This book explores the identity of Texas as a state with a large and severe penal system. It does so by assessing the narratives at work in Texas museums and tourist sites associated with prisons and punishment. In such cultural institutions, complex narratives are presented, which show celebratory stories of Texan toughness in the penal sphere, as well as poignant stories about the witnessing of executions, comical stories that normalize the harsher aspects of Texan punishment, and presentations about prison officers who have lost their lives in the war on crime. In analysing these representations, the book shows that Texan history plays an important role in the production of Texan self-identity, and that to understand the Texan commitment to harsh punishment we must be prepared to focus on Texan myths and memories. Prisons and Punishment in Texas draws on diverse interdisciplinary work, including criminology, cultural studies about Southern values, as well as research on cultural memory and dark tourism. Museums are shown to be under-researched sites of criminological significance, which offer rich evidence through which penal imaginaries and the cultural role of punishment can be explored. The book will be of great interest to criminologists as well as scholars of sociology, cultural studies, museum studies and politics.

WINNER OF THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 2017 'In its tragic absurdity, Close But No Cigar reads like a Graham Greene story, with a cast of characters to make Hemingway proud' Daily Telegraph For over a decade Stephen Purvis had been a pillar of Havana's expat community, one of many foreign businessmen investing in Cuba's crawl from Cold War communism towards modernity. But for reasons unknown to him he was also under State Security's microscope. One morning during the height of President Raul Castro's purges in 2012, while his family slept, the unmarked Ladas of State Security arrived at his home and he was taken away into the absurd and brutal world of Cuban justice. In this engrossing memoir, Purvis recounts his fifteen-month ordeal. Accused at first of selling state secrets, he is taken to the notorious interrogation centre Villa Marista, where he endures brutal conditions designed by the KGB and Stasi to break the bodies and minds of spies and political prisoners, and resists the paranoia and incompetence of his jailers. Later, held in a maximum-security prison, he finds himself surrounded by a motley crew of convicts: people-smugglers and drug-runners together with a handful of confused businessmen also awaiting formal charges. From his arrest to his farcical secret trial and sudden release, Purvis exposes the madness of modern Cuba with wit, grit and a sharp eye for character. As tourists flock to Havana to marvel at a city frozen in time, he shows that despite reforms and international reconciliation the Castro regime remains a corrupt, dictatorial relic. Close But No Cigar is part thriller, part comedy and part morality tale, but most of all a true story that takes the reader into a dark side of a sunny place that remains an enigma.

In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn't trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death? That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans' thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do-and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it's the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.

Conversations about rehabilitation and how to address the drugs-crime nexus have been dominated by academics and policymakers, without due recognition of the experience and knowledge of practitioners. Not enough is known about the cultures and conditions in which rehabilitation occurs. Why is it that significant numbers of practitioners are leaving the alcohol and other drugs field, while disproportionate numbers of criminal justice practitioners are on leave? Rehabilitation Work provides a unique insight into what happens behind the closed doors of prisons, probation and parole offices, drug rehabs, and recovery support services drawing on research from Australia. This book is among the first to provide a dedicated empirical examination of the interface between the concurrent processes of desistance from crime and recovery from substance misuse, and the implications for rehabilitation work. Hannah Graham uses practitioner interviews, workforce data and researcher observations to reveal compelling differences between official accounts of rehabilitation work, and what practitioners actually do in practice. Practitioners express a desire to be the change rather than being subject to change, actively co-producing progressive reforms instead of passively coping with funding cutbacks and interagency politics. Applied examples of how practitioners collaborate, lead and innovate in the midst of challenging work are complemented with evocative illustrations of insider humour and professional resilience. This book is a key resource for students, academics and practitioners across fields including criminology and criminal justice, social work, psychology, counselling and addiction treatment.

In Their Names busts open the public safety myth that uses victims' rights to perpetuate mass incarceration, and offers a formula for what would actually make us safe, from the widely respected head of Alliance for Safety and Justice When twenty-six-year-old recent college graduate Aswad Thomas was days away from starting a professional basketball career in 2009, he was shot twice while buying juice at a convenience store. The trauma left him in excruciating pain, with mounting medical debt, and struggling to cope with deep anxiety and fear. That was the same year the national incarceration rate peaked. Yet, despite thousands of new tough-on-crime policies and billions of new dollars pumped into "justice," Aswad never received victim compensation, support, or even basic levels of concern. In the name of victims, justice bureaucracies ballooned while most victims remained on their own. In In Their Names, Lenore Anderson, president of one of the nation's largest reform advocacy organizations, offers a close look at how the political call to help victims in the 1980s morphed into a demand for bigger bureaucracies and more incarceration, and cemented the long- standing chasm that exists between most victims and the justice system. She argues that the powerful myth that mass incarceration benefits victims obscures recognition of what most victims actually need, including addressing their trauma, which is a leading cause of subsequent violent crime. A solutions-oriented, paradigm-shifting book, In Their Names argues persuasively for closing the gap between our public safety systems and crime survivors.

This book presents an in-depth analysis of how statutory and third sector organisations have faced the challenge of dealing with former 'terrorists'. Offering a theoretically robust, empirically rich account of work with ex-prisoners and those considered 'at risk' of involvement in extremism in the United Kingdom, Marsden dissects the problems governments are facing in dealing with the effects of 'radicalisation'. Increasingly, governments are struggling with the challenge of dealing with those who have become involved in extremism, and yet, comparatively little is known about how and why people renounce violence. Nor are existing efforts to 'deradicalise' extremists well understood. Arguing that reintegration is a more appropriate framework than 'deradicalisation', Marsden looks in detail at the mechanisms by which people can be supported to move away from extremism. By drawing out implications for policy, practice and academic debates around disengagement from radical subcultures, this book makes a significant contribution to an issue only likely to grow in importance for scholars of criminological theory, terrorism and justice.

Originally published in 1974 and the recipient of the Denis Carroll Book Prize at the World Congress of the International Criminology Society in 1978, Thomas Mathiesen's The Politics of Abolition is a landmark text in critical criminology. In its examination of Scandinavian penal policy and call for the abolition of prisons, this book was enormously influential across Europe and beyond among criminologists, sociologists and legal scholars, as well as advocates of prisoners' rights. Forty years on and in the context of mass incarceration in many parts of the world, this book remains relevant to a new generation of penal scholars. This new edition includes a new introduction from the author, as well as an afterword that collects contributions from leading criminologists and inmates from Germany, England, Norway and the United States to reflect on the development and current state of the academic literature on penal abolition. This book will be suitable for academics and students of criminology and sociology, as well as those studying political science. It will also be of great interest to those who read the original book and are looking for new insights into an issue that is still as important and topical today as it was forty years ago.

"Jeanne Stinchcomb's book makes an excellent contribution to the field of corrections serving as a substantial resource for those teaching corrections and as a practical inspiration for those students who will ultimately lead the profession. Stinchomb carefully crafts a balanced perspective that presents a powerful argument for why corrections is an important and necessary part of our criminal justice system while at the same time cautioning that justice can only be served when corrections is implemented with integrity and held to the highest of professional standards....This book will dare those who care about corrections to move beyond the ease of accepting the status quo to optimistically embracing the greater challenges of implementing a just and effective system of corrections." - Faith E. Lutze, Ph.D., Washington State University Written by a master teacher with over a decade of experience in federal, state, and local justice agencies, this is the most comprehensive, yet affordable, corrections text on the market. Students will like everything about it - from the reasonable cost to the user-friendly narrative that keeps them engaged. Chapters are written with the passion of a former correctional trainer and administrator, while balancing both sides of every issue. Based on proven concepts of instructional design, the narrative features: measurable learning outcomes that are placed strategically throughout the chapters material is presented in a "building-block" method designed to enhance learning "Close-up on Corrections" boxes reinforce content with real-life stories and examples. Realistic insights are provided into virtually every aspect of the "correctional conglomerate" - from the impact of sentencing policies to the effects of institutional life and the difficulties of re-entry. Unlike most other texts, an entire chapter is devoted to the correctional workforce - which gives students insights into the challenges as well as rewards of such employment. Best of all for the instructor, the book's flexibility and supplemental material make it a breeze to use in the classroom. Electronic versions are available for online and hybrid courses, and it is customizable in inexpensive paperback form. The instructor's manual, written entirely by the Author of the text itself, includes over 500 high-quality test questions directly correlated with each learning outcome featured in the text, along with annotated websites, teaching tips, and powerpoint slides.

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.

Punishing the Other draws on the work of Zygmunt Bauman to discuss contemporary discourses and practices of punishment and criminalization. Bringing together some of the most exciting international scholars, both established and emerging, this book engages with Bauman's thesis of the social production of immorality in the context of criminalization and social control and addresses processes of 'othering' through a range of contemporary case studies situated in various cultural, political and social contexts. Topics covered include the increasing bureaucratization of the business of punishment with the corresponding loss of moral and ethical reflection in the public sphere; punitive discourses around border control and immigration; and exclusionary discourses and their consequences concerning 'terrorists' and other socially and culturally defined outsiders. Engaging with national and global issues that are more topical now than ever before, this book is essential reading for academics and students of involved in the study of the sociology of punishment, punishment and modern society, the criminal justice system, philosophy and punishment, and comparative criminology and penology.

Zvi Preigerzon wrote memoirs about his time in the Gulag in 1958, long before Solzhenitsyn and without any knowledge of the other publications on this subject. It was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the harsh reality of Soviet Gulags. Even after the death of Stalin, when the whole Gulag system was largely disbanded, writing about them could be regarded as an act of heroism. Preigerzon attempted to document and analyze his own prison camp experience and portray the Jewish prisoners he encountered in forced labor camps. Among these people, we meet scientists, engineers, famous Jewish writers and poets, young Zionists, a devoted religious man, a horse wagon driver, a Jewish singer of folk songs, and many, many others. As Preigerzon put it, "Each one had his own story, his own soul, and his own tragedy."

Political leaders and the popular press tell us that society is in the grip of a moral crisis. 'Where have our values gone?' our newspapers scream at us. 'Benefit scroungers', 'greedy bankers', 'intrusive journalists', 'have-a-go rioters', political scandals and criminals of all shapes and sizes are continually cited as evidence that we live in a modern-day Gomorrah. Criminologists have studied this in several ways, including: media representations of crime, mass incarceration, hooliganism and the exercise of power and control through communities. What criminologists have not studied is the place of morality in shaping public debate about understanding crime and how this then shapes crime control strategies. Rather than dismiss statements about community breakdown, 'broken society' and irresponsibility as ideological, self-justificatory rhetoric, what happens when we take these claims seriously? What do they tell us about the causes of crime? How do they shape the crime control agenda? How else might we begin to understand and explain the relationship between crime and society? Navigating between criminological concerns about control and governance and social theories about culture and identity, this book explores what is meant by crime, community and morality and puts this meaning to the test. Discussion of a new theory of rule-breaking, combined with an analysis of how our justice system is becoming maladapted, makes this essential reading for criminologists around the globe, as well as those general readers interested in the causes of crime.

The fifth edition of this highly praised study charts and explains the progress that continues to be made towards the goal of worldwide abolition of the death penalty. The majority of nations have now abolished the death penalty and the number of executions has dropped in almost all countries where abolition has not yet taken place. Emphasising the impact of international human rights principles and evidence of abuse, the authors examine how this has fuelled challenges to the death penalty and they analyse and appraise the likely obstacles, political and cultural, to further abolition. They discuss the cruel realities of the death penalty and the failure of international standards always to ensure fair trials and to avoid arbitrariness, discrimination and conviction of the innocent: all violations of the right to life. They provide further evidence of the lack of a general deterrent effect; shed new light on the influence and limits of public opinion; and argue that substituting for the death penalty life imprisonment without parole raises many similar human rights concerns. This edition provides a strong intellectual and evidential basis for regarding capital punishment as undeniably cruel, inhuman and degrading. Widely relied upon and fully updated to reflect the current state of affairs worldwide, this is an invaluable resource for all those who study the death penalty and work towards its removal as an international goal.

Police who engage in torture are condemned by human rights activists, the media, and people across the world who shudder at their brutality. Stark revelations about torture by American forces at places like Guantanamo Bay have stoked a fascination with torture and debates about human rights. Yet despite this interest, the public knows little about the officers who actually commit such violence. How do the police understand what they do? How do their beliefs inform their responses to education and activism against torture? Just Violence reveals the moral perspective of perpetrators and how they respond to human rights efforts. Through interviews with law enforcers in India, Rachel Wahl uncovers the beliefs that motivate officers who use and support torture, and how these beliefs shape their responses to international human rights norms. Although on the surface Indian officers' subversion of human rights may seem to be a case of "local culture" resisting global norms, officers see human rights as in keeping with their religious and cultural traditions-and view Western countries as the primary human rights violators. However, the police do not condemn the United States for violations; on the contrary, for Indian police, Guantanamo Bay justifies torture in New Delhi. This book follows the attempts of human rights workers to both persuade and coerce officers into compliance. As Wahl explains, current human rights strategies can undermine each other, leaving the movement with complex dilemmas regarding whether to work with or against perpetrators.

Having left South Africa at the age of four as a political refugee with his parents, photographer Koto Bolofo returned to his home country with his wife in 1992, two years after Nelson Mandela had been released from prison. Bolofo got free access to the notorious and by now deserted prison of Robben Island, where Mandela had been held for the majority of the twenty-seven years of his confinement in a cell of barely 6 square metres in Section B. The photographer and his wife eagerly began documenting the site's abandoned interiors and surroundings, dreading the prison's potential closure. Meanwhile, it was converted into a well-frequented museum in 1997 and included on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 1999. The black and white photographs of this volume conspicuously favour close-up depictions of details as opposed to general views: leftover items, barbed wire fences, spacious dormitories viewed through a spyhole, the key in the lock to Mandela's cell which is so tiny it cannot be taken as a whole--all this is conveying the gloomy sense of claustrophobia and suppression that characterise the place. The camera is constantly searching for the few rays of light that penetrate the ubiquitous grimness and silence of cruelty.

True-life reporting on vicious criminals and the haphazard system that punishes them In 1969, the Supreme Court justices cast votes in secret that could have signaled the end of the death penalty. Later, the justices' resolve began to unravel. Why? What were the consequences for the rule of law and for the life at stake in the case? These are some of the fascinating questions answered in Murder at the Supreme Court. Veteran journalists Martin Clancy and Tim O'Brien not only pull back the curtain of secrecy that surrounds Supreme Court deliberations but also reveal the crucial links between landmark capital-punishment cases and the lethal crimes at their root. The authors take readers to crime scenes, holding cells, jury rooms, autopsy suites, and execution chambers to provide true-life reporting on vicious criminals and the haphazard judicial system that punishes them. The cases reported are truly "the cases that made the law." They have defined the parameters that judges must follow for a death sentence to stand up on appeal. Beyond the obvious questions regarding the dubious deterrent effect of capital punishment or whether retribution is sufficient justification for the death penalty (regardless of the heinous nature of the crimes committed), the cases and crimes examined in this book raise other confounding issues: Is lethal injection really more humane than other methods of execution? Should a mentally ill killer be forcibly medicated to make him "well enough" to be executed? How does the race of the perpetrator or the victim influence sentencing? Is heinous rape a capital crime? How young is too young to be executed? This in-depth yet highly accessible book provides compelling human stories that illuminate the thorny legal issues behind the most noteworthy capital cases.

Controversy has arisen regarding U.S. treatment of enemy combatants and terrorist suspects detained in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations, and whether such treatment complies with U.S. statutes and treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and the 1949 Geneva Convention. This book summarises the results of the review conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of the Inspector General (OIG) regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigations in Guantanamo Bay (GTMO), Afghanistan, and Iraq. The focus of this book was whether FBI agents witnessed incidents of detainee abuse in the military zones, whether FBI employees reported any such abuse to their superiors or others, and how those reports were handled. The OIG also examined whether FBI employees participated in any detainee abuse. In addition, the authors examined the development and adequacy of the policies, guidance, and training that the FBI provided to the agents it deployed to the military zones.

When suspects are arrested, they spend their time in police custody largely in isolation and out of public view. These custody blocks are police territory, and public controversies about what happens there often only arise when a detainee dies. Custody visitors are volunteers who make what are supposed to be random and unannounced visits to police custody blocks to check on the welfare of detainees. However, there is a fundamental power imbalance between the police and these visitors, which calls the independence and effectiveness of custody visiting into question. Investigating this largely unexplored part of the criminal justice system, this timely book includes the voices of the detainees who have a unique insight into the scheme. It offers detailed proposals for radically reforming custody visiting to make it an effective regulator of police behaviour, with an explanation of the political context that could make that a reality.

Urbina's consideration of capital punishment seeks to examine racial and ethnic differences, stressing how Latinos' and Latinas' experiences are distinct from those of Caucasians and African Americans. In considering Latinos he focuses on the problem of lack of data and addresses it through several means. His goal is to go beyond traditional approaches of analyzing death penalty information, with the ultimate objective of addressing theoretical and methodological shortcomings empirically, and quantitatively analyzing death sentence outcome data for California, Florida, and Texas between 1975 and 1995.

In his cogent and groundbreaking book, From Slave Ship to Supermax, Patrick Elliot Alexander argues that the disciplinary logic and violence of slavery haunt depictions of the contemporary U.S. prison in late twentieth-century Black fiction. Alexander links representations of prison life in James Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk to his engagements with imprisoned intellectuals like George Jackson, who exposed historical continuities between slavery and mass incarceration. Likewise, Alexander reveals how Toni Morrison's Beloved was informed by Angela Y. Davis's jail writings on slavery-reminiscent practices in contemporary women's facilities. Alexander also examines recurring associations between slave ships and prisons in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, and connects slavery's logic of racialized premature death to scenes of death row imprisonment in Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying. Alexander ultimately makes the case that contemporary Black novelists depict racial terror as a centuries-spanning social control practice that structured carceral life on slave ships and slave plantations-and that mass-produces prisoners and prisoner abuse in post-Civil Rights America. These authors expand free society's view of torment confronted and combated in the prison industrial complex, where discriminatory laws and the institutionalization of secrecy have reinstated slavery's system of dehumanization.

Bio-Privacy: Privacy Regulations and the Challenge of Biometrics provides an in-depth consideration of the legal issues posed by the use of biometric technology. Focusing particularly on the relationship between the use of this technology and the protection of privacy, this book draws on material across a range of jurisdictions in order to explore several key questions. What are the privacy issues in the biometric context? How are these issues currently dealt with under the law? What principles are applied? Is the current regulation satisfactory? Is it applied consistently? And, more generally, what is the most appropriate way to deal with the legal implications of biometrics? Offering an analysis, and recommendations, with a view to securing adequate human rights and personal data protection, Bio-Privacy: Privacy Regulations and the Challenge of Biometrics will be an important reference point for those with interests in the tension between freedom and security.

A Restorative Justice Reader brings together carefully chosen extracts from the most important and influential contributions to the literature of restorative justice, accompanying these with an informative commentary providing context and explanation. It includes works by both well known advocates of restorative justice and by some of the key critics of the restorative justice movement.

The new edition has been thoroughly revised to take account of the rapid expansion of the literature of restorative justice over the last decade. Classical readings are accompanied by more recent literature representing the most significant contributions to research, discussion and debate concerning restorative justice. The latest edition also contains:

• a new section containing key contributions to the research literature evaluating what works in restorative justice.
• a brief guide to studying restorative justice

Just as consumer demands for mobile devices have risen rapidly, the use of cell phones by prison inmates has grown as the U.S. prison population continues to expand. This use is considered contraband by prison officials. The number of cell phones confiscated by prison officials has dramatically increased in only a few years. This increase in unauthorised cell phone use by inmates is a mounting concern among correctional administrators across the country. This book investigates and examines wireless technology solutions to prevent contraband cell phone use in prisons, such as jamming, managed access, and detection.

While the use of imprisonment continues to rise in developed nations, we have little sociological knowledge of the prison's inner world. Based on extensive fieldwork in a medium-security prison, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison provides an in-depth analysis of the prison's social anatomy. It explains how power is exercised by the institution, individualizing the prisoner community and demanding particular forms of compliance and engagement. Drawing on prisoners' life stories, it supplies a detailed typology of adaptive styles, showing how different prisoners experience and respond to the new range of penal practices and frustrations. It then explains how the prisoner society - its norms, hierarchy and social relationships - is shaped both by these conditions of confinement and by the different backgrounds, values and identities that prisoners bring into the prison environment.
Through this analysis, this meticulously researched book aims to revive and update the dormant tradition of prison ethnography. It provides an empirical snapshot of a modern prison, documenting the aims and techniques of contemporary imprisonment and illuminating the social structures and behaviors that they generate. Through a penetrating account of power relations throughout the institution, the author documents the pains of modern imprisonment, the new techniques of survival, and the prison's distinctive forms of trade, friendship and everyday culture.

This book is a collection of work on aging and development from authors from the global south. Aging is steadily evolving as a public health and social crisis for which countries of the global south are ill-prepared. The forces of development and improved public health services have ensured that human being live longer. But there is enough evidence that such longevity do not commensurate with good health. As such, many countries of the global south are seeing a booming population who are aging in poor health, without the necessary safety net to ensure quality of life. This book discusses work from Asia, Africa, and South America to explore the challenges facing older adults. Topics include: aging in institutions, living arrangements of older adults, food insecurity, social isolation, end of life migration, and policy papers. This is the first book to bring together varied perspectives on the situation of older adults, and the challenges and opportunities that lie in developing innovative, sustainable programs to support elderly care services.