Much has been written about the laogai (sometimes likened to the Soviet gulag) in the People's Republic of China. Depending on the source, the prisons are described as nonexistent, enlightened institutions, or hellish places that subject the inmates to degradation and misery. The system is commonly thought of (by admirers and critics alike) as having a measurable impact on the national economy and providing significant resources to the state. Based on research in classified documents and extensive interviews with former prisoners, judicial personnel, and other insiders, and featuring case studies dealing with the three northwestern provinces, this book examines such assertions on the basis of the facts about this underexamined subject in order to arrive at a detailed, objective, and realistic picture of the situation. In the case of each province under study, the authors discuss the history of the provincial prison system and the impact that each has had at the macro, meso, and micro levels.

Comparing and contrasting the prison systems of 15 nations, this volume addresses the crisis and change in penology which has occurred during the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors identify both common and unusual problems which face penal systems throughout the world, and compare a variety of these systems by employing sociological analysis. Analyses of the penal systems in industrial, non-industrial, stable and unstable nations are undertaken here, and possible prospects for social and penal reform around the globe are discussed.

Sir Leon Radzinowicz is one of the key figures in the development of criminology in the 20th century, working as an academic criminologist, an adviser to government, and as the founding director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. This account of the development of criminology intertwines his personal narrative as a criminologist with the development of criminology itself. From a long career spanning 70 years from the 1920s to the late 1990s, he offers an overview of the changing understanding of crime and criminals, of criminal justice systems and penology, and of the tensions and dilemmas these pose for democratic societies. His own work as a scholar, adviser to governments, and the founding director of the first criminological research institute in Britain results in this book offering a well informed account of the intellectual and institutional history of criminology in Britain and Europe, and its place within a wider comparative perspective.

This edited collection is concerned with the ideas, challenges, demands and framework of conditions behind police education from an international perspective. Whilst not directly concerned with a classical comparison of education concepts from different countries, the broad range of international contributors consider issues such as professionalization programmes, how higher education programmes influence police organizations, as well how higher education influences police practice in a global context. Examining a wide array of countries from Germany to China and Brazil to show the flawed nature of an education system based purely upon an approach concerned with police officer numbers, the editors of this book argue for the need for greater scientific education among police around the world to meet contemporary developments. A timely and well-informed study, this book meets a crucial gap in the literature and will serve as an important contribution to existing work on policing, crime prevention, and theoretical criminology.

Much has been written about the laogai (sometimes likened to the Soviet gulag) in the People's Republic of China. Depending on the source, the prisons are described as nonexistent, enlightened institutions, or hellish places that subject the inmates to degradation and misery. The system is commonly thought of (by admirers and critics alike) as having a measurable impact on the national economy and providing significant resources to the state. Based on research in classified documents and extensive interviews with former prisoners, judicial personnel, and other insiders, and featuring case studies dealing with the three northwestern provinces, this book examines such assertions on the basis of the facts about this underexamined subject in order to arrive at a detailed, objective, and realistic picture of the situation. In the case of each province under study, the authors discuss the history of the provincial prison system and the impact that each has had at the macro, meso, and micro levels.

Comparing and contrasting the prison systems of 15 nations, this volume addresses the crisis and change in penology which has occurred during the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors identify both common and unusual problems which face penal systems throughout the world, and compare a variety of these systems by employing sociological analysis. Analyses of the penal systems in industrial, non-industrial, stable and unstable nations are undertaken here, and possible prospects for social and penal reform around the globe are discussed.

Acres of Skin sheds light on a dark episode in American medical history. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used, in exchange for a few dollars, as guinea pigs in a host of medical experiments. Drawing on in-depth interviews with dozens of prisoners as well as the doctors and prison officials who, respectively, performed and enforced these tests, Allen M. Hornblum paints a harrowing portrait of medical abuse, moral indifference, and stark greed.
Acres of Skin raises provocative questions about human rights, prison treatment, and medical and research ethics as he exposes what really happened behind the locked doors of this American prison. The book answers the question: were there other prisons like this?

A collection of 20 pieces by people in prison and on probation, covering the theme of 'hope'. Explores aspects of prisons, the criminal justice system, and rehabilitation.

The first book-length treatment of the nature of prison culture among women in thirty years, "In the Mix"describes the prison culture in a large California prison, from the point of view of the women themselves. Based on three years of study, including participant-observation, in-depth interviews and surveys, this book describes the daily life of the prison from a variety of perspectives, with an emphasis on the gendered nature of its social organization, roles and normative frameworks.

The title, "In the Mix", describes the contours of prison culture and its themes of trouble, programming and relationships. Common themes, such as the impact of substance use, limited economic opportunity, patriarchy, survival on the streets and in the prison, thread through the individual chapters. Owen argues that prison culture for women is tied directly to the role of women in society as well as a dynamic social structure that is shaped by the conditions of women's lives in prison and in the "free world".

"Youth in Prison" tells the story of youths in a "model" juvenile prison program--a program created after a class action lawsuit for inhumane and illegal practices. It captures the lives of these youths inside and outside of prison: from drugs, gangs, and criminal behavior to the realities of families, schools, and neighborhoods. Drawing on experience that encompasses twenty years of juvenile justice research and policy analysis, the authors spent two years scrutinizing the prison's attempts to combine accountability and treatment for youths with protection for the public. Situating these within the larger social and political context, the authors have fashioned a book about all of us: those kept, those charged with their keeping, and the society that condones and demands this imprisonment.

In 1949, Annie Samuelli and her sister Nora were seized by the Communists on trumped-up charges in a mass arrest of all Romanian nationals working for the US and British legations in Bucharest. After nine months of torture and interrogation, the two sisters were sentenced to long prison terms. Then, in 1961, after 11 years and 340 days in separate prisons and security cells, the two were quietly released from jail and exiled upon payment of ransom by a relative living in the United States. In this book, Annie Samuelli writes of those years of imprisonment. She describes her successful effort to sustain her own and others' spirits through the seemingly endless ordeal.

This book provides a detailed and practical exploration of criminal recidivism and social reintegration in Jamaica. It uses various methods to seek the authentic voices of inmates, ex-prisoners, deported migrants and practitioners, drawing on an original study to examine factors that might help ex-prisoners more successfully transition from a prison environment to life within the community. Leslie also raises important questions about the Jamaican state's capacity to meet the needs of inmates, particularly as a large number of its citizens are subject to forced repatriation to their homeland by overseas jurisdictions due to their offending. Recidivism in the Caribbean provides a unique insight into institutional and community life in a post-colonial society, whilst linking practices theories of offender management. It will particularly appeal to criminologists and sociologists interested in tertiary crime prevention but also those interested in correctional policy and practice, punishment and deviance.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Edited by Harvey Arden, with an Introduction by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, and a Preface by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

In 1977, Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents. He has affirmed his innocence ever since—his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen's bestselling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse—and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. This wise and unsettling book, both memoir and manifesto, chronicles his life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Invoking the Sun Dance, in which pain leads one to a transcendent reality, Peltier explores his suffering and the insights it has borne him. He also locates his experience within the history of the American Indian peoples and their struggles to overcome the federal government's injustices.

Drawing upon social history, political history, and critical prison studies, this book analyzes how prisons and other instruments of colonial punishment endured after independence and challenges their continued existence. In Carceral Afterlives, Katherine Bruce-Lockhart traces the politics, practices, and lived experiences of incarceration in postcolonial Uganda, focusing on the period between independence in 1962 and the beginning of Yoweri Museveni's presidency in 1986. During these decades, Ugandans experienced multiple changes of government, widespread state violence, and war, all of which affected the government's approach to punishment. Bruce-Lockhart analyzes the relationship between the prison system and other sites of confinement--including informal detention spaces known as "safe houses" and wartime camps--and considers other forms of punishment, such as public executions and "disappearance" by state paramilitary organizations. Through archival and personal collections, interviews with Ugandans who lived through these decades, and a range of media sources and memoirs, Bruce-Lockhart examines how carceral systems were imagined and experienced by Ugandans held within, working for, or impacted by them. She shows how Uganda's postcolonial leaders, especially Milton Obote and Idi Amin, attempted to harness the symbolic, material, and coercive power of prisons in the pursuit of a range of political agendas. She also examines the day-to-day realities of penal spaces and public perceptions of punishment by tracing the experiences of Ugandans who were incarcerated, their family members and friends, prison officers, and other government employees. Furthermore, she shows how the carceral arena was an important site of dissent, examining how those inside and outside of prisons and other spaces of captivity challenged the state's violent punitive tactics. Using Uganda as a case study, Carceral Afterlives emphasizes how prisons and the wider use of confinement--both as a punishment and as a vehicle for other modes of punishment--remain central to state power in the Global South and North. While scholars have closely analyzed the prison's expansion through colonial rule and the rise of mass incarceration in the United States, they have largely taken for granted its postcolonial persistence. In contrast, Bruce-Lockhart demonstrates how the prison's transition from a colonial to a postcolonial institution explains its ubiquity and reveals ways to critique and challenge its ongoing existence. The book thus explores broader questions about the unfinished work of decolonization, the relationship between incarceration and struggles for freedom, and the prison's enduring yet increasingly contested place in our global institutional landscape.

Gender, Ethnicity, and the State is a study of Latina and Latino prisoners in New York State. Through the use of two case studies, it compares the organizing strategies for reform pursued by Latina and Latino prisoners between 1970 and 1987, the support they received from non-Latina(o) prisoners and third parties, and the response of penal personnel to their calls for support.

This book closes a gap in decolonizing intersectional and comparative research by addressing issues around the mass incarceration of Indigenous women in the US, Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand. This edited collection seeks to add to the criminological discourse by increasing public awareness of the social problem of disproportionate incarceration rates. It illuminates how settler-colonial societies continue to deny many Indigenous peoples the life relatively free from state interference which most citizens enjoy. The authors explore how White-settler supremacy is exercised and preserved through neo-colonial institutions, policies and laws leading to failures in social and criminal justice reform and the impact of women's incarceration on their children, partners, families, and communities. It also explores the tools of activism and resistance that Indigenous peoples use to resist neo-colonial marginalisation tactics to decolonise their lives and communities. With most contributors embedded in their indigenous communities, this collection is written from academic as well as community and experiential perspectives. It will be a comprehensive resource for academics and students of criminology, sociology, Indigenous studies, women and gender studies and related academic disciplines, as well as non-academic audiences: offering new knowledge and insider insights both nationally and internationally.

Handbook on the Consequences of Sentencing and Punishment Decisions, the third volume in the Routledge ASC Division on Corrections & Sentencing Series, includes contemporary essays on the consequences of punishment during an era of mass incarceration. The Handbook Series offers state-of-the-art volumes on seminal and topical issues that span the fields of sentencing and corrections. In that spirit, the editors gathered contributions that summarize what is known in each topical area and also identify emerging theoretical, empirical, and policy work. The book is grounded in the current knowledge about the specific topics, but also includes new, synthesizing material that reflects the knowledge of the leading minds in the field. Following an editors' introduction, the volume is divided into four sections. First, two contributions situate and contextualize the volume by providing insight into the growth of mass punishment over the past three decades and an overview of the broad consequences of punishment decisions. The overviews are then followed by a section exploring the broader societal impacts of punishment on housing, employment, family relationships, and health and well-being. The third section centers on special populations and examines the unique effects of punishment for juveniles, immigrants, and individuals convicted of sexual or drug-related offenses. The fourth section focuses on institutional implications with contributions on jails, community corrections, and institutional corrections.

The field of international probation has been surprisingly under-investigated by researchers or policymakers. While in a solely European context, the legal and administrative implications for criminal justice concerning reductions in border controls and the freedom of movement on the labour market have begun to be examined by international criminal justice orginizations, including those in policing and probation, there are still many outstanding, crucial questions relating to criminal justice and the nature of probation that have still to be addressed. This text represents the findings of a study conducted by the United Nations Crime and Justice Research Unit which should be useful at an international level in instituting probation systems. It reviews the disparate existing literature on comparative probation and by reworking data received from the national experts in ten selected case study countries, it offers an analysis of probation around the world. It should also provide useful reading for students of criminal justice and criminology and for professionals working in probation management and government.

This is a study of probation in countries, ranging from the well-resourced and heavily professionalized services of Britain and the old Commonwealth to the reliance on lay-supervisors in Japan. The study is the result of collaborative research involving the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), the British Home Office and experts in the ten countries in the study: Australia, Canada, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Sweden, England, Wales and Scotland. The results paint a picture of probation systems in a state of flux. Faced with rising crime, the more industrialized countries have placed renewed importance on probation as a means not only of reducing reoffending but also of containing burgeoning prison populations. This has led to more overtly "correctionalist" systems than before.

What is the meaning of punishment today? Where is the limit that separates it from the cruel and unusual? In legal discourse, the distinction between punishment and vengeance-punishment being the measured use of legally sanctioned violence and vengeance being a use of violence that has no measure-is expressed by the idea of "cruel and unusual punishment." This phrase was originally contained in the English Bill of Rights (1689). But it (and versions of it) has since found its way into numerous constitutions and declarations, including Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the Amendment to the US Constitution. Clearly, in order for the use of violence to be legitimate, it must be subject to limitation. The difficulty is that the determination of this limit should be objective, but it is not, and its application in punitive practice is constituted by a host of extra-legal factors and social and political structures. It is this essential contestability of the limit which distinguishes punishment from violence that this book addresses. And, including contributions from a range of internationally renowned scholars, it offers a plurality of original and important responses to the contemporary question of the relationship between punishment and the limits of law.

The criminological contributions of Richard Quinney have spanned four decades and have spawned and energized both critical and peacemaking intellectual and activist movements in the field of Criminology. Quinney has been consistently recognized as one of a small handful of seminal thinkers in the discipline. The introduction illustrates how each chapter: has drawn inspiration from the crime-related writings of this influential criminologist; contains core assumptions of critical and peacemaking criminology; has application for the development of transformative justice as an alternative approach to the study of crime. Part 1 features chapters generally falling within the parameters of critical criminology. Here, critical analyses are directed toward: linkages of capitalism and political economy to crime; state/corporate crime; feminist concerns about moral conscience; views of crime and justice among convict criminologists; prison as an industrial complex. Part 2 exhibits chapters oriented toward the development of peacemaking criminology. As such, peacemaking criminology is explored in regard to: an emergent theoretical model; a synthesis of Quinney's peacemaking-oriented writings; women's crime and mothers in prisons; teaching and learning about justice through a non-violent perspective; advocating justice reforms on the internet; its future directions in terms of theory and application.

While state and federal prisons like Attica and Alcatraz occupy a central place in the national consciousness, most incarceration in the United States occurs within the walls of local jails. In This Is My Jail, Melanie D. Newport situates the late twentieth-century escalation of mass incarceration in a longer history of racialized, politically repressive jailing. Centering the political actions of people until now overlooked-jailed people, wardens, corrections officers, sheriffs, and the countless community members who battled over the functions and impact of jails-Newport shows how local, grassroots contestation shaped the rise of the carceral state. As ground zero for struggles over criminal justice reform, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, jails in Chicago and Cook County were models for jailers and advocates across the nation who aimed to redefine jails as institutions of benevolent transformation. From a slave sale on the jail steps to new jail buildings to electronic monitoring, from therapy to job training, these efforts further criminalized jailed people and diminished their capacity to organize for their civil rights. With prisoners as famous as Al Capone, Dick Gregory, and Harold Washington, and a place in culture ranging from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to B. B. King's Live in Cook County Jail, This Is My Jail places jails at the heart of twentieth-century urban life and politics. As a sweeping history of urban incarceration, This Is My Jail shows that jails are critical sites of urban inequality that sustain the racist actions of the police and judges and exacerbate the harms wrought by housing discrimination, segregated schools, and inaccessible health care. Structured by liberal anti-Blackness and legacies of violence, today's jails reflect longstanding local commitments to the unfreedom of poor people of color.

Chaplains to the Imprisoned begins to fill the information gap through its in-depth study of prison chaplains as seen by co-workers, inmates, and the chaplains themselves. They describe their roles, share difficulties which are encountered in their ministry, and personal methods for coping with these difficulties, especially those which may be internalized as stress. The author, a Roman Catholic priest with a doctorate in criminal justice, provides a fascinating look into the work of chaplains who serve in correctional institutions. This new book sheds a much-needed light on the often hidden, yet significant, role played by chaplains within correctional facilities. Little is known of these chaplains and the work that they do. Though they are frequently depicted in television and film, many of these images are stereotypes from writers'imaginations. In this unique book, chaplains speak for themselves through the results of a survey questionnaire sent by the author to local- and state-level chaplains in New York State and to chaplains throughout the federal prison system. Chaplains to the Imprisoned, the first non-denominational book on these clergy, explores: the history of chaplaincy in this country, including the irony that chaplains have often been treated as unwanted intruders in penitentiaries--which were created originally by religious groups?chaplains as seen by other professionals in the field--sometimes positive, often negative, opinions of chaplains drawn from literature written by wardens, corrections officers, and others who deal with chaplains on a routine basis chaplains as seen by inmates--published opinions by inmates who have recorded their impressions of facility chaplains?chaplains as seen by chaplains--their own descriptions of their work, frustrations, successes, and failures, along with suggestions for the betterment of the role of chaplainsThis book is an eye-opening look into the world of prison chaplaincy for students of criminal justice and religion, policymakers for prisons and jails, seminary students, and clergy members themselves, as well as individuals interested in what often goes on behind prison walls from a chaplain's perspective.

Written by a multi-disciplinary group of leading practitioners, Sexual Offending Against Children provides an account of the practice, policy and management issues involved in the assessment and treatment of adult and adolescent sexual offenders against children. Written for practitioners from all disciplines concerned with this area of work, it is underpinned by a strong theoretical base, giving a practical and detailed description of the management of sexual offenders, as well as the potential impact on service providers.