The recent explosion in women's imprisonment in the US- 2,800 percent increase from 1970 to 2001- and around the world has received little critical analysis. Women of colour, immigrants, and indigenous women, in particular, have been targeted by 'tough on crime' policies and the global war on drugs, making them the majority inside prison walls while still the minority outside of them. The symbiotic relationship between private prison corporations and the state criminal justice system has also led to harsher sentencing and enforcement, causing prison overcrowding and creating a demand for more prison construction. This collection of essays provides a new analysis of women in prison, shifting the focus from the reasons behind women's criminal behavior to the role of the state, corporations, and the media in their imprisonment. While much analysis has focused on the rise of imprisoned men of color, scholars have neglected to look at the way race, gender, and class affect the criminalization of women. The essays engage in such controversial topics as the war on drugs, immigrant trafficking, and prisoner rights.

Although prison can present a critical opportunity to engage with offenders through interventions and programming, reoffending rates among those released from prison remain stubbornly high. Sport can be a means through which to engage with even the most challenging and complex individuals caught up in a cycle of offending and imprisonment, by offering an alternative means of excitement and risk taking to that gained through engaging in offending behaviour, or by providing an alternative social network and access to positive role models. This is the first book to explore the role of sport in prisons and its subsequent impact on rehabilitation and behavioural change. The book draws on research literature on the beneficial role of sport in community settings and on prison cultures and regimes, across disciplines including criminology, psychology, sociology and sport studies, as well as original qualitative and quantitative data gathered from research in prisons. It unpacks the meanings that prisoners and staff attach to sport participation and interventions in order to understand how to promote behavioural change through sport most effectively, while identifying and tackling the key emerging issues and challenges. Sport in Prison is essential reading for any advanced student, researcher, policy-maker or professional working in the criminal justice system with an interest in prisons, offending behaviour, rehabilitation, sport development, or the wider social significance of sport.

Millions of pounds are spent every year trying to tackle human trafficking, modern slavery and child sexual exploitation. These are apparently threats perpetrated by 'criminal masterminds', spreading at a dizzying rate and approaching epidemic proportions - or so the story goes. Amid all the bold rhetoric and sweeping claims, there is very little robust research to help understand these problems and inform evidence-based policy and practice. In this book, readers are invited to delve inside the murky world of human trafficking. It focuses on the internal (domestic) trafficking of children for sexual exploitation. It is based on far-reaching analysis of six of the earliest and largest such investigations in the United Kingdom (UK), including the infamous Derby and Rochdale cases that sparked nationwide concerns about 'street grooming' and 'Asian sex gangs'. Innovative methods, analytical rigour and truly extraordinary data underpin the research: a nuanced and sometimes unsettling exploration of the offender and victim networks, their characteristics, structure, activity and dynamics and the problems they pose for investigation and prosecution. The results paint a picture of a sprawling and dynamic system of grooming and abuse that is deeply embedded in complex webs of social relations and interactions. This book challenges accepted wisdom, debunks myths and introduces new and fundamentally different ways of thinking about trafficking and its prevention. An accessible and compelling read, this book is for academics, policymakers, practitioners and others interested in serious and organised crime.

Redemption, Rehabilitation and Risk Management provides the most accessible and up-to-date account of the origins and development of the Probation Service in England and Wales. The book explores and explains the changes that have taken place in the service, the pressures and tensions that have shaped change, and the role played by government, research, NAPO, and key individuals from its origins in the nineteenth century up to the plans for the service outlined by the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government. The probation service is a key agency in dealing with offenders; providing reports for the courts that assist sentencing decisions; supervizing released prisoners in the community and working with the victims of crime. Yet despite dealing with more offenders than the prison service, at lower cost and with reconviction rates that are lower than those associated with prisons, the Probation Service has been ignored, misrepresented, taken for granted and marginalized, and probation staff have been sneered at as 'do-gooders'. The service as a whole is currently under serious threat as a result of budget cuts, organizational restructuring, changes in training, and increasingly punitive policies. This book details how probation has come to such a pass. By tracing the evolution of the probation service, Redemption, Rehabilitation and Risk Management not only sheds invaluable light on a much misunderstood criminal justice agency, but offers a unique examination of twentieth century criminal justice policy. It will be essential reading for students and academics in criminal justice and criminology.

Despite their very different histories, societies, political and legal systems, Russia and the UK stand out as favouring a punitive approach to young law breakers, imprisoning many more children than any other European countries. The book is based on the author's primary research in Russia in which she visited a dozen closed institutions from St Petersburg to Krasnoyarsk and on similar research in England and Northern Ireland. The result is a unique study of how attitudes to youth crime and criminal justice, the political environment and the relationship between state and society have interacted to influence the treatment of young offenders. McAuley's account of the twists and turns in policy towards youth illuminate the extraordinary history of Russia in the twentieth century and the making of social policy in Russia today. It is also the first study to compare the UK (excluding Scotland because of its separate juvenile justice system) with Russia, a comparison which highlights the factors responsible for the making of 'punitive' policy in the two societies. McAuley places the Russian and UK policies in a European context, aiming to reveal how other European countries manage to put so many fewer children behind bars.

As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and around the worldooverwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis. Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California's penal systems. Each element of prison lifeo from numbing boredom to hard labour, from meagre pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violenceodemonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century. Ethan Blue is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Western Australia.

Prison Nation charts the injustices of prison privatization, race and the justice system, the quixotic drug war and the rarely discussed prison AIDS crisis. With fascinating narratives, shocking tales and small stories of hope, this collection paints a picture of a world many Americans know little or nothing about.

This book advances conceptualisations and empirical understanding of the prison cell. It discusses the complexities of this specific carceral space and addresses its significance in relation to the everyday experiences of incarceration. The collected chapters highlight the array of processes and practices that shape carceral life, adding the cell to a rich area of discussion in penal scholarship, criminology, anthropology, sociology and carceral geography. The chapters highlight key aspects such as penal philosophies, power relationships, sensory and emotional engagements with place to highlight the breadth and depth of interdisciplinary perspectives on the prison cell: a contested place of home, labour and leisure. The Prison Cell's empirical attention is global in its consideration, bringing together both contemporary and historical work that focuses upon the cell in the Global North and South including examples from a variety of geographical locations and settings, including police custody, prisons and immigrant detention centres. This book is an important and timely intervention in the growing and topical field of carceral studies. It presents the only standalone collection of essays with a sole focus on the space of the cell.

This comprehensive and factual study of the penal systems of South America is the outgrowth of an extended tour made by the author in 1944. The countries visited include: Panama; Colombia, which has the most rational program of productive prison labor; Ecuador, where there is "no penal philosophy or prison system worthy of the name"; Peru; Bolivia, with "prisons and penal philosophy the most benighted of any country visited"; Chile, which maintains "the worst large city jail ever seen" in Santiago; Argentina, which with Brazil stands in the foreground as far as prison construction is concerned; and Brazil, where there is real leadership in both adult penology and child care. The author's observations and discussions with leading men in the field, his knowledge of the history behind the present penal cods and institutions, and his understanding of the social, economic, and biological factors leading to crime make this a very illuminating account. There are detailed descriptions of the extremes of good and bad penal administration that may exist even within the same city, the generally sordid treatment of women prisoners who are not cared for in church-operated institutions, and the almost universal system of housing dependent and neglected minors in the same institutions as delinquent children. This book will be of interest not only to those who have a special knowledge of the field but to those who have little previous experience with the subject. There are ten photographs of prisoners that are described in detail by the author and a line-map of the penal institutions of South America.

Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Britain in 1965. At this time, the way people in Britain perceived and understood the death penalty had changed - it was an issue that had become increasingly controversial, high-profile and fraught with emotion. In order to understand why this was, it is necessary to examine how ordinary people learned about and experienced capital punishment. Drawing on primary research, this book explores the cultural life of the death penalty in Britain in the twentieth century, including an exploration of the role of the popular press and a discussion of portrayals of the death penalty in plays, novels and films. Popular protest against capital punishment and public responses to and understandings of capital cases are also discussed, particularly in relation to conceptualisations of justice. Miscarriages of justice were significant to capital punishment's increasingly fraught nature in the mid twentieth-century and the book analyses the unsettling power of two such high profile miscarriages of justice. The final chapters consider the continuing relevance of capital punishment in Britain after abolition, including its symbolism and how people negotiate memories of the death penalty. Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain is groundbreaking in its attention to the death penalty and the effect it had on everyday life and it is the only text on this era to place public and popular discourses about, and reactions to, capital punishment at the centre of the analysis. Interdisciplinary in focus and methodology, it will appeal to historians, criminologists, sociologists and socio-legal scholars.

Capital punishment is one of the more controversial subjects in the social sciences, especially in criminal justice and criminology. Over the last decade or so, the United States has experienced a significant decline in the number of death sentences and executions. Since 2007, eight states have abolished capital punishment, bringing the total number of states without the death penalty to 19, plus the District of Columbia, and more are likely to follow suit in the near future (Nebraska reinstated its death penalty in 2016). Worldwide, 70 percent of countries have abolished capital punishment in law or in practice. The current trend suggests the eventual demise of capital punishment in all but a few recalcitrant states and countries. Within this context, a fresh look at capital punishment in the United States and worldwide is warranted. The Routledge Handbook on Capital Punishment comprehensively examines the topic of capital punishment from a wide variety of perspectives. A thoughtful introductory chapter from experts Bohm and Lee presents a contextual framework for the subject matter, and chapters present state-of-the-art analyses of a range of aspects of capital punishment, grouped into five sections: (1) Capital Punishment: History, Opinion, and Culture; (2) Capital Punishment: Rationales and Religious Views; (3) Capital Punishment and Constitutional Issues; (4) The Death Penalty's Administration; and (5) The Death Penalty's Consequences. This is a key collection for students taking courses in prisons, penology, criminal justice, criminology, and related subjects, and is also an essential reference for academics and practitioners working in prison service or in related agencies.

The first known abolitionist critique of the death penalty-here for the first time in English In 1764, a Milanese aristocrat named Cesare Beccaria created a sensation when he published On Crimes and Punishments. At its centre is a rejection of the death penalty as excessive, unnecessary, and pointless. Beccaria is deservedly regarded as the founding father of modern criminal-law reform, yet he was not the first to argue for the abolition of the death penalty. Against the Death Penalty presents the first English translation of the Florentine aristocrat Giuseppe Pelli's critique of capital punishment, written three years before Beccaria's treatise, but lost for more than two centuries in the Pelli family archives. Peter Garnsey examines the contrasting arguments of the two abolitionists, who drew from different intellectual traditions. Pelli was a devout Catholic influenced by the writings of natural jurists such as Hugo Grotius, whereas Beccaria was inspired by the French Enlightenment philosophers. While Beccaria attacked the criminal justice system as a whole, Pelli focused on the death penalty, composing a critique of considerable depth and sophistication. Garnsey explores how Beccaria's alternative penalty of forced labour, and its conceptualisation as servitude, were embraced in Britain and America, and delves into Pelli's voluminous diaries, shedding light on Pelli's intellectual development and painting a vivid portrait of an Enlightenment man of letters and of conscience. With translations of letters exchanged by the two abolitionists and selections from Beccaria's writings, Against the Death Penalty provides new insights into eighteenth-century debates about capital punishment and offers vital historical perspectives on one of the most pressing questions of our own time.

A fascinating look at the social life of women in prison. Intended to shine the light on prison social life in the face of allegations of all sorts of misconduct and deviant behaviors.

The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political culture among dissidents since the 1970s-a culture that laid the foundation for the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The emergence of prison literature as a specific genre helped articulate opposition to authoritarian states, including the Assad regime. However, the significance of Syrian prison literature goes beyond a form of witnessing, expressing creative opposition, and illuminating the larger cultural and historical backstory of the Syrian uprising. Prison literature, in all its diversity, challenges the narrative structures and conventional language of human rights. In doing so, prison literature has played an essential role in generating the ""experimental shift"" in Arabic literature since the 1960s. Taleghani's groundbreaking work explores prison writing's critical role in resistance movements in Syria, the evolution of Arabic literature, and the development of a global human rights.

Restorative Justice is one of the most talked about developments in the field of crime and justice. Its advocates and practitioners argue that state punishment, society's customary response to crime, neither meets the needs of crime victims nor prevents reoffending. In its place, they suggest, should be restorative justice, in which families and communities of offenders encourage them to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, express repentance and repair the harm they have done.

First published in 2002, Restorative Justice: Ideas, Values, Debates is renowned worldwide as an accessible, balanced and invaluable analysis of the argument that restorative justice can provide an attractive alternative to traditional responses to crime.

The second edition includes a new chapter identifying and analysing fundamental shifts and developments in restorative justice thinking over the last decade. It suggests that the campaign for restorative justice has not only grown rapidly in the last decade, but has also changed in its focus and character. What started as a campaign to revolutionise criminal justice has evolved into a social movement that aspires to implant restorative values into the fabric of everyday life. This new edition explores the implications of this development for restorative justice 's claim to provide a feasible and desirable alternative to mainstream thinking on matters of crime and justice.

This book provides an essential introduction to the most fundamental and distinctive ideas of restorative justice and will appeal to students of criminology, law or related disciplines or researchers and professionals with an interest in crime and justice issues. In addition it extends the debate about the meaning of restorative justice pros, cons and wider significance hence it will also be of interest to those already familiar with the topic.

Restorative justice is one of the most talked about developments in the field of crime and justice. Its advocates and practitioners argue that state punishment, society's customary response to crime, neither meets the needs of crime victims nor prevents reoffending. In its place, they suggest, should be restorative justice, in which families and communities of offenders encourage them to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, express repentance and repair the harm they have done.

First published in 2002, Restorative Justice: Ideas, Values, Debates is renowned worldwide as an accessible, balanced and invaluable analysis of the argument that restorative justice can provide an attractive alternative to traditional responses to crime.

The second edition includes a new chapter identifying and analyzing fundamental shifts and developments in restorative justice thinking over the last decade. It suggests that the campaign for restorative justice has not only grown rapidly in the last decade, but has also changed in its focus and character. What started as a campaign to revolutionize criminal justice has evolved into a social movement that aspires to implant restorative values into the fabric of everyday life. This new edition explores the implications of this development for restorative justice s claim to provide a feasible and desirable alternative to mainstream thinking on matters of crime and justice.

This book provides an essential introduction to the most fundamental and distinctive ideas of restorative justice and will appeal to students of criminology, law or related disciplines or researchers and professionals with an interest in crime and justice issues. In addition it extends the debate about the meaning of restorative justice pros, cons and wider significance hence it will also be of interest to those already familiar with the topic.

This interdisciplinary volume presents a nuanced critique of the prison experience in diverse detention facilities across Africa. The book stresses the contingent, porous nature of African prisons, across both time and space. It draws on original long-term ethnographic research undertaken in both Francophone and Anglophone settings, which are grouped in four parts. The first part examines how the prison has imprinted itself on wider political and social imaginaries and, in turn, how structures of imprisonment carry the imprint of political action of various times. The second part stresses how particular forms of ordering emerge in African prisons. It is held that while these often involve coercion and neglect, they are better understood as the product of on-going negotiations and the search for meaning and value on the part of a multitude of actors. The third part is concerned with how prison life percolates beyond its physical perimeters into its urban and rural surroundings, and vice versa. It deals with the popular and contested nature of what prisons are about and what they do, especially in regard to bringing about moral subjects. The fourth and final part of the book examines how efforts of reforming and resisting the prison take shape at the intersection of globally circulating models of good governance and levels of self-organisation by prisoners. The book will be an essential reference for students, academics and policy-makers in Law, Criminology, Sociology and Politics.

James Billington, formerly a pub entertainer and then a barber, had been single-minded in his determination to secure the post of executioner for London and the Home Counties. But did he really feel he was primarily a benefit to society and justice, or were his reasons for wanting the position more personal? Three of his sons, Thomas, William and John, followed in his footsteps and together the family were responsible for 235 executions in Great Britain between 1884 and 1905. Billington: Victorian Executioner provides a complete account of the stories behind James Billington's 151 executions, as well as introducing the reader to the real man behind the rope. This fascinating biography is an exciting addition to any true crime bookshelf.

The UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty detailed many children's poor experiences in detention, highlighting the urgent need for reform. Applying a child-centred model of detention that fulfils the rights of the child under the five themes of provision, protection, participation, preparation and partnership, this original book illustrates how reform can happen. Drawing on Ireland's experience of transforming law, policy and practice, and combining theory with real-life experiences, this compelling book demonstrates how children's rights can be implemented in detention. This important case study of reform presents a powerful argument for a progressive, rights-based approach to child detention. Worthy of international application, the book shares practical insights into how theory can be translated into practice.

A two-person memoir that explores education, prison, possibility, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the books core are two stories that speak up for human imagination, spirit, and the power of art. "A boy with no one to listen becomes a man in prison for life and discovers his mind can be free. A woman enters prison to teach and becomes his first listener. And so begins a twenty-five year friendship between two gifted writers and poets. The result is By Heart a book that will anger you, give you hope, and break your heart." - Gloria Steinem Judith Tannenbaum and Spoon Jackson met at San Quentin State Prison in 1985. For over two decades they have conferred, corresponded and sometimes collaborated, producing very different bodies of work resting on the same understanding: that human beings have one foot in darkness, the other in light. In this beautifully crafted exploration, part memoir, part essay, Tannenbaum and Jackson consider art, education, prison, possibility, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the book's core are two stories that speak for human imagination, spirit, and expression. Judith Tannenbaum is a nationally respected educator, speaker, and author. Among her books are the memoir, Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin; two books for teachers: Teeth, Wiggly as Earthquakes: Writing Poetry in the Primary Grades and (with Valerie Chow Bush) Jump Write In! Creative Writing Exercises for Diverse Communities, Grades 6-12; and six poetry collections. She currently serves as training coordinator with WritersCorps in San Francisco. Born into a family of fifteen boys in Barstow, California, Spoon Jackson was sentenced to Life Without Possibility of Parole when he was twenty years old. Spoon discovered himself as a writer at San Quentin; played Pozzo in the prison's 1988 production of Waiting for Godot; and has written, published, and received awards for plays, poetry, novels, fairy tales, short stories, essays, and memoir during the more than thirty years he has been behind bars. His poems are collected in Longer Ago.

This book brings together leading authorities from the fields of international human rights law, criminology, legal medicine, and political science with international human rights judges and UN experts to analyze the current situation of detainees in Europe, the Americas and Africa. This comprehensive volume offers a platform for reflecting on the complexity of the prison problem from a multidisciplinary perspective. The authors address detention-related issues with the aim of generating new ideas that contribute to both academic discussion and critical analysis. Academic dialogue across the globe provides insights into various national and international carceral systems and how they deal with human rights behind bars. At the same time, the critical comparison helps to identify basic needs and practices that can work in multiple settings. The contributors are respected experts and leading scholars in their fields, and each has pursued prison and human rights research over the last decades. However, this is the first time that they have come together in a multidisciplinary academic project. This book aims to stimulate diverse actors to imagine alternative ways of engaging with persons deprived of their liberty, in academia and in practice.

John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment a " an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, societya (TM)s purposes of imprisonment, and offendersa (TM) reformability. Through the lifersa (TM) stories, he reveals what happens to prisoners serving very long sentences in correctional facilities and what this should tell us about effective sentencing policy.

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.

This open access book provides insights into the everyday lives of long-term prisoners in Switzerland who are labelled as 'dangerous' and are preventatively held in indefinite, probably lifelong, incarceration. It explores prisoners' manifold ways of inhabiting the prison which can be used to challenge well established notions about the experience of imprisonment, such as 'adaptation', 'coping', and 'resistance'. Drawing on ethnographic data generated in two high-security prisons housing male offenders, this book explores how the various spaces of the prison affect prisoners' sense of self and experience of time, and how, in particular, the indeterminate nature of their imprisonment affects their perceptions of place and space. It sheds light on prisoners' subjective, emplaced and embodied perceptions of the prisons' various everyday time-spaces in the cell, at work, and during leisure time, and the forms of agency they express. It provides insight into prisoners' everyday habits, practices, routines, and rhythms as well as the profoundly existential issues that are engendered, (re)arranged, and anchored in these everyday contexts. It also offers insights into the penal policies, norms, and practices developed and followed by prison authorities and staff.

V. S. Naipaul's Booker Prize winning novel about displacement, the yearning for the good place in someone else's land and the attendant heartache. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by acclaimed author, Robert McCrum. In a Free State tells the story first of an Indian servant in Washington, who becomes an American citizen but feels displaced. Then of a disturbed Asian West Indian in London who, in jail for murder, has never really known where he is. Then the central novel moves to a fictional African country. There, the central characters have to make the long drive to the safety of their compound. By the end of this drive we know everything about the English characters, the African country and the Idi Amin-like future awaiting it.