This book examines the increasing retention and use of previous criminal record information, within and beyond the criminal justice system. There remains a misconception that once an offender has served the penalty for an offence, his or her dealings with the law and legal system in relation to that offence is at an end. This book demonstrates that in fact the criminal record lingers and permeates facets of the person's life far beyond the de jure sentence. Criminal records are relied upon by key decision makers at all stages of the formal criminal process, from the police to the judiciary. Convictions can affect areas of policing, bail, trial procedure and sentencing, which the author discusses. Furthermore, with the increasing intensifying of surveillance techniques in the interests of security, ex-offenders are monitored more closely post release and these provisions are explored here. Even beyond the formal criminal justice system, individuals can continue to experience many collateral consequences of a conviction whereby access to employment, travel and licenses (among other areas of social activity) can be limited as a consequence of disclosure requirements. Overall, this book examines the perpetual nature of criminal convictions through the evolution of criminal record use, focussing on the Irish perspective, and also considers the impact from a broader international perspective.

This new edition of Community Justice in Australia expands on the discussion of how people who have committed offences can be engaged in the community. It considers how the concept of community justice can be successfully applied within Australia by social workers, criminologists, parole officers and anyone working in the community with both adults and young people. The book defines community justice and applies the concept to the Australian context. It then explains theories of offending behaviour, considers relevant Australian legislation, policy and intervention strategies and examines the implications for both young people and adults. Restorative justice is also discussed. The latter part of the book focuses on practical issues including working in community justice organisations, technology, public protection and desistance approaches. Each chapter contains an engagement with the implications of community justice approaches for Indigenous groups and features reflective questions, practical tasks and guidance for further reading. This accessible and practical book will be indispensable for instructors, students and practitioners working in the community with people who have committed offences.

This new edition of Community Justice in Australia expands on the discussion of how people who have committed offences can be engaged in the community. It considers how the concept of community justice can be successfully applied within Australia by social workers, criminologists, parole officers and anyone working in the community with both adults and young people. The book defines community justice and applies the concept to the Australian context. It then explains theories of offending behaviour, considers relevant Australian legislation, policy and intervention strategies and examines the implications for both young people and adults. Restorative justice is also discussed. The latter part of the book focuses on practical issues including working in community justice organisations, technology, public protection and desistance approaches. Each chapter contains an engagement with the implications of community justice approaches for Indigenous groups and features reflective questions, practical tasks and guidance for further reading. This accessible and practical book will be indispensable for instructors, students and practitioners working in the community with people who have committed offences.

The first authoritative volume to look back on the last 50 years of The Open University providing higher education to those in prison, this unique book gives voice to ex-prisoners whose lives have been transformed by the education they received. Offering vivid personal testimonies, reflective vignettes and academic analysis of prison life and education in prison, the book marks the 50th anniversary of The Open University.

This book analyses the mixed courts of professional and lay judges in the Japanese criminal justice system. It takes a particular focus on the highly public start of the mixed court, the saiban-in system, and the jury system between 1928-1943. This was the first time Japanese citizens participated as decision makers in criminal law. The book assesses reasons for the jury system's failure, and its suspension in 1943, as well as the renewed interest in popular involvement in criminal justice at the end of the twentieth century. Popular Participation in Japanese Criminal Justice proceeds by explaining the process by which lay participation in criminal trials left the periphery to become an important national matter at the turn of the century. It shows that rather than an Anglo-American jury model, outline recommendations made by the Japanese Judicial Reform Council were for a mixed court of judges and laypersons to try serious cases. Concerns about the lay judge/saiban-in system are raised, as well as explanations for why it is flourishing in contemporary society despite the failure of the jury system during the period 1928-1943. The book presents the wider significance of Japanese mixed courts in Asia and beyond, and in doing so will be of great interests to scholars of socio-legal studies, criminology and criminal justice.

- Presents qualitative data, giving an insight into the everyday experience of overcrowded prisons. - Links a smaller ethnographic study with wider trends on European politics and penal policy. - Places the Italian case in the wider international context.

First published in 1974, The American Prison Business studies the lunacies, the delusions, and the bizarre inner workings of the American prison business. From the first demonstration that the penitentiary is an American invention that was initiated by the late eighteenth-century reformers, to the startling revelations, in the chapter called 'Cheaper than Chimpanzees' of how pharmaceutical companies lease prisoners as human guinea-pigs, every page stimulates and surprises the reader as Jessica Mitford describes, inter alia the chemical, surgical and psychiatric techniques used to help 'violent' prisoners to be 'reborn'; why businessmen tend to be more enthusiastic than the prisoners they employ in the 'rent-a-con' plan; and the Special Isolation Diet which tastes like inferior dog food. Jessica Mitford's financial analysis of the prison business is a scoop. Her hard-eyed examination of how parole really works is a revelation. As the prison abolition movement continues to gain momentum, this book will provide food for thought for legislators, officials and students of sociology, law, criminology, penology, and history.

First published in 1977, Angel Face documents the penal life of Walter Probyn, who spent 30 out of 44 years in prison and escaped 15 times. He describes the succession of events which began when he was a nine-year-old 'blitz kid' who 'stole' a can of peas from a bombed shop, and tells in absorbing and harrowing detail his time in prison and on the run. Important though his description and indictment of prison life and the treatment of so-called hardened offenders may be, his particular attention to carefully planned and ingenious escapes gives great insight into his fight for retaining his independence and his insatiable craving for freedom. This is not a book which glamourises crime. It does raise serious and debatable questions about the need for reform of a penal system which has failed in its objectives. These questions are discussed in an introduction and final commentary by noted criminologist, Stan Cohen, who puts Probyn's story into a wider context. His life is a classic example of the way in which the penal system, far from curing crime, may actually encourage it, by strengthening the resolve and bitterness of those who resist being institutionalised and fitting into authority's moulds. But is three-quarters of a lifetime a responsible price to pay? The authorities and Walter Probyn give different answers. This book will be of interest to anyone intrigued by the other side of the penal system but especially to students of law, criminology, and sociology.

This book, the first of two volumes edited by McCartan and Kemshall, focusses on perceptions of sexual offenders, and how risk is used by policy makers, stakeholders, academics and practitioners to both construct and respond to unknown and known sex offenders within the contexts of criminal justice, health and social policy. The chapters provide an oversight of contemporary policies, practices and debates within the area to help both professionals and researchers. The collection focuses on emerging areas (public health approaches, prevention, public perceptions of sexual abuse, and social constructionism), as well as more traditional topics (media, preventative and exceptional sentencing, resilience, and work force development). The authors examine public and professional engagement on sex offender management, and the changing socio-political landscape of sexual offender management. A bold and engaging volume, this edited collection will be of great importance to scholars and practitioners interested in perceptions of sexual offending.

Prisons are everywhere. Yet they are not everywhere alike. How can we explain the differences in cross-national uses of incarceration? The Politics of Punishment explores this question by undertaking a comparative sociological analysis of penal politics and imprisonment in Ireland and Scotland. Using archives and oral history, this book shows that divergences in the uses of imprisonment result from the distinctive features of a nation's political culture: the different political ideas, cultural values and social anxieties that shape prison policymaking. Political culture thus connects large-scale social phenomena to actual carceral outcomes, illuminating the forces that support and perpetuate cross-national penal differences. The work therefore offers a new framework for the comparative study of penality. This is also an important work of sociology and history. By closely tracking how and why the politics of punishment evolved and adapted over time, we also yield rich and compelling new accounts of both Irish and Scottish penal cultures from 1970 to the 1990s. The Politics of Punishment will be essential reading for students and academics interested in the sociology of punishment, comparative penology, criminology, penal policymaking, law and social history.

Based on a reading of contemporary philosophical arguments, this book accounts for how punishment has provided audiences with pleasure in different historical contexts. Watching tragedies, contemplating hell, attending executions, or imagining prisons have generated pleasure, according to contemporary observers, in ancient Greece, in medieval Catholic Europe, in the early-modern absolutist states, and in the post-1968 Western world. The pleasure was often judged morally problematic, and raised questions about which desires were satisfied, and what the enjoyment was like. This book offers a research synthesis that ties together existing work on the pleasure of punishment. It considers how the shared joys of punishment gradually disappeared from the public view at a precise historic conjuncture, and explores whether arguments about the carnivalesque character of cruelty can provide support for the continued existence of penal pleasure. Towards the end of this book, the reader will discover, if willing to go along and follow desire to places which are full of pain and suffering, that deeply entwined with the desire for punishment, there is also the desire for social justice. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, philosophy and all those interested in the pleasures of punishment.

Deploying empirical studies spanning from early Imperial China to the present day, 17 scholars from across the globe explore the history of surveillance with special attention to the mechanisms of power that impel the concept of surveillance in society. By delving into a broad range of historical periods and contexts, the book sheds new light on surveillance as a societal phenomenon, offering 10 in-depth, applied analyses that revolve around two main questions: * Who are the central actors in the history of surveillance? * What kinds of phenomena have been deemed eligible for surveillance, for example, information flows, political movements, border-crossing trade, interacting with foreign states, workplace relations, gender relations, andsexuality?

A comprehensive analysis of the role that prison policy can play in the reduction of terrorism, this book examines the experience of three western Europe jurisdictions: Northern Ireland, Italy and the Spanish Basque Country. It looks at the role of the prisons both as tools for counter-insurgency and as part of a process of conflict resolution. It looks in detail at each jurisdiction and then compares the experience of the three conflicts.

An eye-opening look at how incarcerated people, health professionals, and others behind and beyond bars came together to problem-solve incarceration. Raising the Living Dead is a history of Puerto Rico's carceral rehabilitation system that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. Alberto Ortiz Diaz describes the ways that multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation from the 1930s to the 1960s. Scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the "living dead," an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners. These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically. The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico's broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Diaz tells a story that goes beyond debates about structural and social control. The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners' different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship. Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography; few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons.

1. This book contributes to research in the popular area of protest policing. However, unlike other books on the topic, this book considers specific police operational tactics, written by a police insider. 2. Courses on policing are popular at undergraduate, though this will be particularly useful reading for students on a professional policing degree.

1. While there has been growing research on the topic of immigration detention in the UK, this is the first to exclusively explore the experiences of women. The focus on experiences of detention, release and removal makes for a particularly broad subject. 2. Courses on penology and punishment are popular, even core components of a Criminology degree. This book offers much needed supplementary reading on a modern form of punishment, in the form of immigration detention.

1. This book contributes to research in the popular area of protest policing. However, unlike other books on the topic, this book considers specific police operational tactics, written by a police insider. 2. Courses on policing are popular at undergraduate, though this will be particularly useful reading for students on a professional policing degree.

1. While there has been growing research on the topic of immigration detention in the UK, this is the first to exclusively explore the experiences of women. The focus on experiences of detention, release and removal makes for a particularly broad subject. 2. Courses on penology and punishment are popular, even core components of a Criminology degree. This book offers much needed supplementary reading on a modern form of punishment, in the form of immigration detention.

Accompanied by a podcast called "The Cannabis Criminology Podcast." As a limited series podcast, the authors will review key aspects of the book and interview scholars and activists working in this area. Very timely as the (potential) legalisation of cannabis has received much attention across the globe in recent decades/years, and this interest is set to continue for many years to come. Most research tends to focus on drugs as a whole, whereas this book focus solely on cannabis, and as such offers the depth needed to grasp the topic more effectively. Fits into several topics/modules within criminology, sociology, law, drug policy and public health. Comprehensive in its coverage, exploring history, frameworks of analysis, evidence to date, key initiatives, and providing examples from relevant jurisdictions.

In the 1890s, Amos Lunt served as the San Quentin hangman, tying the nooses that brought the most dangerous criminals in the Wild West to their deaths. A former police chief who became the hangman of San Quentin due to an unfortunate turn of events, Lunt stood on the gallows alongside bank robbers, desperadoes and assassins throughout a five-year career. This book follows Lunt's trail from the Santa Cruz police department to the San Quentin State Prison. Covering his interesting friendship with a series of death row inmates to the gradual deterioration of his sanity, it is a one-of-a-kind biography that profiles an American executioner. Also profiled are his subjects-twenty of the West's most heinous criminals-as well as Lunt's preparations for their hangings and their final moments on the gallows.

Where are the police going? Originally published in 1974, Peter Evans argues that their traditional relationship with the public was being dangerously threatened, a situation neither the police themselves nor the public wanted to see worsen. In his analysis of the pressures and influences that were leading many policemen to question their role in society, Mr Evans looks first at the immense problems created for the police by increasingly violent and sophisticated crime, protest and terrorism. The attitudes of the police, he says, are in keeping with their nature. They are a minority, a semi-closed community, with astonishing records of long-serving families, giving police forces something of a tribal flavour. They have their own slang. Like miners, dockers or railwaymen, their jobs were established in Victorian times and are now faced with a rapid technological change - for the police, a 'revolution'. Yet there is one important difference: the police must remain manpower intensive, otherwise precious contact with the public is lost. They must also remain craftsmen, not become merely technicians. Mr Evans concludes that successive governments are to blame for not giving the police the sort of backing they deserve - finance, for example, and not merely pious expressions of support. This failure has widened the gap between police and public because of shortage of men, has left London in particular dangerously under-patrolled, and has contributed towards those pressures that tempt some officers to err. There is nothing wrong with the traditions of the police, although some policemen sometimes do not live up to them. The police need more resources and more opportunity to apply these traditions, so that the unique character of British policing is not lost. The author felt there was both time and need for reform in the decade before 1984. Today it can be read in its historical context.

First published in 1976, Psychopath is a study of Patrick Mackay who, in 1974 - with a string of muggings and killings behind him - was on trial for murder and was imprisoned in November 1975. John Penycate and Tim Clark - responsible for the controversial BBC Panorama programme on Patrick Mackay's case - here take their investigation further and raise the important question of how the various responsible agencies which came into contact with him failed to see the danger and prevent these needless killings. Mackay passed through five mental institutions as well as approved schools, remand centres and homes. Twice he had been released from Moss Side Special Hospital - the North of England's equivalent to Broadmoor - against the advice of his doctors. Penycate and Clark show that the signs were there for all to see. They give a detailed account of Patrick Mackay's deterioration, from his turbulent childhood, through numerous suicide attempts, acts of violence and spells in mental and penal institutions, to his becoming London's most notorious 'mugger' and a multiple killer, culminating in the final maniacal axing of his friend Father Crean, illustrated here with Mackay's own words. This book will be of interest to students of criminology, psychology, penology, government, and media.

Upon receiving his execution date, one of the thousands of men living on death row in the United States had an epiphany: "All there ever is, is this moment. You, me, all of us, right here, right now, this minute, that's love." Right Here, Right Now collects the powerful, first-person stories of dozens of men on death rows across the country. From childhood experiences living with poverty, hunger, and violence to mental illness and police misconduct to coming to terms with their executions, these men outline their struggle to maintain their connection to society and sustain the humanity that incarceration and its daily insults attempt to extinguish. By offering their hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, failures, and wounds, the men challenge us to reconsider whether our current justice system offers actual justice or simply perpetuates the social injustices that obscure our shared humanity.