The funny, insightful and moving account of what happens to a close, loving middle-class family when the father is unexpectedly thrown in jail. After fourteen years of marriage, Mel Jacob's life looked as perfect as the roses perched above her white picket fence. The nice house in the suburbs, two great kids, a good husband. Until... Her life took an unexpected detour when her seemingly saintly husband was jailed for two years. In Sickness, in Health . . . and in Jail follows Mel's funny, moving and insightful journey as she navigates single parenthood, prison visitations and nosy neighbours. Mel's revealing account is the story of the family left behind. It chronicles the grief, the stigma and the conversational minefields of her husband's whereabouts, as well as the logistical problems of making a baby sibling for her two children, and why it's not appropriate to tell people that Daddy's in jail. In Sickness, in Health . . . and in Jail is a funny and touching account of grief and love and forgiveness.

A one-stop resource of practical exercises for professionals to use in direct work with offenders aged 16+. Changing Offending Behaviour is a guide to the essentials of rehabilitation theory which also equips the reader with ready-to-use photocopiable exercises and activities to help put the theory into practice in rehabilitation work with adult offenders. Drawing on a range of evidence-based methodologies, theories and treatment approaches, including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Attachment Theory, Relationally-based Therapies, Social Learning Theory, Motivational Interviewing and the Cycle of Change, this resource provides exercises to increase self-understanding, examine patterns of behaviour, and build empathy and other crucial skills. All the exercises are culturally aware and designed for maximum flexibility to meet different needs and learning styles. Covering must-know theory and packed with practical exercises that work, this is an indispensable resource for probation workers and related professionals.

How do you break the vicious cycle of violence that affects the lives of many young people today? Transformative programmes can help young people to change the way they think about themselves and their futures, and offer support to help them to become resilient and positive young leaders of their community. This manual, based on approaches used successfully by Leap Confronting Conflict, is a guide to designing and setting up transformative programmes and targeted interventions with young people. Part 1 provides guidance and advice on developing a transformative programme and demonstrates how it can help young people break free of violence. Part 2 outlines a full programme on building leadership skills made up of four workshops: Leadership, Advanced Leadership, Leadership in Action, and Fear and Fashion: Tackling knife carrying and use. The manual is packed with exercises and activities and includes full guidance notes and tips on setting up and facilitating the workshops. It will be invaluable for all those working with young people at risk of violence, those managing and delivering programmes for young people, and policy makers, academics and students in youth and conflict fields.

Maintaining a balance between managing and assessing risk and upholding the required high standards of practice in health and social care can be demanding, particularly in the current climate of increased preoccupation with the difficult tensions between rights, protection and risk-taking. Good Practice in Assessing Risk is a comprehensive guide to good practice for those working with risk, covering a wide variety of health, social care and criminal justice settings including child protection, mental health, work with sex offenders and work with victims of domestic violence. The contributors discuss a range of key issues relating to risk including positive risk-taking, collaborating with victims and practitioners in the design of assessment tools, resilience to risk, and defensibility. The book also explores the role of bureaucracy in hindering high quality professional practice, complex decision-making in situations of stress or potential blame, and involving service users in assessment. This book reflects the latest policy and practice within health, social care and criminal justice and will be an invaluable volume to all professionals working in these fields.

Gain a practical and comprehensive understanding of the juvenile justice system with JUVENILE JUSTICE, Sixth Edition. Highly accessible and reader friendly, this book explores various programs and processes that exist in today's juvenile justice system, including prevention efforts through school and community-based programs. The Sixth edition features a prestigious new coauthor--John Paul Wright from the University of Cincinnati--and provides a new emphasis on evidence-based practice and other cutting-edge issues such as cyberbullying, school violence, female delinquency, and more.

Victim awareness and the needs of victims of crime are a major societal concern. What Have I Done? is a photocopiable resource and downloadable online content to encourage empathy in young people who commit crimes or hurt others through their actions. It is designed to be used directly with young people who have committed a specific crime or caused harm and distress to others through their actions, and challenges the young person to face the harm they have caused and consider what they can do to help put things right. The course is flexible and interactive, and can be used on an individual basis or with small groups, and is suitable for young people with limited literacy. The exercises are challenging, and aim to be engaging through the use of creative arts, film, role-play and discussion. Clear guidance is provided for the course leader, and evaluation is built into the course, including a psychometric test. A downloadable online content to help stimulate discussion is also included. What Have I Done? will be ideal for victim empathy work in Youth Offending Teams and Young Offender Institutions, and can equally be used in schools, children's homes, youth groups and any context with young people. The programme is measurable, featuring pre- and post-programme empathy scales, and is suitable for young offenders subject to a youth rehabilitation order.

The United States has the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world. But are we any safer? Journalist Maya Schenwar proves that locking people up actually makes society less safe - and that there are alternatives that do a better job of deterring crime and providing justice for victims. Schenwar looks at how incarceration breaks the bonds that hold people together and deprives incarcerated people of exactly the kind of support and life skills necessary to reintegrate into society - which is why more than two-thirds of prisoners are re-arrested within three years of release. She draws heavily on her personal experience (her sister has spent the better part of ten years entangled in the system), as well as the struggles of other prisoners and their families. Far from advocating the complete abolition of prisons, Schenwar simply argues that they shouldn't be the only approach. She describes how highly effective alternative justice programs in the US and other countries do a better job of both preventing recidivism and providing meaningful restitution to victims. Above all, however, Schenwar seeks to convince her readers that prisoners, for all their hurtful deeds, shouldn't be treated as "non-persons." Her book is a passionate argument that "throwing away the key" ultimately hurts individuals and society.

R U Listenin'? challenges men to reflect on their personal and emotional behaviour and uses prison life as an analogy to help them rethink their perspectives. Aimed at professionals working with men who are challenging the boundaries of society or any man who feels frustrated by his life, the book offers detailed illustrative case studies, structured exercises and topics for discussion, which can be used by the individual or in a group context. These features are identified in the text by pictorial icons, making the book easy to navigate. The exercises are imaginative and challenging, encouraging men to develop social and communication skills and an understanding of how the structures of society work. The author also suggests exercises and techniques for dealing with challenging groups, which are ideal for use by group facilitators. This book provides positive guidance for troubled men and is an essential tool for professionals working with young offenders and men with challenging behaviour.

The Joy of Stats offers a reader-friendly introduction to applied statistics and quantitative analysis in the social sciences and public policy. Perfect as an undergraduate text or self-study manual, it emphasizes how to understand concepts, interpret algorithms and formulas, analyze data, and answer research questions. This brand new edition offers examples and visualizations using real-life data, a revised discussion of statistical inference, and introductory examples in R and SPSS. The third edition has been extensively reorganized with shorter chapters and closer links between concepts and formulas, while retaining useful pedagogical features including key terms, practice exercises, a math refresher, and playful inserts on "the mathematical imagination." The Joy of Stats also places a strong emphasis on learning how to write and speak clearly about data results. Supported by a companion website with data sets and additional resources, The Joy of Stats is a superb choice for introducing students to applied statistics and for refreshing and reviewing stats as a social scientist, public policy professional, or community activist.

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is an important actor in the American gun debate. While popular explanations for the group's influence often focus on the NRA's lobbying and campaign donations, it receives lesser attention for the mass mobilization efforts that make these political endeavours possible. On Target explores why the NRA is so influential and how we can understand the group's impact on firearms policy in the United States. The book looks at how the NRA both draws upon and shapes historical meta-narratives regarding the role of firearms in America's national identity and how this is part of a larger effort to expand the community of gun owners. Noah S. Schwartz demonstrates how the NRA portrays a vision of the past through events such as its annual meeting; communications such as American Rifleman magazine and NRA TV; and points of contact including the National Firearms Museum. Based on fieldwork in Indiana and Virginia, including participant observation at NRA events and firearm safety classes, thematic analysis of audio-visual material, and interviews with NRA executives and members, On Target sheds light on the ways in which the NRA tells stories to build and mobilize a politically motivated network of gun owners.

Individuals who have committed a number of crimes over their lifetimes have had complex, multi-faceted life experiences often characterized by extreme disadvantage and victimization. Those who are formally designated as "high-risk" by the Canadian criminal justice system often have a record of violent or sexual crimes. As a result, they are usually subject to additional monitoring in the community after completing a prison sentence. Pathways to Ruin? disentangles the numerous elements and pathways that lead to high rates of reoffending by focusing on developmental periods of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The book uses a case-study approach to consider individuals' entire crime pathway by examining the circumstances and factors that contribute to assumptions or official designations of "high-risk" behaviour. Erin Gibbs Van Brunschot and Tamara Humphrey overhaul society's popular crime narratives and instead draw on sociological and criminological perspectives to identify historical, social, and personal contexts that appear to increase the likelihood of reoffending. They also consider how negative life experiences may be addressed to circumvent trajectories of serious offending. Reducing the social distance that the "law-abiding" public may feel towards marginalized groups, Pathways to Ruin? details how legal systems could better serve these individuals, and acknowledges the many missed opportunities for compassion.

A searing, intimate memoir tracing the author’s attempt to find out the truth about her father’s murder.

Robin McGregor, an older man living in a small town outside Cape Town, is brutally murdered in his home. Cecil Thomas is convicted for the crime, but his trial leaves more questions than answers. His daughter, Liz, tries to move beyond her grief but she still wants answers. What drove Thomas to torture and kill a complete stranger?

The author meets the murderer’s family and discovers that he comes from a loving, comfortable home. He is educated and skilled – there is no apparent reason for his descent into delinquency. After protracted obstruction from the prison authorities, she finally gets to confront him but not without putting herself in danger. She finds answers, but not the answers she is looking for.

Unforgiven tells a story seldom told: what happens to a family when one of their own is murdered?

This is a detailed ethnographic study of a therapeutic prison unit in Canada for the treatment of sexual offenders. Utilizing extensive interviews and participant-observation over an eighteen month period of field work, the author takes the reader into the depths of what prison inmates commonly refer to as the hound pound. James Waldram provides a rich and powerful glimpse into the lives and treatment experiences of one of societyOCOs most hated groups. He brings together a variety of theoretical perspectives from psychological and medical anthropology, narrative theory, and cognitive science to capture the nature of sexual offender treatment, from the moment inmates arrive at the treatment facility to the day they are relased. This book explores the implications of an outside world that balks at any notion that sexual offenders can somehow be treated and rendered harmless. The author argues that the aggressive and confrontational nature of the prisonOCOs treatment approach is counterproductive to the goal of what he calls habilitation -- the creation of pro-social and moral individuals rendered safe for our communities. "

This unique analysis of the rise of the juvenile justice system from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries uses one of the harshest states - California - as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color. Using rich new untapped archives, "States of Delinquency" is the first book to explore the experiences of young Mexican Americans, African Americans, and ethnic Euro-Americans in California correctional facilities including Whittier State School for Boys and the Preston School of Industry. Miroslava Chavez-Garcia examines the ideologies and practices used by state institutions as they began to replace families and communities in punishing youth, and explores the application of science and pseudo-scientific research in the disproportionate classification of youths of color as degenerate. She also shows how these boys and girls, and their families, resisted increasingly harsh treatment and various kinds of abuse, including sterilization.

* emphasis on collaboration, co-creative innovation and organisational development. * discussion on academic/practitioner relations. * offers practical means of applying my discussion to real-world practice and research as well as means of boundary-crossing between academic and practitioners in the field. * offers a multinational, inter-sector, perspective on innovation, collaboration and learning in the penal system.

"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.

Trapped in a Vice explores the consequences of a juvenile justice system that is aimed at promoting change in the lives of young people, yet ultimately relies upon tools and strategies that enmesh them in a system that they struggle to move beyond. The system, rather than the crimes themselves, is the vice. Trapped in a Vice explores the lives of the young people and adults in the criminal justice system, revealing the ways that they struggle to manage the expectations of that system; these stories from the ground level of the justice system demonstrate the complex exchange of policy and practice.

From Confederation to the partial abolition of the death penalty a century later, defendants convicted of sexually motivated killings and sexually violent homicides in Canada were more likely than any other condemned criminals to be executed for their crimes. Despite the emergence of psychiatric expertise in criminal trials, moral disgust and anger proved more potent in courtrooms, the public mind, and the hearts of the bureaucrats and politicians responsible for determining the outcome of capital cases. Wherever death has been set as the ultimate criminal penalty, the poor, minority groups, and stigmatized peoples have been more likely to be accused, convicted, and executed. Although the vast majority of convicted sex killers were white, Canada's racist notions of "the Indian mind" meant that Indigenous defendants faced the presumption of guilt. Black defendants were also subjected to discriminatory treatment, including near lynchings. In debates about capital punishment, abolitionists expressed concern that prejudices and poverty created the prospect of wrongful convictions. Unique in the ways it reveals the emotional drivers of capital punishment in delivering inequitable outcomes, The Death Penalty and Sex Murder in Canadian History provides a thorough overview of sex murder and the death penalty in Canada. It serves as an essential history and a richly documented cautionary tale for the present.

Although there is plentiful research on the impact of marriage, employment and the military on desistance from criminal behaviour in the lives of men, far less is known about the factors most important to women's desistance. Imprisoned women are far more likely than their male counterparts to be the primary caretakers of children before their incarceration, and are far more likely to intend to reunify with their children upon their release from incarceration. This book focuses on the role of mothering in women's desistance from criminal behaviour. Drawing on original research, this book explores the nature of mothering during incarceration, how mothers maintain a relationship with their children from behind bars and the ways in which mothering makes desistance more or less likely after incarceration. It outlines the ways in which race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, gender identity, and other characteristics affect mothering and desistance, and explores the tensions between individual and system-level factors in the consideration of desistance. This book suggests that any discussion of desistance, particularly for women, must move beyond the traditional focus on individual characteristics and decision-making. Such a focus overlooks the role played by context and systems which undermine both women's attempts to be mothers and their attempts to desist. By contrast, in the tradition of Beth Richie's Compelled to Crime, this book explores both the trees and the forests, and the quantum in-between, in a way that aims for lasting societal and individual changes.

Innocent people are regularly convicted of crimes they did not commit. A number of systemic factors have been found to contribute to wrongful convictions, including eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, informant testimony, official misconduct, and faulty forensic evidence. In Miscarriages of Justice in Canada, Kathryn M. Campbell offers an extensive overview of wrongful convictions, bringing together current sociological, criminological, and legal research, as well as current case-law examples. For the first time, information on all known and suspected cases of wrongful conviction in Canada is included and interspersed with discussions of how wrongful convictions happen, how existing remedies to rectify them are inadequate, and how those who have been victimized by these errors are rarely compensated. Campbell reveals that the causes of wrongful convictions are, in fact, avoidable, and that those in the criminal justice system must exercise greater vigilance and openness to the possibility of error if the problem of wrongful conviction is to be resolved.

A comprehensive resource for practitioners working with sexual offenders. Discusses assessments and interventions, as well as providing a comprehensive literature review There are around 10,000 convictions or cautions for sexual offences in the UK each year; early evidence suggests that treatment programmes can halve re-conviction rates Edited by a University of Birmingham team who are world leaders in researching this area; the subject is of interest worldwide, with strong markets in Canada and New Zealand Includes material on managing offenders with developmental disabilities and those with Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of sex-offending expert and founder of the Gracewell Clinic, Ray Wyre. It is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the main events described in this book and 40 years since newspaper girl Genette Tate `disappeared into thin air'. Tim Tate and Charmaine Richardson (Wyre's widow) have meticulously re-visited a work that has been out of print for a decade, adding fresh Introduction, Preface and endpiece, `Twenty-five Years Later ....' They show how events have changed, including the further conviction of child serial-killer Robert Black for the murder of Jennifer Cardy and changes in policing methods, but criticise a continuing, possibly worse, failure to protect children from paedophiles in the internet age. They voice real concern that Ray Wyre's call to learn more about sex-offenders, their methods of operation and strategies of denial, distortion, deflection of blame and need for treatment, have not been heeded. Ultimately, the book paints a picture of political regression.

This book describes the complex process of desistance from sexual crime as told by 74 men incarcerated for sexual offenses and released back into the community. Unlike much of the research on this topic, Harris places strong emphasis on how men who have committed serious sexual offenses come to stop offending and end their 'criminal career'. Drawing on in-depth interviews, Harris outlines three main strategies that the men employ in order to pursue offense-free lives. The Retirement Strategy is divided into those who appear to simply 'resign' and those who go on to 'rebuild' their lives. The Regulation Strategy characterizes desistance as a product of one's ability to navigate increasingly restrictive legislation ('restricted,' 'rehearsed,' 'resistant,' and 'reclusive' desistance). The men who describe their desistance in terms of Recovery do so either through 'rehabilitation' or through 'resilience.' This original and engaging study will be of great interest not only to academics who study sexual aggression but also those who have survived sexual abuse themselves, and anyone working with survivors of sexual abuse, individuals convicted of sexual offenses, their families, and their communities.