mothers, housed together with their children, who are serving terms in alternative, community-based prisons-a type of facility that is becoming increasingly widespread. Incorporating vivid, sometimes shocking observations of daily life, she probes the dynamics of power over women's minds and bodies that play out in two such institutions in California. She finds that these 'alternative' prisons, contrary to their aims, often end up disempowering women, transforming their social vulnerabilities into personal pathologies, and pushing them into a state of disentitlement. Uncovering the complex gendered under-pinning of methods of control and intervention used in the criminal justice system today, "Offending Women" links that system to broader discussions on contemporary government and state power and asks why these strategies have arisen at this particular moment in time, and considers what forms of citizenship they have given rise to.

One out of every ten prisoners in the United States is serving a life sentence-roughly 130,000 people. While some have been sentenced to life in prison without parole, the majority of prisoners serving 'life' will be released back into society. But what becomes of those people who reenter the everyday world after serving life in prison? In After Life Imprisonment, Marieke Liem carefully examines the experiences of "lifers" upon release. Through interviews with over sixty homicide offenders sentenced to life but granted parole, Liem tracks those able to build a new life on the outside and those who were re-incarcerated. The interviews reveal prisoners' reflections on being sentenced to life, as well as the challenges of employment, housing, and interpersonal relationships upon release. Liem explores the increase in handing out of life sentences, and specifically provides a basis for discussions of the goals, costs, and effects of long-term imprisonment, ultimately unpacking public policy and discourse surrounding long-term incarceration. A profound criminological examination, After Life Imprisonment reveals the untold, lived experiences of prisoners before and after their life sentences.

The 1990s witnessed a flurry of legislative initiatives - most notably, ""Megan's Law"" - designed to control a population of sex offenders (child abusers) widely reviled as sick, evil, and incurable. In Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control, Diana Rickard provides the reader with an in-depth view of six such men, exploring how they manage to cope with their highly stigmatized role as social outcasts. The six men discussed in the book are typical convicted sex offenders - neither serial pedophiles nor individuals convicted of the type of brutal act that looms large in public perceptions about sex crimes. Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control explores how these individuals, who have been cast as social pariahs, construct their sense of self. How does being labeled in this way and controlled by measures such as Megan's Law affect one's identity and sense of social being? Unlike traditional criminological and psychological studies of this population, this book frames their experiences in concepts of both deviance and identity, asking how men so highly stigmatized cope with the most extreme form of social marginality. Placing their stories within the context of the current culture of mass incarceration and zero-tolerance, Rickard provides a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between public policy and lived experience, as well as an understanding of the social challenges faced by this population, whose re-integration into society is far from simple or assured. Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control makes a significant contribution to our understanding of sex offenders, offering a unique window into how individuals make meaning out of their experiences and present a viable - not monstrous - social self to themselves and others.

One out of every ten prisoners in the United States is serving a life sentence-roughly 130,000 people. While some have been sentenced to life in prison without parole, the majority of prisoners serving 'life' will be released back into society. But what becomes of those people who reenter the everyday world after serving life in prison? In After Life Imprisonment, Marieke Liem carefully examines the experiences of "lifers" upon release. Through interviews with over sixty homicide offenders sentenced to life but granted parole, Liem tracks those able to build a new life on the outside and those who were re-incarcerated. The interviews reveal prisoners' reflections on being sentenced to life, as well as the challenges of employment, housing, and interpersonal relationships upon release. Liem explores the increase in handing out of life sentences, and specifically provides a basis for discussions of the goals, costs, and effects of long-term imprisonment, ultimately unpacking public policy and discourse surrounding long-term incarceration. A profound criminological examination, After Life Imprisonment reveals the untold, lived experiences of prisoners before and after their life sentences.

A new paradigm for supervising offenders in the community Environmental Corrections is an innovative guide filled with rich insights and strategies for probation and parole officers to effectively integrate offenders back into the community and reduce recidivism. Authors Lacey Schaefer, Francis T. Cullen, and John E. Eck move beyond traditional models for interventions and build directly on the applied focus of environmental criminology theories. Using this approach, the authors answer the question of what officers can do to decrease opportunities for an offender to commit a crime. Readers will learn how to recognize and assess specific criminal opportunities in an offender's past and gain the tools and strategies they need to design an individualized supervision plan that channels offenders away from these criminogenic situations.

Through an empirical inquiry into three categories of offending women, Offending Women in Contemporary China: Gender and Pathways into Crime explores the socioeconomic conditions that facilitate womens' pathways into crime, and examines the interplay between gender, class, rapid social changes and female law-breaking in neoliberal China.

From nineteenth-century broad arrows and black and white stripes to twenty first-century orange jumpsuits, prison clothing has both mirrored and bolstered the power of penal institutions over prisoners' lives. Vividly illustrated and based on original research, including throughout the voices of the incarcerated, this book is a pioneering history and investigation of prison dress, which demystifies the experience of what it is like to be an imprisoned criminal. Juliet Ash takes the reader on a journey from the production of prison clothing to the bodies of its wearers. She uncovers a history characterized by waves of reform, sandwiched between regimes that use clothing as punishment and discovers how inmates use their dress to surmount, subvert or survive these punishment cultures. She reveals the hoods, the masks, and pink boxer shorts, near nakedness, even twenty first-century "civvies" to be not just other types of uniform but political embodiments of the surveillance of everyday life.

In this up-to-date new Edition, Wright and his team of expert contributing authors incorporate results of the latest studies on sex offender policies in their critical analyses of current laws, and assess the most effective approaches in preventing sex offender recidivism. This provocative book has been updated throughout to reflect the latest research in the fields of criminal justice, law, forensic psychology, and social work. It is the only book on the market that offers such a focused and comprehensive examination of current sex offender laws and policies and what is known about their efficacy. This new and expanded Edition of the book presents alternative models and approaches to sex offense laws and policies, including a brand new chapter on Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner programs. The authors explore critical, cutting-edge topics, such as sexting, internet sexual solicitation, the death penalty, and community responses to sex offense.

Bringing together new research, this book advances current theoretical understandings of punishment and control in society. It provides a critical analysis of institutions, punishment and the law, and explores the delivery of punishment and experience of incarceration in Western societies from the early-nineteenth century.

Moving backwards from the murders they committed through their adult lives, relationship histories, and their childhoods, the author sought to understand what motivates the men to kill. The patterns he found reveal that the murders were neither impulsive crimes of passion nor were they indiscriminate. "Why Do They Kill?" is the first book to profile different types of wife killers, and to examine the courtship patterns of abusive men. The author shows that wife murders are not, for the most part, "crimes of passion," but culminations of lifelong predisposing factors of the men who murder, and that many elements of their crimes are foretold by their past behavior in intimate relationships.

Key turning points of these relationships include the first emergence of the man's violence, his blaming of the victim, her attempts to resist, his escalation, her attempts to end the relationship, and his punishment for her defiance. Critical perspective on the men's accounts comes from interviews with victims of attempted homicide (standing in for the murder victims) who survived shootings, stabbings, and strangulation. These women detail their partner's escalating patterns of child abuse, sexual violence, terroristic threats, and stalking. The section on help-seeking patterns of victims helps to dispel notions of ilearned helplessnessi among victims."

Prostitutes, shoplifters, vagrants, murderesses-Dodge tracks the history of such "improper" women as she explores the history of female incarceration in Illinois from 1835 to the present. In court and in prison, these women-some who are considered beyond all hope of reformation-have received vastly different treatment than their male counterparts. A woman's fate in court often hung on officials' estimates of her moral and sexual reputation. Alleged promiscuity, illegitimate births, venereal disease, interracial relationships, or use of alcohol could condemn her in the eyes of judge and jury. Ethnic and social prejudice played a role, too, as most incarcerated women poor, workingclass, immigrants, or members of a racial minority. In women's prisons, the slightest misbehavior-from poor table manners to inappropriate dress-could lead to disciplinary action. Guards vigilantly monitored female friendships, suspecting lesbianism in the most innocent acts. Instead of creating docile and dutiful subjects, such treatment stirred resistance among the prisoners and fostered a powerful inmate subculture. Highly readable yet theoretically sophisticated, Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind provides a striking collective portrait of incarcerated women. Drawn from extensive primary sources, the voices of female prisoners emerge powerfully and poignantly as individuals tell their stories.

"Interrupted Life" is a gripping collection of writings by and about imprisoned women in the United States, a country that jails a larger percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. This eye-opening work brings together scores of voices from both inside and outside the prison system including incarcerated and previously incarcerated women, their advocates and allies, abolitionists, academics, and other analysts. In vivid, often highly personal essays, poems, stories, reports, and manifestos, they offer an unprecedented view of the realities of women's experiences as they try to sustain relations with children and family on the outside, struggle for healthcare, fight to define and achieve basic rights, deal with irrational sentencing systems, remake life after prison; and more. Together, these powerful writings are an intense and visceral examination of life behind bars for women, and, taken together, they underscore the failures of imagination and policy that have too often underwritten our current prison system.

The application of psychological principles to research and practice in crime prevention, detection, legal processes and offender treatment is a feature of the growing number of advanced undergraduate courses and graduate courses, and professional training programmes. This book reflects the need to provide an overview of psychological knowledge and its forensic applications and implications, to psychology students and its forensic applications and implications, to psychology students and to related professional disciplines such as psychiatry, nursing, policing, law, prison work and probation.
The Editors are very well known academics and clinicians. The chapters are written by contributors who are recognised leaders in their own fields, and they have provided accessible accounts of the applications and implications of behavioural sciences for their peers, and for professionals and students in other disciplines. Multi-professional case work and innovative approaches to crime and offenders are being supported by research, by poicy and by legislation. There is a growing need to provide a wide range of professionals with a common framework and knowledge base to aid their shared understanding of crime and offenders, and of related interventions.
"Behaviour, Crime and Legal Processes will be of great interest to psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers and others concerned with understanding and treating offenders. The book is readable, scholarly and wide-ranging, covering legal issues, psychology and the police, witness evidence, decision-making in court, criminological theories, risk assessment and the treatment of mentally disordered and sex offenders." - Professor David Farrington, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, UK

Why I Chase Comedians and Other Bipolar Tales is written with self-observational humour and a comical self-deprecating irony. Frankie Owens takes the reader inside the turbulent mind of someone afflicted by hypermania. He deals with the extremities of the bipolar condition - highs, lows, in-betweens - allowing readers to understand its overwhelming nature. Written in the style of his acclaimed Little Book of Prison, this new work follows a relapse when the author (founder of the Read and Grow Society and by now a respected, law-abiding exponent of Criminology and Literacy) found himself back in prison following a manic episode. The book shows how he struggled with booming ideas, breathtaking feats of imagination, coming down to Earth and dealing with the wreckage. It contrasts the out-and-out ability of this well-respected expert in criminology and literacy with bizarre behaviour as he serves time a second time around and rebuilds his life once more. A rare journey into the bipolar mind which 'opens-up' on mental health. A raw, challenging, humorous account.

This Element examines an increasingly important community crime prevention strategy - focused deterrence. This strategy seeks to change offender behavior by understanding underlying crime-producing dynamics and conditions that sustain recurring crime problems, and implementing a blended set of law enforcement, community mobilization, and social service actions. The approach builds on recent theorizing on optimizing deterrence, mobilizing informal social control, enhancing police legitimacy, and reducing crime opportunities through situational crime prevention. There are three main types of focused deterrence strategies: group violence intervention programs, drug market intervention programs, and individual offender programs. A growing number of rigorous program evaluations find focused deterrence to be an effective crime prevention strategy. However, a number of steps need to be taken to ensure focused deterrence strategies are implemented properly. These steps include creating a network of capacity through partnering agencies, conducting upfront and ongoing problem analysis, and developing accountability structures and sustainability plans.

Presented from the perspectives of a former FBI profiler and a forensic violence-risk expert, Profiling Violent Crime: A Behavioral and Forensic Approach educates readers about the nature of criminal profiling including how it works, the techniques it draws on, the types of offenders it applies to, and the psychological make-ups of those offenders. Drawing from technique, as well as from theory and the latest clinical research, Profiling Violent Crime delves into precisely what it means to profile. Students learn what it's like to be on the ground as an FBI profiler, dispelling myths and detailing the actual process. Subsequent chapters detail crime scene analysis; determination of the type of offender that may be at work; the fascinating interplay between mental illness and criminality; and breakdowns of the various types of criminal offenders including stalkers, murderers, rapists, mass murderers, and serial killers. The book also offers multiple real-life case examples to shed light further into the criminal mind. Rooted in the authors' personal experience in law enforcement and forensic psychology Profiling Violent Crime is an excellent text for courses in criminal justice, psychological profiling, and forensic psychology. It provides readers with real, intimate insight into criminal profiling, addressing its strengths and drawbacks, as well as offering a glimpse of where this crucial field has yet to go.

Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration in the United States has skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, both historically and in comparison to that of other developed nations. At far higher rates than the general population, those in or entering U.S. jails and prisons are prone to many health problems. This is a problem not just for them, but also for the communities from which they come and to which, in nearly all cases, they will return.
"Health and Incarceration" is the summary of a workshop jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences(NAS) Committee on Law and Justice and the Institute of Medicine(IOM) Board on Health and Select Populations in December 2012. Academics, practitioners, state officials, and nongovernmental organization representatives from the fields of healthcare, prisoner advocacy, and corrections reviewed what is known about these health issues and what appear to be the best opportunities to improve healthcare for those who are now or will be incarcerated. The workshop was designed as a roundtable with brief presentations from 16 experts and time for group discussion. "Health and Incarceration" reviews what is known about the health of incarcerated individuals, the healthcare they receive, and effects of incarceration on public health. This report identifies opportunities to improve healthcare for these populations and provides a platform for visions of how the world of incarceration health can be a better place.

As recently as five years ago mass incarceration was widely considered to be a central, permanent feature of the political and social landscape. The number of people in U.S. prisons is still without historic parallel anywhere in the world or in U.S. history. But in the last few years, the population has decreased, in some states by almost a third. A broad consensus is emerging to reduce prison rolls. Politicians have called for repealing the harshest sentencing laws of the war on drugs, abolishing mandatory minimums and closing correctional facilities. Does the decrease in the prison population herald the dismantling of mass incarceration? This book provides an answer. Drawing on original research from across New York State, the contributors argue that while massive decarceration is taking place, the outcome to date is not the one wished for by reformers, namely a more just system. While drug law reform is clearly upon us, for example, a moral panic about heroin addiction and phantom meth labs has recently reached a fever pitch. As the penitentiary population drops and prisons close, the number of people in jail has swelled. New intelligence-led policing, and the rise of a reentry industry together have led to more surveillance and less social justice. Together these developments lead to justice disinvestment as the state sheds direct responsibility for the criminal justice system to the private and non-profit sector, while it extends its reach through new forms of community-based supervision, surveillance and policing into poor neighborhoods and communities of color. Celebration may be premature, in other words. Having endowed a group that is already disproportionately poor and people of color with the stigma of criminality, the state has left the formerly incarcerated and their communities to their fate. The future we face appears to be neither emancipatory reform nor simply the continuation of past mass incarceration. The challenge of freedom, on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction, remains before us.

Violent Offenders and Their Victims is a holistic and human exploration of the nature of violence and its genesis. Chad C. Breckenridge provides a complete psychoanalytic, child developmental, and neurobehavioral understanding of empathic failure and violence. Breckenridge reviews current thinking about the criminal personality from both a psychological and sociological perspective and provides a foundation for the possibility of change and growth in offenders.

This book provides an assessment of contemporary international knowledge about the experiences of life after release from prison. For over 100 years people leaving prison have been supervised by probation services, but little has been written about how those who are supervised experience this process, or how this process influences experiences post-release. Research suggests that the success or failure of supervision in terms of reoffending may be related to how it is experienced, but little has been written about how supervision interacts with these experiences. Despite this lack of grounded knowledge, post-prison supervision continues to grow internationally. This book addresses issues relating to life after release through providing a vision of contemporary life after prison in different social and economic climates from those who are the subjects of this growing and changing form of penal power. An engaging and timely study, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of criminal justice and punishment.

Prisoner enfranchisement remains one of the few contested electoral issues in twenty-first-century democracies. It is at the intersection of punishment and representative government. Many jurisdictions remain divided on whether or not prisoners should be allowed access to the franchise. This book investigates the experience of prisoner enfranchisement in the Republic of Ireland. It examines the issue in a comparative context, beginning by locating prisoner enfranchisement in a theoretical framework, exploring the arguments for and against allowing prisoners to vote. Drawing on global developments in jurisprudence and penal policy, it examines the background to, and wider significance of, this change in the law. Using the Irish experience to examine the issue in a wider context, this book argues that the legal position concerning the voting rights of the imprisoned reveals wider historical, political and social influences in the treatment of those confined in penal institutions. -- .

This book addresses the core issues in prisoner reentry into society after incarceration. The chapters are written by academic scholars who have much experience researching and writing about prisoner reentry and by people who work in the field of prison reentry. Comprising reviews of empirical literature, this study is also supplemented by the workings of a reentry agency in the state of California. The focus of the work is to provide the best practices within prisoner reentry programs, to explore the barriers experienced by both prisoners and reentry agencies as they work toward the reentry of prisoners, and to discuss critical issues associated with prisoner reentry. The authors broach various topics regarding life after imprisonment, such as: the financial burden, problems faced by sex offenders, changing family dynamics and employment. An engaging and thought-provoking study, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of criminology theory, the justice system and sociology.

This Brief provides an overview and history of the definition of serial homicide, from the perspectives of psychology, medicine, criminology and forensics. It reviews research to provide a standard definition of serial homicide (as opposed to multiple or mass homicide), and provide insights on profiles of victims and offenders for police practitioners. It also includes a discussion of the media approach to covering serial homicide. The Brief is divided into four major sections covering: definitions and overview of serial homicide, profiling perpetrators according to different typologies, profiling victims, applied case studies, and recommendations for investigation and prevention. The author's approach is aimed primarily at researchers in police studies, but will be of interest to researchers in related fields such as criminal justice, sociology, psychology, and public policy.

For years, criminologists have studied the relationship between crime and below-average intelligence, concluding that offenders possess IQ scores 8-10 points below those of non-offenders. Little, however, is known about the criminal behavior of those with above-average IQ scores. This book provides some of the first empirical information about the self-reported crimes of people with genius-level IQ scores. Combining quantitative data from 72 different offenses with qualitative data from 44 follow-up interviews, this book describes the nature of high-IQ crime while shedding light on a population of offenders often ignored in research and sensationalized in media.

This work compiles experiences and lessons learned in meeting the unique needs of women and children regarding crime prevention and criminal justice, in particular the treatment and social reintegration of offenders, and serves a as a cross-disciplinary work for academic and policy-making analyses and follow-up in developing and developed countries. Furthermore, it argues for a more humane and effective approach to countering delinquency and crime among future generations. In a world where development positively depends on the rule of law and the related investment security, two global trends may chart the course of development: urbanization and education. Urbanization will globalize the concepts of "justice" and "fairness"; education will be dominated by the urban mindset and digital service economy, just as a culture of lawfulness will. This work looks at crime prevention education as an investment in the sustainable quality of life of succeeding generations, and at those who pursue such crime prevention as the providers of much-needed skills in the educational portfolio. Adopting a reformist approach, this work collects articles with findings and recommendations that may be relevant to domestic and international policymaking, including the United Nations Studies and their educational value for the welfare of coming generations. The books address the relevant United Nations ideas by combining them with academic approaches. Guided by the Editors' respective fields of expertise, and in full recognition of academic freedom and "organized scepticism", it includes contributions by lawyers, criminologists, sociologists and other eminent experts seeking to bridge the gap between academic and policy perspectives, as appropriate, against the international background, including the United Nations developments. The first volume opens with a foreword by Marta Santos Pais, the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children, and a general introduction by the editors. Part I provides an overview of United Nations principles for crime prevention and the treatment of women and children. Part II concentrates on education and the social learning of children and adolescents. The importance of quality education is stressed as is its impact on the behaviour of children of all ages. It also includes a discussion of the factors that still hinder access to good schooling in many parts of the world. Part III presents international research findings on children, juveniles and women both as victims and offenders. Statistics show overwhelmingly that these groups are more often victims than offenders.