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.

The U.S. incarceration machine imprisons more people than in any other country. Music-Making in U.S. Prisons looks at the role music-making can play in achieving goals of accountability and healing that challenge the widespread assumption that prisons and punishment keep societies safe. The book's synthesis of historical research, contemporary practices, and pedagogies of music-making inside prisons reveals that, prior to the 1970s tough-on-crime era, choirs, instrumental ensembles, and radio shows bridged lives inside and outside prisons. Mass incarceration had a significant negative impact on music programs. Despite this setback, current programs testify to the potency of music education to support personal and social growth for people experiencing incarceration and deepen social awareness of the humanity found behind prison walls. Cohen and Duncan argue that music-making creates opportunities to humanize the complexity of crime, sustain meaningful relationships between incarcerated individuals and their families, and build social awareness of the prison industrial complex. The authors combine scholarship and personal experience to guide music educators, music aficionados, and social activists to create restorative social practices through music-making.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The threat of terrorism, if not adequately managed, is likely to increase exponentially. As terrorist groups' influence and networks spread globally, a concerted effort in counterterrorism strategy is critical to mitigating the threat they present. Governments facing the threat of terrorism are typically strengthening their law enforcement, military and intelligence capabilities, but more complex initiatives such as deradicalisation and terrorist rehabilitation are more time-consuming and less attention-grabbing and so tend to be neglected. It is all too easy to 'do' rehabilitation ineffectively or to simply ignore it altogether. This is unfortunate, as an effective rehabilitation strategy can yield dividends over the longer term. Every committed terrorist is a potential recruiter, whether in prison or at liberty, for more terrorists. Even in death, they can potentially be presented as martyrs. Conversely, successfully rehabilitated terrorists can be valuable assets in the public relations theatre of battle. There is no single, simple solution to the challenges of deradicalisation and rehabilitation, but this book places examples of best practice within a robust, but flexible, conceptual framework. It gives guidelines for establishing and implementing a successful deradicalisation or rehabilitation programme, derived from a series of empirical case studies of successful projects around the world. It sets out both the necessary and desirable facets of such a programme, identifying which areas to prioritise and where budgets can be best spent if resources are tight. The authors provide detailed case studies of each step to illustrate an approach that has worked and how best to replicate this success.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence. This book analyses the different types of post-execution punishments and other aggravated execution practices, the reasons why they were advocated, and the decision, enshrined in the Murder Act of 1752, to make two post-execution punishments, dissection and gibbeting, an integral part of sentences for murder. It traces the origins of the Act, and then explores the ways in which Act was actually put into practice. After identifying the dominance of penal dissection throughout the period, it looks at the abandonment of burning at the stake in the 1790s, the rapid decline of hanging in chains just after 1800, and the final abandonment of both dissection and gibbeting in 1832 and 1834. It concludes that the Act, by creating differentiation in levels of penalty, played an important role within the broader capital punishment system well into the nineteenth century. While eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historians have extensively studied the 'Bloody Code' and the resulting interactions around the 'Hanging Tree', they have largely ignored an important dimension of the capital punishment system - the courts extensive use of aggravated and post-execution punishments. With this book, Peter King aims to rectify this neglected historical phenomenon.

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.

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?

This distinguished constitutional theorist takes a hard look at current criminal law and the Supreme Court's most recent decisions regarding the legality of capital punishment. Examining the penal system, capital punishment, and punishment in general, he reviews the continuing debate about the purpose of punishment for deterrence, rehabilitation, or retribution. He points out that the steady moderation of criminal law has not effected a corresponding moderation in criminal ways or improved the conditions under which men must live. He decries the "pious sentiment" of those who maintain that criminals need to be rehabilitated. He concludes that the real issue is not whether the death penalty deters crime, but that in an imperfect universe, justice demands the death penalty. Originally published by Basic Books in 1979.

"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.

Private prisons have become an integral part of the penal system in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. There already are over 100 such prisons in these countries, and with the number of prisoners continuing to increase rapidly, the trend toward privatization seems irreversible. In this context, Richard Harding addresses the following issues: the contributions, positive or negative, that private prisons make to providing custody for offenders; whether or not private prisons stimulate improvement within the public prison system; and the difficulties with the regulation and accountability of private prisons.

This book sets out to explore the contribution of private prisons to custodial practices, standards, and objectives. Many experts believe that, properly regulated and fully accountable, private prisons could lead to improvement within the public prison system, which has long been degenerate and demoralized. Harding sees the total prison system as a single entity, with two components: public and private. He relies upon extensive fieldwork and draws upon published literature as well as in-house documentation, discussions with public and private authorities, and a range of government documents.

Key issues covered in Private Prisons and Public Accountability are: overcrowding, program delivery, prisoners' rights, quality of staff, and financial control. This volume will be a significant addition to the criminal justice literature, but it will also appeal to sociologists, policymakers, and scholars interested in the privatization of various institutions in our society.

Punishment in the Community: The Future of Criminal Justice challenges the widely held assumption that punishment through imprisonment is central to the criminal justice system. Contemporary political debate assumes that penality is synonymous with prison. However, in reality, the vast majority of people admitting to, or convicted of criminal offences are dealt with using non-custodial penal measures.

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.

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

First published in 1989, Guards Imprisoned provides an in-depth look into the work and working life of prison guards as they perceive and experience it. The author, who was a teacher at Auburn Prison, New York, discovered that little was known about the guard's perceptions of his "place" in the prison community and set out to explore the dynamics of this key correctional occupation from the perspective of those who do it. The raw data was provided by over 160 hours of interviews with guards and is presented in the order of a "natural history" - from their prerecruitment images of prison to the search for satisfaction as experienced guards. The book also includes a follow-up with the officers who were originally interviewed in 1976, assessing patterns of change and stability in their attitudes and behaviors. The Auburn Correctional Facility (renamed from Auburn Prison in 1970) was the second state prison in New York, the site of the first execution by electric chair in 1890, and the namesake of the famed "Auburn System" replicated across the country, in which people worked in groups during the day, were housed in solitary confinement at night, and lived in total silence. The facility is celebrating the 200th anniversary of its groundbreaking in 2016.

Boot camps have developed over the past two decades into a program that incorporates a military regimen to create a structured environment. While some critics of this method of corrections suggest that the confrontational nature of the program is antithetical to treatment, authors Doris Layton MacKenzie and Gaylene Styve Armstrong present research knowledge and personal discussions with community leaders that offer insight into both the strengths and weaknesses of this controversial form of corrections. Correctional Boot Camps: Military Basic Training or a Model for Corrections? provides the most up-to-date assessment of the major perspectives and issues related to the current state of boot camps. The book goes beyond cursory examinations of the effectiveness of boot camps, presenting an in-depth view of a greater variety of issues. Correctional Boot Camps examines empirical evidence on boot camps drawn from diverse sources including male, female, juvenile, and adult programs from across the nation. The book explores empirical research on both the punitive and rehabilitative components of the boot camp model and the effectiveness of the "tough on crime" aspects of the programs that are often thought of as punishment or retribution, in lieu of a longer sentence in a traditional facility. Thus, offenders earn their way back to the general public more quickly because they have paid their debt to society by being punished in a short-term, but strict, boot camp. Correctional Boot Camps is a comprehensive textbook for undergraduate and graduate students studying corrections and juvenile justice. The book is also a valuable resource for correctional professionals interacting with offenders.

This is an English-language translation of P.F. Iakubovich's popular roman a clef about his exile and experiences as a Siberian penal laborer during the late 19th century.

This edited collection addresses the topic of prison governance which is crucial to our understanding of contemporary prisons in Latin America. It presents social research from Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay and Argentina to examine the practices of governance by the prisoners themselves in each unique setting in detail. High levels of variation in the governance practices are found to exist, not only between countries but also within the same country, between prisons and within the same prison, and between different areas. The chapters make important contributions to the theoretical concepts and arguments that can be used to interpret the emergence, dynamics and effects of these practices in the institutions of confinement of the region. The book also addresses the complex task of explaining why these types of practices of governance happen in Latin American prisons as some of them appear to be a legacy of a remote past but others have arisen more recently. It makes a vital contribution to the fundamental debate for prison policies in Latin America about the alternatives that can be promoted.

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.

George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis triggered abolitionist shockwaves. Calls to defund the police found receptive ears around the world. Shortly after, Sarah Everard's murder by a serving police officer sparked a national abolitionist movement in Britain. But to abolish the police, prisons and borders, we must confront the legacy of Empire. Abolition Revolution is a guide to abolitionist politics in Britain, drawing out rich histories of resistance from rebellion in the colonies to grassroots responses to carceral systems today. The authors argue that abolition is key to reconceptualising revolution for our times - linking it with materialist feminisms, anti-capitalist class struggle, internationalist solidarity and anti-colonialism. Perfect for reading groups and activist meetings, this is an invaluable book for those new to abolitionist politics - whilst simultaneously telling a passionate and authoritative story about the need for abolition and revolution in Britain and globally.

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.