Shining a light on the deadly health consequences of incarceration. Finalist in the PROSE Award for Best Book in Anthropology, Criminology, and Sociology by the Association of American Publishers Kalief Browder was 16 when he was arrested in the Bronx for allegedly stealing a backpack. Unable to raise bail and unwilling to plead guilty to a crime he didn't commit, Browder spent three years in New York's infamous Rikers Island jail-two in solitary confinement-while awaiting trial. After his case was dismissed in 2013, Browder returned to his family, haunted by his ordeal. Suffering through the lonely hell of solitary, Browder had been violently attacked by fellow prisoners and corrections officers throughout his incarceration. Consumed with depression, Browder committed suicide in 2015. He was just 22 years old. In Life and Death in Rikers Island, Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer for New York City's jails, explains the profound health risks associated with incarceration. From neglect and sexual abuse to blocked access to care and exposure to brutality, Venters details how jails are designed and run to create new health risks for prisoners-all while forcing doctors and nurses into complicity or silence. Pairing prisoner experiences with cutting-edge research into prison risk, Venters reveals the disproportionate extent to which the health risks of jail are meted out to those with behavioral health problems and people of color. He also presents compelling data on alternative strategies that can reduce health risks. This revelatory and groundbreaking book concludes with the author's analysis of the case for closing Rikers Island jails and his advice on how to do it for the good of the incarcerated.

A comprehensive examination of the connection between mass incarceration and health In an age when over two million people are incarcerated in the United States alone, the wide-reaching impact of prisons in our society is impossible to deny, and the paradoxical relationship between prisons and health has never been more controversial. Prisons are charged at the same time with being punitive and therapeutic, with denying freedom and administering treatment, with confining and rehabilitating. And they are not living up to the charge. Prisons and Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration examines the connection between prisons and health. Based on a decade of empirical research, this book explores the consequences of incarceration on inmates themselves; on the families they leave behind; on the larger communities to which they return; and, ultimately, on entire health care systems at the state and national level. Jason Schnittker, Michael Massoglia, and Christopher Uggen demonstrate that the relationship between incarceration and health is sustained by a combination of social, cultural, and legal forces, and by a failure to recognize that prisons are now squarely in the business of providing care. With an eye to the history that led us to this point, the book investigates these connections and shows how prisons undermine health and well-being. An evenhanded and comprehensive analysis, this groundbreaking volume demonstrates that the prison system produces unintended and far-reaching consequences for the health of our nation and points the way for a fairer and more effective justice system.

Are you a prison officer who feels nervous about dealing with Muslims on the wings? Are you a prison chaplain who wants to know how your chaplaincy affects the lives of prisoners? Are you a policymaker who needs a robust base of evidence for Islam in prison? Are you an academic or a journalist seeking ground-breaking social science in a contentious field? Based on original evidence from 279 Muslim prisoners and 79 prison officers, we explore how Muslims come to be incarcerated, how the practice of Islam affects prison life and rehabilitation, the types of Islam and the effects of Islamic conversion in prison and the professional practice of officers and chaplains. We also investigate the common belief that incarceration fosters Islamist extremism and suggest improvements to faith provision and rehabilitative opportunities for Muslim prisoners.

The 'punitive turn' has brought about new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Carceral geography offers a geographical perspective on incarceration, and this volume accordingly tracks the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant subdiscipline, and scopes out future research directions. By conveying a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, it traces the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. Synthesizing existing work in carceral geography, and exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the 'carceral' as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.

This book charts the historical development of 'forensic objectivity' through an analysis of the ways in which objective knowledge of crimes, crime scenes, crime materials and criminals is achieved. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, with authors drawn from law, history, sociology and science and technology studies, this work shows how forensic objectivity is constructed through detailed crime history case studies, mainly in relation to murder, set in Scotland, England, Germany, Sweden, USA and Ireland. Starting from the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to the present day, the book argues that a number of developments were crucial. These include: the beginning of crime photography, the use of diagrams and models specially constructed for the courtroom so jurors could be 'virtual witnesses', probabilistic models of certainty, the professionalization of medical and scientific expert witnesses and their networks, ways of measuring, recording and developing criminal records and the role of the media, particularly newspapers in reporting on crime, criminals and legal proceedings and their part in the shaping of public opinion on crime. This essential title demonstrates the ways in which forensic objectivity has become a central concept in relation to criminal justice over a period spanning 170 years.

One out of every ten prisoners in the United States is serving a life sentence-roughly 130,000 people. While some have been sentenced to life in prison without parole, the majority of prisoners serving 'life' will be released back into society. But what becomes of those people who reenter the everyday world after serving life in prison? In After Life Imprisonment, Marieke Liem carefully examines the experiences of "lifers" upon release. Through interviews with over sixty homicide offenders sentenced to life but granted parole, Liem tracks those able to build a new life on the outside and those who were re-incarcerated. The interviews reveal prisoners' reflections on being sentenced to life, as well as the challenges of employment, housing, and interpersonal relationships upon release. Liem explores the increase in handing out of life sentences, and specifically provides a basis for discussions of the goals, costs, and effects of long-term imprisonment, ultimately unpacking public policy and discourse surrounding long-term incarceration. A profound criminological examination, After Life Imprisonment reveals the untold, lived experiences of prisoners before and after their life sentences.

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?

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition. Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed world in which justice is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging. Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piche, the book is divided into four themes: * Prisons and Racism * Prisons and Settler Colonialism * Anti-Carceral Feminisms * Multispecies Carceralities. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms.

This book provides a comprehensive history of the genesis, existence, and demise of Imperial Russia's largest penal colony, made famous by Chekhov in a book written following his visit there in 1890. Based on extensive original research in archival documents, published reports, and memoirs, the book is also a social history of the late imperial bureaucracy and of the subaltern society of criminals and exiles; an examination of the tsarist state's failed efforts at reform; an exploration of Russian imperialism in East Asia and Russia's acquisition of Sakhalin Island in the face of competition from Japan; and an anthropological and literary study of the Sakhalin landscape and its associated values and ideologies. The Sakhalin penal colony became one of the largest penal colonies in history. The book's conclusion prompts important questions about contemporary prisons and their relationship to state and society.

Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition. Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed world in which justice is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging. Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piche, the book is divided into four themes: * Prisons and Racism * Prisons and Settler Colonialism * Anti-Carceral Feminisms * Multispecies Carceralities. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms.

Around one in five prisoners report the previous or current incarceration of a parent. Many such prisoners attest to the long-term negative effects of parental incarceration on one's own sense of self and on the range and quality of opportunities for building a conventional life. And yet, the problem of intergenerational incarceration has received only passing attention from academics, and virtually little if any consideration from policy makers and correctional officials. This book - the first of its kind - offers an in-depth examination of the causes, experiences and consequences of intergenerational incarceration. It draws extensively from surveys and interviews with second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-generation prisoners to explicate the personal, familial and socio-economic contexts typically associated with incarceration across generations. The book examines 1) the emergence of the prison as a dominant if not life-defining institution for some families, 2) the link between intergenerational trauma, crime and intergenerational incarceration, 3) the role of police, courts, and corrections in amplifying or ameliorating such problems, and 4) the possible means for preventing intergenerational incarceration. This is undeniably a book that bears witness to many tragic and traumatic stories. But it is also a work premised on the idea that knowing these stories - knowing that they often resist alignment with pre-conceived ideas about who prisoners are or who they might become - is part and parcel of advancing critical debate and, more importantly, of creating real change. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about more about families in prison.

This updated tenth edition covers all aspects of prisoners' rights, including an overview of the judicial system and constitutional law and explanation of specific constitutional issues regarding correctional populations. It also discusses the federal statutes that affect correctional administration and inmates' rights to bring litigation. Accessible and reader-friendly, it provides a practical understanding of how constitutional law affects the day-to-day issues of prisons, jails, and community corrections programs. The tenth edition includes a thorough update of relevant case law, and new chapters are included that deliver the latest developments on Search, Seizure, and Privacy, Juveniles and Youthful Offenders, and the Death Penalty. Part II contains the Supreme Court syllabi for the significant Court cases relating to the concepts covered. This updated edition is appropriate as a primary text for undergraduate or graduate-level correctional law and prisoner rights courses within Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Sociology departments. It is also an invaluable reference tool for law students and correctional agencies.

This updated tenth edition covers all aspects of prisoners' rights, including an overview of the judicial system and constitutional law and explanation of specific constitutional issues regarding correctional populations. It also discusses the federal statutes that affect correctional administration and inmates' rights to bring litigation. Accessible and reader-friendly, it provides a practical understanding of how constitutional law affects the day-to-day issues of prisons, jails, and community corrections programs. The tenth edition includes a thorough update of relevant case law, and new chapters are included that deliver the latest developments on Search, Seizure, and Privacy, Juveniles and Youthful Offenders, and the Death Penalty. Part II contains the Supreme Court syllabi for the significant Court cases relating to the concepts covered. This updated edition is appropriate as a primary text for undergraduate or graduate-level correctional law and prisoner rights courses within Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Sociology departments. It is also an invaluable reference tool for law students and correctional agencies.

The authors of the chapters included in this volume provide preliminary answers to questions such as: How extensive were COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons, jails, and community corrections systems globally? Which regions and countries reported the largest outbreaks? Why were prisons and jails found to be "hot spots" for the spread of COVID-19 in most countries? How did governments initially respond to COVID-19 outbreaks in their corrections systems? Did the mitigation strategies used in each country reduce the spread of the infection in the corrections system (both in prisons and jails, and in community corrections)? Did the corrections-focused mitigation strategies used in each country have a positive or an adverse impact on public health and public safety? How likely is it that the varied short-term mitigation strategies implemented by governments will result in long-term changes in corrections policies and practices? The book includes three chapters examining the global impact of the COVID-19 outbreaks, six regional overviews, and 27 country-specific reviews, including reviews targeting 21 of the 50 largest prison systems globally. This collection will be an excellent resource for researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and the general public interested in knowing more about the nature and extent of COVID-19 outbreaks in corrections systems globally, and about the diversity of responses developed and implemented by governments from each global region. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Victims & Offenders.

It isn't enough to celebrate the death penalty's demise. We must learn from it. When Henry McCollum was condemned to death in 1984 in rural North Carolina, death sentences were commonplace. In 2014, DNA tests set McCollum free. By then, death sentences were as rare as lethal lightning strikes. To most observers this national trend came as a surprise. What changed? Brandon Garrett hand-collected and analyzed national data, looking for causes and implications of this turnaround. End of Its Rope explains what he found, and why the story of who killed the death penalty, and how, can be the catalyst for criminal justice reform. No single factor put the death penalty on the road to extinction, Garrett concludes. Death row exonerations fostered rising awareness of errors in death penalty cases, at the same time that a decline in murder rates eroded law-and-order arguments. Defense lawyers radically improved how they litigate death cases when given adequate resources. More troubling, many states replaced the death penalty with what amounts to a virtual death sentence-life without possibility of parole. Today, the death penalty hangs on in a few scattered counties where prosecutors cling to entrenched habits and patterns of racial bias. The failed death penalty experiment teaches us how inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments undermine the pursuit of justice. Garrett makes a strong closing case for what a future criminal justice system might look like if these injustices were remedied.

Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) has over the last decade made an increasing mark in several fields, notably health and medicine, education and social welfare. In recent years it has begun to make its mark in criminal justice. As engagement with EBP has spread, it has begun to evolve from what might be regarded as a somewhat narrow doctrine and orthodoxy to something more complex and various. Often criminological research has been at odds with the assumptions, conventions and methodologies associated with first generation EBP. In that context EBP poses a challenge to the research community and existing evidence base and is, accordingly, hotly controversial. This book is a welcome and timely contribution to current debates on evidence-based practice in policing. With a sharp conceptual focus, the chapters provide a critical examination of the recent history of EBP in academic, policy and practitioner communities, evaluate key dimensions of its application to policing, challenge established understandings and pave the way for a much needed change in how research 'evidence' is perceived, generated, transferred, implemented and evaluated.

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.

State Violence, Torture, and Political Prisoners discusses the activities of Amnesty International during the period of Brazil's dictatorship (1964-1985). During the dictatorship, Amnesty assisted political prisoners who were submitted to torture and helped to publicise charges of torture against agents of the military regime's repressive apparatus. Through a specific examination of Amnesty's work with Brazilian political prisoners, this book explores how Amnesty adapted its organisational principles - such as non-violence and the focus on individual cases - during this time. In 1967 Amnesty experienced a severe internal crisis which prompted the organisation to make structural changes. These changes enabled it to expand its activities beyond Europe to Latin America, including Brazil. This book examines one of Amnesty International's first major campaigns against torture and the impact this had on the organisation's development of a new agenda. Bringing a critical and historical perspective on Amnesty's work, the book contributes to the debate on the role of human rights organisations in addressing human rights abuses worldwide. It makes a significant contribution to international research on state crime, human rights, and torture.

Rectifying the fact that little criminological attention has been paid to the notion that the security of flows increasingly embodies concerns at the heart of contemporary policing practices, this book makes a significant contribution to knowledge about the policing and security governance of flows. The book focuses on how the growing centrality of flows affects both contemporary 'risks' and the policing organisations in charge of managing them. The contributors analyse flows such as event security; border controls and migration; the movement of animal parts; security-related intelligence; and organisational flows. The emerging criminology of these, as well as flows of money, information and numerous commodities, from pharmaceuticals to minerals or malicious software, is leading to critical advances in the understanding of the changing harm landscapes and the practices that have developed to manage them. Taken as a whole, the book opens up the conversation, and encourages the invention of new conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools to help criminology tackle and better understand the mobile world in which we live. This book was originally published as a special issue of Global Crime.

This book systematically investigates the capital punishment of girls and women in one jurisdiction in the United States over nearly four centuries. Using Connecticut as an essential case study, due to its long history as a colony and a state, this study is the first of its kind not only for New England but for the United States. The author uses rich archival sources to look critically at the gendered differential in the application of the death penalty from the seventeenth century until the abolition of capital punish-ment in Connecticut in 2012. In addition to analyzing cases of executions, this monograph offers an innovative focus on women and girls who escaped judicial execution with death sentences that were avoided, reversed, reprieved, or commuted. The book fully describes the impact of the rise and fall of witchcraft allegations during the last half of the seventeenth century, the clash between the deg-radation of slavery and Enlightenment ideals that was the provocation for the de facto end of female capital punishment in the New Republic, the introduction of two degrees of murder, which effectively provided an es-cape hatch from the gallows, and a detailed look at the unique case of Lydia Sherman, whose sentence to life in prison under the Connecticut murder statute of 1846 emphatically confirmed the unofficial state exemption of females from the gallows. Pivotal cases since 1900 are also examined. The book will attract attention from a broad audience interested in criminology, criminal justice, capital punishment, women's studies, and legal history. Anti-death penalty advocates, law school activists, public defenders, capital punishment litigators, and jurists will also find the book useful.

Every day children exiled to prison are exposed to abusive and neglectful treatment, yet their plight is hidden. Based on wide-ranging research and first-person interviews, this passionately argued book presents the shocking truth about the lives and deaths of children in custody. Drawing on human rights legislation and progress in the care and treatment of vulnerable children elsewhere, it outlines the harsh realities of penal child custody including hunger, denial of fresh air, cramped and dirty cells, strip-searching, segregation, the authorised infliction of severe pain, uncivilised conditions for suicidal children and ever-present violence and intimidation. The issues are explored through the lens of protection, not punishment, and the author finds there can be only one conclusion: child prisons must close. Providing a compelling manifesto for urgent and radical change, this book should be read by everyone who cares about child protection and human rights.

Understanding prisons and the policies surrounding them is of fundamental importance to students and practitioners of criminology and related fields. This concise and accessible guide offers a compendium of key information, theories, concepts, research and policy, presenting a rounded and critical overview of the prison system in England and Wales. Covering the historical and contemporary context of prisons, the text guides the reader through prison life as experienced by different groups such as women, the work of prison officers and a tour of international prisons. Each chapter features key learning items: * an overview and summary; * learning outcomes; * end of chapter questions; * definitions of key terms and concepts; * examples and illustrative case studies; * summary boxes of key research studies and further reading. Focusing on the experiences of stakeholder groups and the themes of power, legitimacy and rehabilitation, the book concludes with an overview of the future challenges for prisons.

This volume focuses on teaching Classics in carceral contexts in the US and offers an overview of the range of incarcerated adults, their circumstances, and the ways in which they are approaching and reinterpreting Greek and Roman texts. Classics and Prison Education in the US examines how different incarcerated adults - male, female, or gender non-conforming; young or old; serving long sentences or about to be released - are reading and discussing Classical texts, and what this may entail. Moreover, it provides a sophisticated examination of the best pedagogical practices for teaching in a prison setting and for preparing returning citizens, as well as a considered discussion of the possible dangers of engaging in such teaching - whether because of the potential complicity with the carceral state, or because of the historical position of Classics in elitist education. This edited volume will be a resource for those interested in Classics pedagogy, as well as the role that Classics can play in different areas of society and education, and the impact it can have.

Key Issues in Corrections is an engaging textbook critically analyzing the most important challenges affecting the correctional system in the USA. Written by a highly respected expert in the field, and building on his best-selling book Special problems in corrections, it examines long-standing and emerging issues, grounding the discussion in empirical research and current events. Updates to this edition include: * Integrating new scholarship, lawsuits, and the use of technology * The introduction and evaluation of new policies and practices * New sections on "The Privatization of Prisons" and "The Death Penalty" Primarily written for undergraduate students who have already had an introduction to the topic, the book offers a no-nonsense approach to explaining the problems of correctional officers, correctional managers, prisoners, and the public.