Mi Rinconcito en el Cielo (My Little Corner of the Sky) tells the remarkable story of Alberto "Beto" Gonzales, who overcame a childhood of poverty, addiction, bigotry, and violence and went on to change the lives of thousands of children and adults as a mentor and gang prevention specialist. The book explores themes of family relationships, neighborhood segregation, the impacts of drug abuse and crime, and the racism and bigotry that children endure without the benefits of adult protectors. Beto's story is one of pain, recovery, and hope, and one that has the power to change lives.

Youth Justice in America, Second Edition engages students in an exciting, informed discussion of the U.S. juvenile justice system and fills a pressing need to make legal issues personally meaningful to young people. Written in a straightforward style, the book addresses tough, important issues that directly affect today's youth, including the rights of accused juveniles, search and seizure, self-incrimination and confession, right to appeal, and the death penalty for juveniles. Focusing on cases that relate to the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the subject matter comes alive through a wide variety of in-book learning aids.

Cries for Help opens a window on the closed world of Holloway, other women's prisons and the lives of those held there in the 1970s. This was an era when personal style and charismatic leadership was the order of the day for governors and prison officers, before ideas of 'new management', when problems were solved using personal initiatives. It catalogues the daily lives of women prisoners, their anxieties, fears and preoccupations. The book looks at a lost segment of the population, hundreds of women who were hidden from view, lacking a voice, part of a system for men that hardly knew what to do with them. It contains stories about murderers and other serious offenders and looks at their personal correspondence, including that of moors murderer Myra Hindley.

While scholarship on the education of youth behind bars has largely focused on boys, more than one in three youth arrests in the USA is female, and Girls Behind Bars sets out to address this imbalance. The book offers autobiographies, life-stories, and counter-stories in order to challenge simplistic generalizations and empirical prescriptions. Girls Behind Bars provides the educational community with critical perspectives that examine empiricist epistemologies and positivist methodologies that label certain groups of girls as delinquent and mark them for punitive and corrective treatment behind bars. Sharma opens up the discussion on girls' gender, desire, and sexuality by offering a language for these issues absent in educational discourse. Finally, the book supports calls for educators and practitioners in their desire to envision and create transformative spaces that enable young girls behind bars to reclaim their education. Including a foreword by William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, this important and powerful book gives voice to a neglected, silenced, and misrepresented population - young girls behind bars.

Informative, entertaining, against the grain, Her Majesty's Philosophers highlights the artificiality of prison life. By a Guardian correspondent (and with extracts to be published in that newspaper) this book is set to be a penal affairs classic which every student of crime and punishment should read. Building on his Guardian pieces about teaching Philosophy in prison, this is Alan Smith's account in extensio. From introducing Plato to ever-changing groups of hard-nosed prisoners to them wrestling with Bentham, Phillip Larkin and Shakespeare, it is packed with insights and unexpected turns. It paints a picture in which worlds collide and conventional thinking is turned inside out as 'new modes of discourse' change the men's thinking and ideas. At times surreal the book brings fresh perspectives to the minutiae of prison life: survival, coping, soap, teabags, cell mates, the constant noise and immediacy. And needless to say, the men come up with philosophical gems of their own. Her Majesty' Philosophers is also about isolation, the long hours, knockbacks and the emotional mutilation of imprisonment; and whilst philosophy is 'soft and fluffy' it contrasts starkly with the pragmatic world of prison officers, for whom the Holy Grail is Security, Keys and Prison Craft. The book charts how learning changes lives, especially for prisoners who missed out on formal education, who - once motivated - become voracious readers and extraordinary students. It demonstrates more than any official report the value of a wider agenda than Basic Skills. Prisons have been labelled 'Universities of Crime', but colleges are increasingly populated by those who began their studies in a prison cell. In a book packed with wisdom and humour the author laments the fact that prison policy means that this is becoming a far less easy step.

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.

Environment and Society relates to a diverse audience and encompasses viewpoints from a variety of natural and social science approaches. This integrative book about human-environment relations connects many issues about human societies, ecological systems, and environments with data and perspectives from different fields of study. Its viewpoint is primarily sociological and it is designed for courses in Environmental Sociology and Environmental Issues, or taught in departments of Sociology, Environmental Studies, Anthropology, Political Science, and Human Geography.

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.

Effective treatment and preparation for successful reintegration can be better achieved if the needs and risks of incarcerated offenders are taken into consideration by correctional practitioners and scholars. Special Needs Offenders in Correctional Institutions offers a unique opportunity to examine the different populations behind bars (e.g. chronically and mentally ill, homosexual, illegal immigrants, veterans, radicalized inmates, etc.), as well as their needs and the corresponding impediments for rehabilitation and reintegration. Author Lior Gideon takes a rehabilitative and reiterative approach to discuss and differentiate between the needs of these various categories of inmates, and provides in depth discussions-not available in other correctional texts-about the specific needs, risks and policy recommendations when working with present-day special needs offenders. Each chapter is followed by suggested readings and relevant websites that will enable readers to further enhance understanding of the issues and potential solutions discussed in the chapter. Further, each chapter has discussion questions specifically designed to promote class discussions. The text concludes with a theoretical framework for future policy implications and practices.

This is a story of crime-engaged youth who have been given a second chance. New York City teens are often faced with conditions that lead to poor education, deprived job opportunities, and a savage cycle of incarceration. But they are almost always faced with a choice. Teens from deprived neighborhoods face an arduous crossroad: should they a) walk the glamorous path of street culture, whose unlawful codas channels them towards fast money, instant gratification, and irretractable respect? Or b) make the steep climb through carceral traps, structural deprivation, and sometimes peer ridicule, in order to achieve legitimate success? This book is also the story of the non-profit community organizations that recognize the difficulty of this decision. To the many that are unfamiliar with New York's poorest neighborhoods, living a 'crime-free lifestyle' is an obvious and easy choice. According to this thinking, those who violate our legal codes should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, no matter the circumstances that led to their unlawful behavior. Throughout the city, there are a small number of alternative-to-incarceration programs designed to give crime-engaged youth a second chance to walk the path of legitimate success. They attempt to fill the void left behind by a poor opportunity structure. This book is a detailed ethnographic account of a select group of teens in New York City, the deprived conditions they face on a daily basis, and the alternative-to-incarceration programs that try to turn their lives around. Included will be the accounts of teens that faced the arduous crossroad and four programs that attempted to teach a set of skills necessary for a crime-free lifestyle: a set of skills that I call a social survival kit.

The only book on Dovegate TC Contains first-hand insider accounts by staff and inmates Describes the latest developments in TC work Provides extensive data and references A closely observed account of the UK's first private sector prison-based Therapeutic Community (TC) - a 200-bed facility. The book considers: the background to and regimes at Dovegate; modern developments in TC work with (often high-risk) offenders; the differences between Dovegate, Grendon and other UK prison-based TCs; private and public sector imperatives; democratic and hierarchical TCs; reparative, restorative and punitive approaches; accreditation, group work, assessment, suitability and de-selection TC-culture versus prison culture the role of positive attitudes, relationships and experiences; psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, security and control; how TCs alter behaviour and prevent crime.

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.

At a time when problems of crime and antisocial behaviour stimulate debate on big society solutions, this book provides an exceptional means of tracing a line of response which began at the end of the 18th century. Nipping Crime in the Bud explores the origins and development of the Philanthropic Society (and its influence on contemporary institutions) amid growing alarm about crime levels, Draconian sentences under England's Bloody Code and a paucity of effective crime prevention measures. Driven by Enlightenment zeal and ideals, this was the first voluntary sector charity devoted to 'nipping crime in the bud'. It did so through education, training, accommodation, mentoring and support for young people. Uniquely, the book traces the first hard won policy networks and partnerships between government and the voluntary sector. It reveals how-sometimes against the odds, with funding on a knife edge but constantly striving for effective answers-influential philanthropists rose to the challenge and changed approaches to young people involved in crime and delinquency, traces of which endure today within the great crime prevention charities which still rally to this cause. Muriel Whitten's book draws on previously neglected archival sources and other first-hand research to create a formidable and illuminating account about what, for many people, will be a missing chapter in English social and legal history. Review 'Describes in colourful detail the background to the founding of the Society and how its founders and their successors worked. It explains how their plans were put into practice, how they governed and how they acquired support. It skilfully deals with questions that are still asked today such as to what extent are children to be held responsible for wrongdoing? ... Dr Whitten is admirably suited to write such a book ... and] her knowledge and experience are distilled in this comprehensive and well-written book': John Hostettler, legal historian. Read the full review Author Dr. Muriel Whitten has been a youth and family court magistrate and a member of West Sussex Probation Committee. She has lectured widely on criminal justice matters at Goldsmith's and Birkbeck (University of London), the University of Ulster and has presented for CENTREX (now the National Policing Improvement Agency). She has also contributed a weekly column to the Belfast News Letter.

By July 1981 four republican hunger strikers had already died in Long Kesh Prison. A fifth, Joe McDonnell, was clinging to life. To outsiders, Margaret Thatcher appeared unbending; yet, far from the prying eyes of the press, her government was making a substantial offer to the prisoners. On 5 July this offer was given to Gerry Adams in Belfast, and relayed to the prison leadership. In this important sequel to the bestseller Blanketmen, O'Rawe documents the four-year war of words that followed. He interviews former members of the IRA Army Council who claim that a five-man committee led by Adams had control of the hunger strike, keeping the Army Council in the dark about the British governments offer. He uses contemporary records to show that Thatcher had approved the offer but that Gerry Adams and the committee had replied it was 'not enough', telling the hunger strikers that 'nothing was on the table'. The prison leadership accepted the British offer, but six hunger strikers went on to die. O'Rawe asks: why? This hidden history, using contemporaneous photographs, pinpoints the key players in the drama and their responses, identifying Mountain Climber, a Derry businessman who brokered the deal, and describing the contributors to the crucial hunger strike conferences of 2008-09. O'Rawe combines a moving and courageous personal record with first-hand documentation. He provides essential background and astringent commentary on the realpolitick of the peace process and republicanism in Northern Ireland today, and its impact upon the country as a whole.

"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.

A comprehensive overview of rehabilitation, reentry, and reintegration,with real-life examples of successes and failures and the most current research This text explores the challenges that convicted offenders face over the course of the rehabilitation, reentry, and reintegration process. Using an integrated, theoretical approach, each chapter is devoted to a corrections topic and incorporates original evidence-based concepts, research, and policy from experts in the field, and examines how correctional practices are being managed. Students are exposed to examples of both the successful attempts and the failures to reintegrate prisoners into the community, and they will be encouraged to consider how they can help influence future policy decisions as practitioners in the field.

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.

Gang activity and related violence threaten public order in a diverse range of communities in the United States today. Congress has long recognised that this problem affects a number of issues of federal concern, and federal legislation has been introduced in the 110th Congress to address some aspects of the issue. Youth gangs have been an endemic feature of American urban life. They are well attested as early as the 18th century and have been a recurrent subject of concern since then. Contemporary views of the problem have been formed against the background of a significant adverse secular trend in gang activity during the last four decades. In particular, the rapid growth of gang membership, geographical dispersion, and criminal involvement during the violent crime epidemic; associated with the emergence of the crack cocaine market during the mid-1980s to the early 1990s; have intensified current concerns. The experience of those years continues to mark both patterns of gang activity and public policy responses toward them. Policy development and implementation in this area are be-devilled by discrepant uses of the term "gang" and the absence of uniform standards of statistical reporting. There are reasons for special care in the use of data on gangs and their activity. Without a standardised definition of what is meant by "gang", such as the age group or activities engaged in by its members, or standardised reporting among the state, local, tribal, and federal levels of government, it is difficult to target anti-gang initiatives and evaluate their effectiveness. According to a national gang survey, the most recent estimate indicates that there were about 760,000 gang members in 24,000 gangs in the United States in 2004. This book provides background information on the issue of youth gangs, including data on gangs and gang crime. It reviews existing anti-gang initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels, and describes some of the legislation proposed during the 110th Congress to address the gang problem, as well as some of the issues raised by those bills.

"Handbook of Assessing and Treating Substance Abuse and Criminal Conduct: The Progress and Change Evaluation (PACE) Monitor "is an instructive guide that helps agencies and providers assess, monitor and evaluate the change and progress made by criminal justice clients at the beginning, during and after treatment. The guide contains dozens of instruments used to assess and evaluate clients, along with a description of each item and instructions on how to score and interpret it. It was created to be used in conjunction with the Criminal Conduct and Substance Abuse Treatment: Strategies for Self Improvement and Change curriculum, but the instruments are general enough that they can be used separately and with other curriculums as well. The tools provided in this book will be highly useful for anyone working with clients with co-occurring issues of substance abuse and criminal conduct.SAGE offers treatment and training programs for mental health providers that you can easily incorporate into your existing programs. Visit www.sagepub.com/satreatments to learn more about these treatment and training programs.

Voices from the Inside takes readers into the cells of a maximum security prison to reveal the personal accounts of over sixty women that are incarcerated for drug crimes. The stories will shock and entertain, and will certainly help readers to see more than the statistics behind drug offenses. Research included in this book examines the history of prohibition in the United States, with special emphasis on alcohol and drug prohibition, and analyzes empirical data pertaining specifically to the incarceration of female drug offenders in Tennessee. Personal interviews with these women regard the criminal justice processes both before and after their incarceration. This book is a must-read for those seeking to understand the impact of current drug policies on individuals and the community, as well as why these policies are not working.

For over a century, as women have fought for and won greater freedoms, concern over an epidemic of female criminality, especially among young women, has followed. Fear of this crime wave--despite a persistent lack of evidence of its existence--has played a decisive role in the development of the youth justice systems in the United States and Canada. "Justice for Girls?" is a comprehensive comparative study of the way these countries have responded to the hysteria over "girl crime" and how it has affected the treatment of both girls and boys.
Tackling a century of historical evidence and crime statistics, Jane B. Sprott and Anthony N. Doob carefully trace the evolution of approaches to the treatment of young offenders. Seeking to keep youths out of adult courts, both countries have built their systems around rehabilitation. But, as Sprott and Doob reveal, the myth of the "girl crime wave" led to a punitive system where young people are dragged into court for minor offenses and girls are punished far more severely than boys. Thorough, timely, and persuasive, "Justice for Girls?" will be vital to anyone working with troubled youths.

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.

What is restorative justice ... and does it work? These are just two of the many questions posed by David J Cornwell in this incisive work. Based on a lifetime of research and experience it deals with the concerns about crime and punishment of that most vivid of judicial creations, 'The Man or Woman on the Clapham Omnibus'. As the author explains, this human reference point for reason and good sense is likely to be far more receptive to sound explanation and argument than the media (and tabloid press in particular) might give credit. And after all, it is his or her taxes which are being routinely wasted on outmoded or discredited methods. Crime will not disappear through the application of heavy-handed sanctions. Indeed, they make matters worse. With prisons overflowing in many western countries, restorative justice offers a better and ultimately more intuitive solution. Cornwell dismantles the traditional arguments for 'locking people away' and undermines the idea that it is necessary to be 'tough on crime'. The book credits people with a higher level of intelligence. It provides them with proper answers and explanations based on sound data, copious research and an in-depth analysis of existing trends. It is a work for people who value credibility rather than politically-driven excuses with their increasingly damaging effects. David J Cornwell is a criminologist and consultant with extensive practical experience of prisons and imprisonment, having worked in senior positions within the public and private sectors in the UK and abroad. He has written two previous and acclaimed books on restorative justice, Criminal Punishment and Restorative Justice (2006) and Doing Justice Better (2007) (both Waterside Press). Heather Strang is the Director of the Centre for Restorative Justice at the Australian National University and one of the leading international commentators on this topic.

Gang activity and related violence threaten public order in a diverse range of communities in the United States today. Contemporary views of the problem have been formed against the background of a significant adverse secular trend in gang activity during the last four decades. In particular, the rapid growth of gang membership, geographical dispersion, and criminal involvement during the violent crime epidemic -- associated with the emergence of the crack cocaine market during the mid-1980s to the early 1990s -- have intensified current concerns. The experience of those years continues to mark both patterns of gang activity and public policy responses toward them. This book provides background information on the issue of youth gangs, including data on gangs and gang crime. It reviews existing anti-gang initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels, and describes some of the legislation proposed to address the gang problem, as well as some of the issues raised by those bills.

The 109th Congress passed legislation that allows the federal government to civilly commit "sexually dangerous persons". Civil commitment, as it relates to sex offenders, is when a state retains custody of an individual, found by a judge or jury to be a "sexually dangerous person" by involuntarily committing the person to a secure mental health facility after the offender's prison sentence is done. In 1990, the state of Washington passed the first civil commitment law for sexually dangerous persons. Currently, 18 other states and the federal government have similar laws. Moreover, the Supreme Court, in Kansas v. Hendricks and Kansas v. Crane, ruled that current civil commitment laws are constitutional. The civil commitment of sex offenders centres on the belief that sex offenders are more likely than other offenders to re-offend. However, data on sex offender recidivism is varied. Data show that the recidivism risk for sex offenders may be lower than it is typically thought to be; in fact, some studies show that sex offenders recidivate at a lower rate than many other criminals. Other studies show that, given time, almost all sex offenders will commit a new sex crime. Most discussions about recidivism examine ways to decrease it; for example, by providing sex offenders with treatment. Research on the efficacy of sex offender treatment is promising, but it cannot prove that treatment reduces recidivism.