'Unbearably moving' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The story of a young man's coming of age, a tender tribute to a life lost, and a devastating analysis of a broken system. Aged 15 and living in LA, Michael Allen was arrested for a botched carjacking. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to thirteen years behind bars. After growing up in prison Michael was then released aged 26, only to be murdered three years later. In this deeply personal yet clear-eyed memoir, Danielle Allen reconstructs her cousin's life to try and understand how this tragedy came to pass. We get to know Michael himself through the eyes of a devoted relative, moving from his first steps to his first love through to the day of his arrest, his coming of age in prison, and his attempts to make up for lost time after his release. We learn what it's like to grow up in a city carved up by invisible gang borders; and we learn how a generation has been lost. With honesty and insight, Cuz circles around its subject, exposing it from all angles to reveal the shocking reality of a broken system. The result is a devastatingly powerful yet reasoned tribute to a life lost too soon. 'The book pleads with us to find the moral imagination to break the American pattern of racial abuse. Allen's ambitious, breathtaking book challenges the moral composition of the world it inhabits by telling all who listen: I loved my cousin and he loved me, and I know he'd be alive if you loved him, too' Kiese Laymon

Young Criminal Lives is the first cradle-to-grave study of the experiences of some of the thousands of delinquent, difficult and destitute children passing through the early English juvenile reformatory system. The book breaks new ground in crime research, speaking to pressing present-day concerns around child poverty and youth justice, and resonating with a powerful public fascination for family history. Using innovative digital methods to unlock the Victorian life course, the authors have reconstructed the lives, families and neighbourhoods of 500 children living within, or at the margins of, the early English juvenile reformatory system. Four hundred of them were sent to reformatory and industrial schools in the north west of England from courts around the UK over a fifty-year period from the 1860s onwards. Young Criminal Lives is based on one of the most comprehensive sets of official and personal data ever assembled for a historical study of this kind. For the first time, these children can be followed on their journey in and out of reform and then though their adulthood and old age. The book centres on institutions celebrated in this period for their pioneering new approaches to child welfare and others that were investigated for cruelty and scandal. Both were typical of the new kind of state-certified provision offered, from the 1850s on, to children who had committed criminal acts, or who were considered 'vulnerable' to predation, poverty and the 'inheritance' of criminal dispositions. The notion that interventions can and must be evaluated in order to determine 'what works' now dominates public policy. But how did Victorian and Edwardian policy-makers and practitioners deal with this question? By what criteria, and on the basis of what kinds of evidence, did they judge their own successes and failures? Young Criminal Lives ends with a critical review of the historical rise of evidence-based policy-making within criminal justice. It will appeal to scholars and students of crime and penal policy, criminologists, sociologists, and social policy researchers and practitioners in youth justice and child protection.

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.

What characterizes women s and girls pathways to crime?Girls, Women, and Crime: Selected Readings, Second Edition" "is a compilation of journal articles on the female offender written by leading researchers in the fields of criminology and women s studies. The contributors reveal the complex worlds females in the criminal justice system must often negotiate worlds that are frequently riddled with violence, victimization, discrimination, and economic marginalization. This in-depth collection leaves readers with a greater understanding of the complexities and nuances of the realtionship between girls and women and crime."

The criminal justice system, with its complex policies and procedures and its focus on deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation, can be a difficult system to understand. Social Work Practice in the Criminal Justice System presents an overview of the criminal justice system, exploring the network of systems which comprise it. Integrating social work values and a commitment to social justice, this textbook explores how social workers can practice to address social problems within the criminal justice system and promotes the development of knowledge, skills and critical reflection in this increasingly important area of practice. In addition to covering the four key areas for social work practice -- law enforcement, courts, corrections, and legislation -- it covers: Alternative programs and services Special populations -- such as juveniles, women and sex offenders Special topics -- such as reoffending, wrongful conviction and racial disparities The application of evidence-based practice principles in criminal justice. Looking at the challenges and opportunities of social work practice in the criminal justice system, this is the ideal text for social work instructors, students and practitioners working with or within the criminal justice system. Each chapter includes a summary of social work practice implications, key terms, and suggested further reading.

"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.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of jailed Americans leave prison and return to society. Largely uneducated, unskilled, often without family support, and with the stigma of a prison record hanging over them, many if not most will experience serious social and psychological problems after release. Fewer than one in three prisoners receive substance abuse or mental health treatment while incarcerated, and each year fewer and fewer participate in the dwindling number of vocational or educational pre-release programs, leaving many all but unemployable. Not surprisingly, the great majority is rearrested, most within six months of their release. What happens when all those sent down the river come back up--and out?
As long as there have been prisons, society has struggled with how best to help prisoners reintegrate once released. But the current situation is unprecedented. As a result of the quadrupling of the American prison population in the last quarter century, the number of returning offenders dwarfs anything in America's history. What happens when a large percentage of inner-city men, mostly Black and Hispanic, are regularly extracted, imprisoned, and then returned a few years later in worse shape and with dimmer prospects than when they committed the crime resulting in their imprisonment? What toll does this constant "churning" exact on a community? And what do these trends portend for public safety? A crisis looms, and the criminal justice and social welfare system is wholly unprepared to confront it.
Drawing on dozens of interviews with inmates, former prisoners, and prison officials, Joan Petersilia convincingly shows us how the current system is failing, and failing badly. Unwilling merely to sound the alarm, Petersilia explores the harsh realities of prisoner reentry and offers specific solutions to prepare inmates for release, reduce recidivism, and restore them to full citizenship, while never losing sight of the demands of public safety.
As the number of ex-convicts in America continues to grow, their systemic marginalization threatens the very society their imprisonment was meant to protect. America spent the last decade debating who should go to prison and for how long. Now it's time to decide what to do when prisoners come home.

In 2006, after a scandal that gripped the country, the British government began to transform its prison system. Under pressure to find and expel foreigners, Her Majesty's Prison Service began concentrating non-citizens in prisons with 'embedded' border agents. Today, prison officers refer anyone suspected of being foreign to immigration authorities and prisoners facing deportation are detained in special prisons devoted to confining non-citizens. Those who cannot be deported linger, sometimes for years, indefinitely detained behind prison walls. The British approach to foreign nationals reflects a broader trend in punishment. Over the past decade, penal institutions across England, the United States, and Western Europe have become key sites for border control. Offering the first comprehensive account of the imprisonment of non-citizens in the United Kingdom, Punish and Expel: Border Control, Nationalism, and the New Purpose of the Prison draws on extensive empirical data, based on fieldwork in five men's prisons, to explore the relationship between punishment and citizenship. Using first-hand testimonies from hundreds of prisoners, prison officers, and high-level policy makers, it describes how prisons create a national identity and goes inside citizenship classes and 'all-foreign' prisons, documenting the treatment of non-citizens by other prisoners and staff. Passionately argued and meticulously researched, Punish and Expel links prisons to the history of British colonialism and the contemporary politics of race, whilst challenging readers to rethink their approach to prisons, and to the people held inside them.

This volume delivers a comprehensive study of banditry in Latin America and of its cultural representation. In its scope across the continent, looking closely at nations where bandit culture has manifested itself forcefully - Mexico (the subject of the case study), the Hispanic south-west of the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba - it imagines a 'Golden Age' of banditry in Latin America from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1940s when so-called 'social bandits', an idea first proposed by Eric Hobsbawm and further developed here, flourished. In its content, this work offers the most detailed and wide-ranging study of its kind currently available. Contents Introduction: The Idea of a Golden Age of Latin American Banditry 1850-1950 1. The Figure of the Bandit in History, Culture and Social Theory 2. Mexico: The Myth of the Bandit Nation 3. Mexico's Classic Bandit Narrative: Los de abajo 4. Beyond Mexico I: Bandit Cultures in Latin America 5. Beyond Mexico II: Chicano Bandit Cultures Conclusion

One monster. Three innocent girls. Ten years in captivity.

22 August 2002: 21-year-old Michelle Knight disappears walking home.

21 April 2003: Amanda Berry goes missing the day before her seventeenth birthday.

2 April 2004: 14-year-old Gina DeJesus fails to come home from school.

For over a decade these girls remained undetected in a house just three miles from the block where they all went missing, held captive by a terrifying sexual predator. Tortured, starved and raped, kept in chains, Captive reveals the dark obsessions that drove Ariel Castro to kidnap and enslave his innocent victims.

Based on exclusive interviews with witnesses, psychologists, family and police, this is an unflinching record of a truly shocking crime in a very ordinary neighbourhood. Allan Hall was a New York correspondent for ten years, first for the Sun and later for the Daily Mirror. He has spent the last decade covering German-speaking Europe for newspapers including The Times and the Mail on Sunday.

He is the author of two previous books, Monster, an investigation into the life and crimes of Josef Fritzl and Girl in the Cellar: The Natascha Kampusch Story. He lives and works in Berlin.

The prison population in the United States has been growing steadily for more than 30 years. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that since 2000 an average of 680,000 inmates have been released from state and federal prisons and almost 5 million ex-offenders are under some form of community-based supervision. Offender re-entry can include all the activities and programming conducted to prepare ex-convicts to return safely to the community and to live as law-abiding citizens. Some ex-offenders, however, eventually end up back in prison. This book examines the key elements in inmate release and offender re-entry, with a focus on correctional statistics, reintegration into the community, and recidivism.

How can we solve the re-entry challenge and ensure that incarcerated individuals and those under community supervision become productive members of society? Although there is no one answer, a growing body of evidence shows that providing offenders with education and training increases their employment opportunities, addresses their cognitive deficits, and helps reduce their likelihood of recidivating. More work is needed, however, to ensure that low-skill individuals in the corrections population have access to these services and can advance their education and employment prospects despite their correctional status. This book examines the role of education in reducing inmate recidivism with a focus on community-based correctional education strategies and guidance.

Millions of children in the United States have a parent who is incarcerated and a growing number of these nurturers are mothers. Disrupted Childhoods explores the issues that arise from a mother's confinement and provides first-person accounts of the experiences of children with mothers behind bars. Jane A. Siegel offers a perspective that recognizes differences over the long course of a family's interaction with the criminal justice system. Presenting an unparalleled view into the children's lives both before and after their mothers are imprisoned, this book reveals the many challenges they face from the moment such a critical caregiver is arrested to the time she returns home from prison. Based on interviews with nearly seventy youngsters and their mothers conducted at different points of their parent's involvement in the process, the rich qualitative data of Disrupted Childhoods vividly reveals the lived experiences of prisoners' children, telling their stories in their own words. Siegel places the mother's incarceration in context with other aspects of the youths' experiences, including their family life and social worlds, and provides a unique opportunity to hear the voices of a group that has been largely silent until now. Jane A. Siegel is an associate professor of criminology at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey and chair of the department of sociology, anthropology, and criminal justice. She has published numerous articles on the long-term consequences of child sexual abuse, risk factors for victimization, and the effects of parental incarceration.

There are multiple reasons to prevent juveniles from becoming delinquent or continuing to engage in delinquent behaviour. The most obvious reason is that delinquency puts youth at risk for substance abuse and delinquency, school drop-out, gang involvement, criminality, and mental health challenges. Youth engaging in delinquent behaviours are also vulnerable to physical injury, early pregnancy, domestic violence and sexual assault. To address issues of juvenile delinquency, this book describes various youth and family risk and protective factors associated with delinquency and provides a description of various family-oriented treatment options for preventing and treating youth violence and aggression. The authors also examine how sociometric status influences childhood bullying, aggressive behaviour and victimisation. Special attention is given to the affect of sociometric neglect and rejection on child development. In addition, this book summarises the transformation of youth gangs and violence associated with them, the basis of interventions to reduce youth gang affiliation and aggression in these different eras. To conclude, implications for the prevention and treatment of juvenile crime are presented, as well as recommendations for extinguishing violent and aggressive beliefs and behaviours in children.

Administering justice to juvenile offenders has largely been the domain of the states, and as a result of this the laws that pertain to juvenile offenders can vary widely from state to state. This book analyses the current federal legislation that impacts the state juvenile justice systems. It also provides an overview of research on the deterrent effects of transferring youth from juvenile to criminal courts. In addition, this book examines juvenile suicides that occurred in confinement. It describes the demographic characteristics and social history of victims and examines the characteristics of the facilities in which the suicides took place. Drawing on this data, the researchers offer recommendations to prevent suicides in juvenile facilities. Moreover, this book analyses the prevalence and overlap of substance-related behaviours among youth, with comparisons by age group, gender and race/ethnicity. The analysis shows that a youth who engages in one substance-related behaviour is much more likely to engage in another. This book presents information that can help the juvenile justice system detect youth with psychiatric disorders and respond with an integrated system of services. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.

Delinquency is an antisocial misdeed in violation of the law by a minor. This book examines the correlation between family environment and juvenile delinquency and criminality. Also discussed are the social factors that influence delinquent behaviour. The unresolved and contentious issue of different explanatory "types" or "etiological patterns" among delinquents and the conflict this creates for advocates of "general theory" in delinquency are also addressed. Additional chapters look at adolescent religiosity as a factor for delinquency, psychopathic tendencies and causes of delinquency from a biosocial criminological perspective.

Nowadays, an alarming number of juveniles all over the world find themselves implicated in the juvenile justice system and a great number of them are incarcerated in detention centres or even in jails for adults. The mean age of these youth has lowered dangerously, the percentage of delinquent females has increased dramatically, and the number of minority juveniles within this population has become unjustifiably high. The majority of these young people has diagnosable mental disorders, including substance abuse, learning disorders, ADHD, conduct disorder, anxiety and mood disorders, at rates much higher than in general same-age population. Very often, multiple diagnoses are applicable. Over the last years, experts from medicine, psychology, law, and sociology have been engaged in a number of evidence-based research studies, in order to study the relationship between juvenile delinquency and psychopathology. This research interest has resulted in a proliferation of studies mainly conducted at the U.S., with European countries following this activity. The objective of this book is to provide a comprehensive description of what is currently known in this area, with an emphasis on knowledge informed by empirical research. This way, it is aimed at providing a basis for the elaboration of an integrative perspective of psychopathology in juvenile delinquents and for the elucidation of the complex relationship between mental health disorders and juvenile delinquency. A developmental psychopathology approach is used as this is the area of expertise of the authors, especially regarding assessment, diagnosis and treatment of disruptive behaviour disorders.

For years, criminologists have studied the relationship between crime and below-average intelligence, concluding that offenders usually possess IQ scores of 8 to 10 points below those of nonoffenders. 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, James C. Oleson describes the nature of crime by offenders of high IQ thereby shedding light on a population often ignored in research and yet sensationalized by media.

Building upon the success of the first edition, this second - and substantially revised - edition of Youth Crime and Justice comprises a range of cutting-edge contributions from leading national and international researchers. The book: Situates youth crime and youth justice within historical and social-structural contexts; Critically examines policy and practice trends and their relation to knowledge and 'evidence'; and Presents a forward looking vision of a rights compliant youth justice with integrity. An authoritative and accessible book, Youth Crime and Justice (2nd ed) provides a coherent, comprehensive and fully up-to-date analysis of contemporary developments and debates. A must for researchers, teachers, students and practitioners.

This book examines the incendiary issue of racial variation in crime rates in the United States and in many other countries using a variety of data sources. It examines the latest genetic data asserting the reality of the concept of race, and various lines of evidence from population genetics, evolutionary biology, and anthropology pertinent to the evolution of racial differences in behaviour. Because males of African descent commit a disproportionate number of crimes in all countries where crime rates are classified by racial categories are available, the emphasis is on explaining black crime relative to white and Asian crime. In addition to run-of-the-mill street crimes, racial differences in crimes such as mass, spree, and serial killing, hate crime, white-collar crime, and organised crime are examined. The horrendous experience of slavery and Jim Crow laws that blacks have had to uniquely endure in this country is the starting point for explaining African American crime in the United States. Such experiences bred a violent subculture in the African American community that is opposed to much of what mainstream America values. Although the behaviours and attitudes evident in inner city culture were functional responses to the conditions forced upon blacks by whites in former times, they are now dysfunctional and destructive. The role of poverty, the sex ratio, out-of-wedlock births, the devaluation of education, the ecology of the inner city, and child abuse and neglect are examined in detail from a biosocial perspective. A biosocial perspective is one that fully acknowledges and explores how intrinsic features of individuals interact with environmental conditions to produce behaviour.

In many modern wars, there have been those who have chosen not to fight. Be it for religious or moral reasons, some men and women have found no justification for breaking their conscientious objection to violence. In many cases, this objection has led to severe punishment at the hands of their own governments, usually lengthy prison terms. Peter Brock brings the voices of imprisoned conscientious objectors to the fore in "These Strange Criminals."

This important and thought-provoking anthology consists of thirty prison memoirs by conscientious objectors to military service, drawn from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and centring on their jail experiences either during the first or second world wars or in Cold War America. Voices from history - like those of Stephen Hobhouse, Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, Ian Hamilton, Alfred Hassler, and Donald Wetzel - come alive, detailing the impact of prison life and offering unique perspectives on wartime government policies of conscription and imprisonment. Sometimes intensely moving, and often inspiring, these memoirs show that in some cases, individual conscientious objectors - many well-educated and politically aware - sought to reform the penal system from within either by publicizing its dysfunction or through further resistance to authority. The collection is an essential contribution to our understanding of criminology and the history of pacifism, and represents a valuable addition to prison literature.

"Hidden Truth" takes the reader inside a Rhode Island juvenile prison to explore broader questions of how poor, disenfranchised young men come to terms with masculinity and identity. Adam D. Reich, who worked with inmates to produce a newspaper, writes vividly and memorably about the young men he came to know, and in the process extends theories of masculinity, crime, and social reproduction into a provocative new paradigm. Reich suggests that young men's participation in crime constitutes a game through which they achieve 'outsider masculinity'. Once in prison these same youths are forced to reconcile their criminal practices with a new game and new 'insider masculinity' enforced by guards and administrators.

Over the last decade, police departments and state's attorney's offices across the country have adopted mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution policies to handle cases of intimate abuse. In addition to protecting victims from future violence, these policies are intended to change abusers by punishing them for their behavior. Emerging at a time when various dimensions of U.S. society are being "governed through crime," mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution have proven controversial. While critics charge that the policies disempower women by removing decision making from them and aggravate the negative consequences of criminal justice interventions in poor and minority communities, proponents maintain that the measures are needed to protect battered women and provide them the same legal protections afforded to other victims of violent crime. Somewhat overlooked in this debate has been how mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution affect abusers, a critical question for understanding the power of criminal punishment to combat intimate partner abuse. In Arresting Abuse, Keith Guzik answers this question. Drawing both from firsthand observations of a police department and a criminal court following mandatory policies and extensive interviews with 30 offenders arrested and prosecuted for domestic violence, Arresting Abuse provides a critical assessment. While mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution allow the state to extend formal legal supervision over an increasing number of violent men and women, thus seemingly increasing its power over them, offenders prove resistant to change. They see themselves as victims of injustice, continue to view their violence as justified, and devise new strategies to preserve their definition and enactment of self. The reasons for these outcomes rest in the nature of power itself-in the state tactics, structures of social inequality, and modes of individual agency through which mandatory arrest and no-drop prosecution are realized. A key contribution to domestic violence literature as well as to socio-legal scholarship on the power of the law as a force for social change, Arresting Abuse argues that the promise for defeating intimate partner abuse lies in better matching the tactics of state power to the goals of victim empowerment and offender responsibility and to exercise such force through mechanisms that do not exacerbate social inequality.

"The Society of Captives," first published in 1958, is a classic of modern criminology and one of the most important books ever written about prison.

Gresham Sykes wrote the book at the height of the Cold War, motivated by the world's experience of fascism and communism to study the closest thing to a totalitarian system in American life: a maximum security prison. His analysis calls into question the extent to which prisons can succeed in their attempts to control every facet of life--or whether the strong bonds between prisoners make it impossible to run a prison without finding ways of "accommodating" the prisoners.

Re-released now with a new introduction by Bruce Western and a new epilogue by the author, "The Society of Captives" will continue to serve as an indispensable text for coming to terms with the nature of modern power.