Although the negative consequences of rising incarceration rates have been well-established, criminological research has largely neglected to document psychological, social, and behavioral changes that occur during periods of incarceration. Drawing on an original longitudinal study of long-term French prisoners, this book examines the process of desistance from crime and positive growth in prison. It offers reflections on how personal transformation can be achieved in prison, particularly among individuals serving long prison sentences. This research investigates the barriers to achieving positive growth in prison, as well as the different ways in which transformation can occur behind bars. It also conceptualizes the process of abandoning crime in prison, and sheds light on the cognitive, social, and structural factors that may trigger, accelerate, or hamper this process. This book explores the circumstances under which individuals can thrive in prison, and identifies key features of the narratives of prisoners who have achieved positive growth. The research presented in this book also examines the intricacies of returning to society after a lengthy period of time in prison. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will be invaluable reading for those engaged in studies of criminology and criminal justice, sociology, criminal behavior, prisons, and penology. It is also aimed at a variety of audiences, including academics, practitioners, policy-makers, and prisoners.

Is life without parole the perfect compromise to the death penalty? Or is it as ethically fraught as capital punishment? This comprehensive, interdisciplinary anthology treats life without parole as "the new death penalty." Editors Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat bring together original work by prominent scholars in an effort to better understand the growth of life without parole and its social, cultural, political, and legal meanings. What justifies the turn to life imprisonment? How should we understand the fact that this penalty is used disproportionately against racial minorities? What are the most promising avenues for limiting, reforming, or eliminating life without parole sentences in the United States? Contributors explore the structure of life without parole sentences and the impact they have on prisoners, where the penalty fits in modern theories of punishment, and prospects for (as well as challenges to) reform.

An in-depth analysis of the legal entry points and remedies in the school-to-prison pipeline The "school-to-prison pipeline" is an emerging trend that pushes large numbers of at-risk youth-particularly children of color-out of classrooms and into the juvenile justice system. The policies and practices that contribute to this trend can be seen as a pipeline with many entry points, from under-resourced K-12 public schools, to the over-use of zero-tolerance suspensions and expulsions and to the explosion of policing and arrests in public schools. The confluence of these practices threatens to prepare an entire generation of children for a future of incarceration. In this comprehensive study of the relationship between American law and the school-to-prison pipeline, co-authors Catherine Y. Kim, Daniel J. Losen, and Damon T. Hewitt analyze the current state of the law for each entry point on the pipeline and propose legal theories and remedies to challenge them. Using specific state-based examples and case studies, the authors assert that law can be an effective weapon in the struggle to reduce the number of children caught in the pipeline, address the devastating consequences of the pipeline on families and communities, and ensure that our public schools and juvenile justice system further the goals for which they were created: to provide meaningful, safe opportunities for all the nation's children.

While evidence-based policy is an emerging rhetoric of the desire by and for governments to develop policies based on the best available evidence, drug policy is an area where particular challenges abound. This book is a detailed and comprehensive examination of the contours of drug policy development through the consideration of the particular roles of science, media, and interest groups. Using Belgium as the primary case-study, supplemented by insights gathered from other countries, the author contributes to a richer understanding of the science-policy nexus in the messy, real-world complexities of drug policy. Change or Continuity in Drug Policy: The Roles of Science, Media, and Interest Groups is the first book to bring together policy and media theories, knowledge utilisation models, and public scholarship literature. As such, the book provides unique insights relevant to aspects of change or continuity in drug policies in Europe and beyond. This book will be of great value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to academics, practitioners and policymakers with interest in the science-policy nexus with a particular focus on the drug policy domain.

This book offers a systematic exploration of the changing politics around immigration and the impact of resultant policy regimes on immigrant communities. It does so across a uniquely wide range of policy areas: immigration admissions, citizenship, internal immigration controls, labour market regulation, the welfare state and the criminal justice system. Challenging the current state of theoretical literature on the 'criminalisation' or 'marginalisation' of immigrants, this book examines the ways in which immigrants are treated differently in different national contexts, as well as the institutional factors driving this variation. To this end, it offers data on overall trends across 20 high-income countries, as well as more detailed case studies on the UK, Australia, the USA, Germany, Italy and Sweden. At the same time, it charts an emerging common regime of exploitation, which threatens the depiction of some countries as more inclusionary than others. The politicisation of immigration has intensified the challenge for policy-makers, who today must respond to populist calls for restrictive immigration policy whilst simultaneously heeding business groups' calls for cheap labour and respecting legal obligations that require more liberal and welcoming policy regimes. The resultant policy regimes often have counterproductive effects, in many cases marginalising immigrant communities and contributing to the growth of underground and criminal economies. Finally, developments on the horizon, driven by technological progress, threaten to intensify distributional challenges. While these will make the politics around immigration even more fraught in coming decades, the real issue is not immigration but the loss of good jobs, which will have serious implications across all Western countries. This book will appeal to scholars and students of criminology, social policy, political economy, political sociology, the sociology of immigration and race, and migration studies.

Death before Sentencing provides a comprehensive description of America's 3,000 plus county and local jails being ignored by the media, politicians, and even criminal justice reformers. Jails have largely escaped scrutiny for deaths in their facilities for several reasons. First, the nation's jails are local affairs. Even repeat jail deaths warrant no more than limited local coverage at most. Jails are mostly run by sheriffs, often the most powerful and largely untouchable political figure in a local community. Third, the families of deceased jail inmates do not usually have the resources to sue or socioeconomic clout to be heard demanding jail accountability for loved ones' deaths. And lastly, many understood jail deaths as occurring from "natural causes," the verdict medical examiners and coroners erroneously employ to allow those responsible for the deaths to escape any accountability. This book constitutes the most complete investigation of the deadly side of jails, describing the daily deaths of detainees, including those from suicides, drug and alcohol withdrawal, forced restraint and brutality, as well as medical malpractice. Andrew R. Klein with Jessica L. Klein show how the failure of jail oversight by state correctional officials, state and county prosecutors, state police as well as sheriffs, medical examiners, and coroners allows for the secrecy surrounding and the cover up of jail deaths. Through a growing number of wrongful death lawsuits and the increasing role of the media in uncovering the truth about deadly jails, communities, led by the grieving families, are working to hold jailers and their medical providers accountable. This book concludes with hopeful signs of reforms being initiated by the U.S. Justice Department under President Biden, state legislatures, successful lawsuits, and reformers as well as suggests the major institutional reforms required to stop the daily deaths in America's jails.

In late summer 2015, Sweden embarked on one of the largest self-described humanitarian efforts in its history, opening its borders to 163,000 asylum seekers fleeing the war in Syria. Six months later this massive effort was over. On January 4, 2016, Sweden closed its border with Denmark. This closure makes a startling reversal of Sweden's open borders to refugees and contravenes free movement in the Schengen Area, a founding principle of the European Union. What happened? This book sets out to explain this reversal. In her new and compelling book, Vanessa Barker explores the Swedish case study to challenge several key paradigms for understanding penal order in the twenty-first century and makes an important contribution to our understanding of punishment and welfare states. She questions the dominance of neoliberalism and political economy as the main explanation for the penalization of others, migrants and foreign nationals, and develops an alternative theoretical framework based on the internal logic of the welfare state and democratic theory about citizenship, incorporation, and difference, paying particular attention to questions of belonging, worthiness, and ethnic and gender hierarchies. Her book develops the concept of penal nationalism as an important form of penal power in the twenty-first century, providing a bridge between border control and punishment studies.

Despite very diverse approaches towards punishing crime, all Western jurisdictions punish repeat offenders more harshly (a practice known as the recidivist sentencing premium) . For many repeat offenders, their previous convictions have more impact on the penalty they receive than the seriousness of their current crime. Why do we punish recidivists more harshly? Some sentencing theorists argue that offenders should be punished only for the crimes they commit - not for the crimes committed and paid for in the past. From this perspective, punishing repeat offenders more severely amounts to double punishment. Having been punished once for an offence, the recidivist will pay for the crime again every time he re-offends. Is this fair?
This volume explores the nature and consequences of the recidivist sentencing premium on both the theoretical and empirical levels. It begins by exploring the justifications for treating repeat offenders more harshly, and then provides examples of the practice from a number of jurisdictions including England and Wales, Canada, and the United States. Particular attention is paid to the views of two important groups: convicted offenders and the general public. If offenders believe that the recidivist sentencing premium is unjustified, they are less likely to accept the legitimacy of the justice system. As for members of the public, it is important to know whether this key element of the sentencing process is consistent with community views.

What kind of experience is incarceration? How should one define its constraints? The author, who conducted extensive fieldwork in a maximum-security jail in Papua New Guinea, seeks to address these questions through a vivid and sympathetic account of inmates' lives. Prison Studies is a growing field of interest for social scientists. As one of the first ethnographic studies of a prison outside western societies and Japan, this book contributes to a reinterpretation of the field's scope and assumptions. It challenges notions of what is punitive about imprisonment by exploring the creative as well as negative outcomes of detention, separation and loss. Instead of just coping, the prisoners in Papua New Guinea's Last Place find themselves drawing fresh critiques and new approaches to contemporary living.

This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a unique special issue "Is the Death Penalty Dying?." Drawing together an array of distinguished scholars from political science, criminology, sociology, and law, this volume provides a comprehensive assessment of the status of the death penalty in the United States, its past, and its trajectory for the future. Taken together, the work published in this volume exemplifies the kind exciting and innovative work now being done by legal scholars from different disciplines.This is a special issue examining the death penalty in the US. It draws together an array of distinguished scholars from political science, criminology, sociology, and law.

A Comparative Analysis of Capital Punishment provides a concise and detailed history of the death penalty. Incorporating and synthesizing public opinion data and empirical studies, Simon and Blaskovich's work compares, across societies, the offense types punishable by death, the level of public support for the death penalty, the forms the penalty takes, and the categories of persons exempt from punishment. It examines the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent to violent offenses, especially homicide, the extent to which innocent persons have become the victims of capital punishment, and occurrences of state sponsored genocide and democide. This book is a practical and useful tool for public policy makers, criminal justice practitioners, students, and anyone who seeks to better understand the worldwide debate on this controversial social issue.

This title was first published in 2000: Between 1900 and 1950 130 women were sentenced to death for murder in England and Wales. Only 12 of these women were actually executed. Thus, 91 per cent of women murderers had their sentence commuted, whereas if we examine the corresponding figures for men, only 39 per cent had their sentence commuted. It would appear that state servants working within the criminal justice system were far more reluctant to hang women than men. However, this text argues that a closer examination of this apparent discrepancy reveals it to be a misconception which has come about as a result of the statistics regarding infanticide. That is to say - unlike men - the vast majority of women murderers have killed their own child or children. Once this is taken into account we find that women who had murdered an adult had less hope of a reprieve than men. Thus, the author shows that the large proportion of women murderers as killers of their own children has created a false impression of how female murderers fared inside the criminal justice system.

Thinking about Punishment pulls together the key writings by Michael Tonry on penal policy trends in western countries, racial and ethnic disparities, and sentencing policies, practices, and theories. Recent research in the past few decades shows that these topics are inextricably interrelated. Tonry argues that the distinct historical and cultural characteristics of a country offer the best explanation of national patterns of punishment at any one time, and over time. More general theories and models fall apart when applied to individual national experiences. In the United States, the key factors explaining both penal policy trends and sentencing patterns and policies include historical patterns of race relations, obsolete constitutional arrangements, moral attitudes related to the continental expansion of the United States and the country's fundamentalist Protestant religious origins. Comparable - but different - characteristics explain other countries' experiences. This excellent collection of Michael Tonry's work is essential reading for anyone interested in penal policy and criminal justice.

Americans are frustrated with prisons. They recognize the need for these institutions, but at the same time, they worry about whether the money used to build and maintain them is well spent. Older prisons are dirty, disgusting, and dangerous, but even newer facilities come up lacking in terms of offering inmates opportunities to take responsibility for their crimes, support their loved ones, further their education, learn job skills, and develop positive relationships in healthy, safe, respectful communities. This book provides insight into the philosophy of restorative justice, which aims to develop ways we can manage our prisons differently to achieve more positive outcomes. Using the case study of an honor dorm in a maximum security prison, the book posits that most of the inmates never learned the basic tools for living life productively and responsibly. They never thought much about their victims or how their actions affected others. They never learned how to get along with others, pick up after themselves, or how to be of service to their fellow man. Swanson uses the writings and reflections of inmates participating in a restorative justice program to demonstrate the challenges and transformative possibilities of this alternative approach to rehabilitation.

2012 Winner of the Outstanding Book Award presented by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Outstanding Academic Title from 2011 by Choice Magazine Too often, the criminal justice system silences victims, which leaves them frustrated, angry, and with many unanswered questions. Despite their rage and pain, many victims want the opportunity to confront their offenders and find resolution. After the Crime explores a victim-offender dialogue program that offers victims of severe violence an opportunity to meet face-to-face with their incarcerated offenders. Using rich in-depth interview data, the book follows the harrowing stories of crimes of stranger rape, domestic violence, marital rape, incest, child sexual abuse, murder, and drunk driving, ultimately moving beyond story-telling to provide an accessible scholarly analysis of restorative justice. Susan Miller argues that the program has significantly helped the victims who chose to face their offenders in very concrete, transformative ways. Likewise, the offenders have also experienced positive changes in their lives in terms of creating greater accountability and greater victim empathy. After the Crime explores their transformative experiences with restorative justice, vividly illustrating how one program has worked in conjunction with the criminal justice system in order to strengthen victim empowerment.

Over the past three decades, the United States has embraced the death penalty with tenacious enthusiasm. While most of those countries whose legal systems and cultures are normally compared to the United States have abolished capital punishment, the United States continues to employ this ultimate tool of punishment. The death penalty has achieved an unparalleled prominence in our public life and left an indelible imprint on our politics and culture. It has also provoked intense scholarly debate, much of it devoted to explaining the roots of American exceptionalism. America's Death Penalty takes a different approach to the issue by examining the historical and theoretical assumptions that have underpinned the discussion of capital punishment in the United States today. At various times the death penalty has been portrayed as an anachronism, an inheritance, or an innovation, with little reflection on the consequences that flow from the choice of words. This volume represents an effort to restore the sense of capital punishment as a question caught up in history. Edited by leading scholars of crime and justice, these original essays pursue different strategies for unsettling the usual terms of the debate. In particular, the authors use comparative and historical investigations of both Europe and America in order to cast fresh light on familiar questions about the meaning of capital punishment. This volume is essential reading for understanding the death penalty in America. Contributors: David Garland, Douglas Hay, Randall McGowen, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, and Jonathan Simon.

Bridget Donnelly. Charlotte Reveille. Kate Slattery. Emily Boyle. Until now, these were nothing but names marked down in the admittance registers and punishment reports of Kingston Penitentiary, Canada's most notorious prison. In this shocking and heartbreaking book, Ted McCoy tells these women's stories of incarceration and resistance in poignant detail. The four women served sentences at different times over a century, but the inhumanity they suffered was consistent. Locked away in dark basement wards, they experienced starvation and corporal punishment, sexual abuse and neglect - profoundly disturbing evidence of the hidden costs of isolation, punishment, and mass incarceration.

One in every 31 U.S. adults is in the penal system. This mass incarceration is by far the largest in the world. African Americans are disproportionately imprisoned and challenged by the consequences of incarceration in education, jobs, voting, and other aspects of life. Since 96 percent of those imprisoned are released, there is an urgent need for resources and research that can improve reentry outcomes. Reconstructing Rage analyzes how - and how well - one company, Reconstruction, Inc. of Philadelphia, has organized returning prisoners, their families, and communities for 24 years. It looks at Reconstruction's programs, strategies, and patterns of change over time; holistic (i.e., mind-body-spirit) and principled transformations in the people and families it has touched; and at the company's collaborations and contributions to criminal justice and public policy best practices. Reconstructing Rage explores challenges of improving community capacity and quality of life outcomes within and beyond reentry and reintegration, for former felons, their families, and a growing number of others interested in a broader social justice.

Revolution in Penology is a thoroughly original and thought-provoking critique of penal harm, the recursive pains of imprisonment cycle, and the normalization of violence. Relying on selected insights derived from continental philosophy, cultural studies, and chaos theory, internationally renowned social theorists, Bruce A. Arrigo and Dragan Milovanovic, deconstruct the human agency/social structure duality that sustains the prison form, its parts and segments understood as correctional principles/practices, and the prison industrial complex that is informed by and stands above them all.

Incarcerating Motherhood explores how initial short period in prisons can negatively impact mothers and their children. We have much yet to understand about the enduring harms caused by first time incarceration, especially for minimal time periods and for mothers with dependent children. With large numbers of female prisoners currently incarcerated for short periods in England and Wales (either on short sentences or remand), many of whom are primary caregivers, this book asks: what kind of impact does this imprisonment has on both parent and child in the long term? Based on original research, the experiences of sixteen mothers are presented to voice the material, physical and emotional consequences of short-term imprisonment. The book explores to what extent these mothers lose their sense of identity in a short space of time, whether this continues to affect them post-custody, and what level of support they are provided during and post-custody. This book also explores what bearing the initial separation and the care provided during the mother's absence will have on their children's lives, as well as whether the affects of imprisonment on the mother also increase the vulnerability of her children. Incarcerating Motherhood provides a platform for readers to hear how a 'short sharp shock' can cause enduring harms to an already vulnerable group in society and how even short-term imprisonment have long-lasting and multi-dimensional consequences.

Money is the most frequently means used in the legal system to punish and regulate. Monetary penalties outnumber all other sanctions delivered by criminal justice in many jurisdictions, imprisonment included. More people pay fines than go to prison and in some jurisdictions many of those in prison are there because of failure to pay their fines. Therefore, it is surprising how little has been written in the Anglophone academic world about the nature of money sanctions and their specific characteristics as legal sanctions. In many ways, legal innovations related to money sanctions have been poorly understood. This book argues that they are a direct consequence of the changing meaning of money. Considering the 'meaninglessness' of modern money, the book aims to examine the history of changing conceptions in how fines have been conceived and used. Using a set of interpretative techniques sensitive to how money and freedom are perceived, the genealogy of the penal fine is presented as a story of constant reformulation in response to shifting political pressures and changes in intellectual developments that influenced ideological commitments of legislators and practitioners. This book is multi-disciplinary and will appeal to those engaged with criminology, sociology and philosophy of punishment, socio-legal studies, and criminal law.

Long sentenced young people are a small but significant part of the juvenile prison population. The current approach to young people convicted of serious crime speaks to wider issues in criminal and social justice, including the idealisation of (some) childhoods, processes of racialisation and identity and the sociology of the body. Analysing the relationships between biography, trauma and habitus reveals the ways in which class, racial and legal status are experienced and resisted. Young Men's Experiences of Long-Term Imprisonment: Living Life considers the need for the reinvigoration of prison ethnography and calls for a phenomenological approach to understanding youth crime and punishment. An insightful ethnographic study on imprisoned 15- to 17-year-olds in England, this volume examines how young people experience long-term imprisonment, manage their time and imagine and shape their futures. Drawing on observations, interviews and correspondence, Tynan situates long-term imprisonment of young men within the wider social context of criminal and social justice; and analyses constructs and practices that locate responsibility for crime with individuals and communities. Young Men's Experiences of Long-Term Imprisonment: Living Life will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the sociology of prisons, punishment and youth justice and qualitative research methodology.

Recalibrating Juvenile Detention chronicles the lessons learned from the 2007 to 2015 landmark US District Court-ordered reform of the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) in Illinois, following years of litigation by the ACLU about egregious and unconstitutional conditions of confinement. In addition to explaining the implications of the Court's actions, the book includes an analysis of a major evaluation research report by the University of Chicago Crime Lab and explains for scholars, practitioners, administrators, policymakers, and advocates how and why this particular reform of conditions achieved successful outcomes when others failed. Maintaining that the Chicago Crime Lab findings are the "gold standard" evidence-based research (EBR) in pretrial detention, Roush holds that the observed "firsts" for juvenile detention may perhaps have the power to transform all custody practices. He shows that the findings validate a new model of institutional reform based on cognitive-behavioral programming (CBT), reveal statistically significant reductions in in-custody violence and recidivism, and demonstrate that at least one variation of short-term secure custody can influence positively certain life outcomes for Chicago's highest-risk and most disadvantaged youth. With the Quarterly Journal of Economics imprimatur and endorsement by the President's Council of Economic Advisors, the book is a reverse engineering of these once-in-a-lifetime events (recidivism reduction and EBR in pretrial detention) that explains the important and transformative implications for the future of juvenile justice practice. The book is essential reading for graduate students in juvenile justice, criminology, and corrections, as well as practitioners, judges, and policymakers.

This book offers a sustained study of one feature of the prison officer's job: the threat and use of force, which the author calls 'doing' coercion. Adopting an interactionist, micro-sociological perspective, the author presents new research based on almost two years of participant observation within an Italian custodial complex hosting both a prison and a forensic psychiatric hospital. Based on observation of emergency squad interventions during so-called 'critical events', together with visual methods and interviews with staff, 'Doing' Coercion in Male Custodial Settings constitutes an ethnographic exploration of both the organisation and the implicit and explicit practices of threatening and/or 'doing' coercion. With a focus on the lawful yet problematic and discretionary threatening and 'doing' of coercion performed daily on the landing, the author contributes to the growing scholarly literature on power in prison settings, and the developing field of the micro-sociology of violence and of radical interactionism. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and criminology with interests in prisons, power and violence in institutions, and visual methods.