This book addresses the core issues in prisoner reentry into society after incarceration. The chapters are written by academic scholars who have much experience researching and writing about prisoner reentry and by people who work in the field of prison reentry. Comprising reviews of empirical literature, this study is also supplemented by the workings of a reentry agency in the state of California. The focus of the work is to provide the best practices within prisoner reentry programs, to explore the barriers experienced by both prisoners and reentry agencies as they work toward the reentry of prisoners, and to discuss critical issues associated with prisoner reentry. The authors broach various topics regarding life after imprisonment, such as: the financial burden, problems faced by sex offenders, changing family dynamics and employment. An engaging and thought-provoking study, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of criminology theory, the justice system and sociology.

During the past two centuries a vibrant prison press has chronicled life behind bars in American prisons, championed inmate causes, and challenged those in authority who sought to silence it. At its apex, several hundred periodicals were published by and for inmates. Unlike their peers who passed their sentences stamping out license plates, these convicts spent their days like reporters in any community-looking for the story. Yet their own story, the lengthy history of their unique brand of journalism, has remained largely unknown. In "Jailhouse Journalism," James McGrath Morris presents the history of this medium, the lives of the men and women who brought it to life, and the controversies that often surround it.

The dramatic history of prison journalism has included many famous, notorious, and unique personalities such as Robert Morris, the "financier of the America Revolution"; the Younger Brothers of the Jesse James gang; Julian Hawthorne, the only son of Nathaniel Hawthorne; men of the radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW); Charles Chapin, famed city editor of New York's "Evening World" until he murdered his wife; Dr. Frederick Cook, North Pole explorer whose claim to have been the first to reach the pole is still debated today; Tom Runyon, who won a place for himself in history with an Underwood; and Wilbert Rideau, an illiterate teenaged murderer who raised prison journalism to the pinnacle of achievement.

In his new introduction Morris addresses the spread of prison journalism into other forms of media, such as radio and the Internet. He discusses the conflicts between those who publish jailhouse news and those who would wish to control, or eliminate it altogether.

Winner of the 2017 British Society of Criminology Book Prize The penal voluntary sector and the relationships between punishment and charity are more topical than ever before in countries around the world. In recent years in England and Wales, the sector has featured significantly in both policy rhetoric and academic commentary. Penal voluntary organisations are increasingly delivering prison and probation services under contract, and this role is set to expand. However, the diverse voluntary organisations which comprise the sector, their varied relationships with statutory agencies and the effects of such work remain very poorly understood. This book provides a wide-ranging and rigorous examination of this policy-relevant but complex and little studied area. It explores what voluntary organisations are doing with prisoners and probationers, how they manage to undertake their work, and the effects of charitable work with prisoners and probationers. The author uses original empirical research and an innovative application of actor-network theory to enable a step change in our understanding of this increasingly significant sector, and develops the policy-centric accounts produced in the last decade to illustrate how voluntary organisations can mediate the experiences of imprisonment and probation at the micro and macro levels. Demonstrating how the legacy of philanthropic work and neoliberal policy reforms over the past thirty years have created a complex three-tier penal voluntary sector of diverse organisations, this cutting-edge interdisciplinary text will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists of work and industry, and those engaged in the voluntary sector.

Modern criminal justice institutions globally include police, criminal courts, and prisons. Prisons, unlike courts which developed out of an old aristocratic function and unlike police which developed out of an ancient posse or standing army function, are only about 200 years old and are humanitarian inventions. Prisons, defined as modern institutions that deprive the freedom of individuals who violate societies' most basic norms in lieu of corporal or capital punishment, were near universal at the dawn of the 21st century and their use was expanding globally. The US alone spent $60 billion on prisons in 2014. Prison Bureaucracies addresses two fundamental questions. Do prisons in Christian, Hindu, and Muslim societies separated by space and level of socioeconomic development follow a common evolutionary path? Given that differences in prison structure and performance exist, what factors-resources, laws, leadership, historical accident, institutions, culture-account for differences? Based on more than 150 interviews conducted in ten international trips with prison administrators in 15 male state prisons in the US, Mexico, India, and Honduras, Norris provides ethnographic descriptions of prisons bureaucracies that are immediately recognizable as similar institutions, but that nonetheless possessed distinctive forms and developmental trajectories. Economists and political scientists have argued that incentives provided by institutions matter for good or bad public administration, and this is undeniable in the prisons of this study. But institutional incentives were one factor among many affecting the form and function of the prisons and prison systems of this study.

Murguia explores food and foodways within institutions of incarceration. Food, like all resources within total institutions, is vulnerable to social manipulation. Within jail and prison settings, food becomes both a mechanism of control and resistance. In the former, the type of food, its quality, its quantity, and the symbolic significance of its presence or absence all contribute to the socio-political experience of the incarcerated-perhaps even adding an extra form of punishment to one's sentence not measured in time, but rather in terms of cruelty. In the latter, the incarcerated may view the preparation of food, the innovation it may undergo, its consumption, or even the refusal of its consumption along these same socio-political lines. Thus viewing food within jail and prison as social facts that engender real consequences reveals a virtually uncharted area of research for understanding the intersection between food and life within the confines of incarceration. Of this line of inquiry, Murguia asks how food is employed as a means to control prisoners and, conversely, how do prisoners employ food in the service of resistance. As his analysis suggests, this text emphasizes a need to advance a broader discussion about the diets of prisoners.

Offering a timely reanalysis of the issue of Japan's capital punishment policy, this cutting edge volume considers the de facto moratorium periods in Japan's death penalty system and proposes an alternative analytical framework to examine the policy. Addressing how the Ministry of Justice in Japan justified capital punishment policy during the de facto moratorium periods from 1989 to 1993, from 2009 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2012, the author debates the misconceptions surrounding the significance of these moratoriums. The book evidences the approach, rationale and evolution of Japan's Ministry of Justice in consistently justifying capital punishment policy during the different execution-free periods and provides a better understanding of the powerful unelected elite who actually drive the capital punishment system in Japan. Based on parliamentary proceedings, public opinion surveys and periodical reports by both international and domestic human rights NGOs as well as interviews of government ministers, NGO staff, pro- and anti-death-penalty advocates, this text is key reading for those interested in Japan, its government, criminal justice system and policies on the death penalty and human rights.

Correctional policies for Islamist violent extremist offenders are often based on the premise that prisons can be hotbeds of radicalization. The perception that inmates are susceptible to violent extremist belief systems has given rise to a fervent international public, political, and scholarly debate and has led to the introduction of drastic, often expensive policies to counter the threat of prison radicalization. But is the introduction of these policies justified? A key question is whether violent extremist offenders should be concentrated in separate high-security prisons, or whether they should be integrated into the mainstream inmate population. Prisoner Radicalization and Terrorism Detention Policy argues that concentration strategies to manage violent extremist offenders are often flawed - based on untested, potentially false assumptions that are rooted in fear rather than in facts. Little academic evidence has been produced that can valuably inform policy making in this area. As a result, policies to detain violent extremist offenders may be inadequately tailored to achieve their objectives, and could even lead to an intensification of the violent extremist threat. This book is the first to present a detailed and systematic case study of the decision-making and implementation process behind terrorism detention policy. It will be essential reading for students, scholars and policymakers researching criminal justice, terrorism and extremism.

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.

Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions: Counternarratives of Black Family Resilience offers a unique perspective on the complexities of being a Black mother addicted to crack, powder cocaine, heroin, and crank. Qualitative interviews provide rich narratives from five Black mothers challenging negative controlled images and stereotypes of Black motherhood and drug addiction. Using Black Feminist Thought, Critical Race Feminism, and Resilience as conceptual frameworks, this book confronts hegemonic constructions of Black mothers and their children within the context of drug addictions. Particular attention is focused on using the mothers' self-definitions of struggles and family resilience to dismantle the negative controlled images of the junkie and the crack ho' and her crack baby. The mothers in this book speak truth to their experiences with motherhood and addictions to some of the most powerful street drugs that explicitly defy the junkie, crack ho', and crack baby images. The book also addresses tensions existing within researcher-participant relationships and nuances unique to research with Black mothers in recovery. Personal lessons learned and challenges experienced during the research process are highlighted as Tivis shares dilemmas of self-reflections of positionality, accountability and use of language. Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions contains important implications for research and practice in education and across other disciplines concentrating on mothers and children from racially diverse backgrounds. This book will be relevant for both undergraduate and graduate students and academics within these disciplines. Rethinking Black Motherhood and Drug Addictions will be of interest to advanced pre-service teachers and other disciplines engaging in clinical and professional practice with addiction and with families.

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.

How does order emerge out of the multiplicity of bodies, objects, ideas and practices that constitute the urban? This book explores the relation between space, law and control in the contemporary city - and particularly in the context of urban 'mega events' - through a combined geographical and normative analysis. Informed by the recent spatial, affective and material 'turns' in the humanities and social sciences, Andrea Pavoni addresses this question by pursuing an innovative and trans-disciplinary approach, capable of accounting for the emergence of order in urban space both at the conceptual and empirical levels. Two overarching objectives are pursued. First, to account for the increasing convergence of logics, techniques and technologies of law, security and marketing into novel, potentially oppressive spatial configurations. Second, to envisage a consistent ethico-political strategy to counter this evolution, by rethinking originally and in radically spatial terms the notion of justice. Forging a sophisticated and original analysis, this book offers an analysis that will be of considerable interest to those working in critical urban geography, critical legal studies, critical event studies, surveillance and control studies.

The criminal justice system has driven a wedge between black men and their children. African American men are involved in the criminal justice system, whether through incarceration, probation, or parole, at near epidemic levels. At the same time, the criminal justice system has made little or no institutional efforts to maintain or support continuing relationships between these men and their families. Consequently, African American families are harmed by this in countless ways, from the psychological, physical, and material suffering experienced by the men themselves, to losses felt by their mates, children, and extended family members. The volume opens with an introduction and brief review by R. Robin Miller, Sandra Lee Browning, and Lisa M. Spruance, outlining the impacts of incarceration on the African American family. Brad Tripp, explores changes in family relationships and the identity of incarcerated African American fathers. Mary Balthazar and Lula King discuss the loss of the protective effect of marital and nonmarital relationships and its impact on incarcerated African American men, and the implications for African American men and those who work with them in the helping professions. Theresa Clark explores the relationship between visits by family and friends and the nature of inmate behavior. In a research note, Olga Grinstead, Bonnie Faigeles, Carrie Bancroft, and Barry Zack investigate the actual costs families incur to maintain contact with family members, be it emotional, social, or financial. Patricia E. O'Connor uses data from sociolinguistic interviews of male inmates from a maximum security prison to study how some of these men manage to continue to fulfill the fatherhood role long-distance. In a concluding chapter, Sandra Lee Browning, Robin Miller, and Lisa Spruance focus on actions of the criminal justice system that undermine the black family, on reasons that black male inmate fathers are studied so rarely, and discuss the role restorative justice may play. This insightful volume fills a void in the literature on the role of African American men in the functioning of families. It will be of interest to students of African American studies, social workers, and policy makers.

This ground-breaking collection dares to take the next step in the advancement of an autonomous, inter-disciplinary restorative justice field of study. It brings together criminology, social psychology, legal theory, neuroscience, affect-script psychology, sociology, forensic mental health, political sciences, psychology and positive psychology to articulate for the first time a psychological concept of restorative justice. To this end, the book studies the power structures of the restorative justice movement, the very psychology, motivations and emotions of the practitioners who implement it as well as the drivers of its theoreticians and researchers. Furthermore, it examines the strengths and weakness of our own societies and the communities that are called to participate as parties in restorative justice. Their own biases, hunger for power and control, fears and hopes are investigated. The psychology and dynamics between those it aims to reach as well as those who are funding it, including policy makers and politicians, are looked into. All these questions lead to creating an understanding of the psychology of restorative justice. The book is essential reading for academics, researchers, policymakers, practitioners and campaigners.

In 2007, the Corston Report recommended a far-reaching, radical, 'women-centred' approach to women's imprisonment in England and Wales. It suggested a 'fundamental re-thinking' about how services to support women in conflict with the law are delivered in custody and in the community, recommending the development and implementation of a decarceration strategy. This argued for appropriate treatment programmes in the community, reserving prison for only those women who commit serious and violent offences. Ten years on, what progress has been made? What is the relationship between Corston's vision and a more radical abolitionist agenda? Drawing on a range of international scholarship, this book contributes to the critical discourse on the penal system, human rights, and social injustice, revealing the consequences of imprisonment on the lives of women and their families. A decade on from Corston's publication, it critically reviews her report, revealing the slow progress in meeting the reforms it proposed. Identifying the significant barriers to change, it questions the failure to reverse the unrelenting growth of the women's prison population or to transform state responses to women's offending. Reflecting the global expansion of women's imprisonment, particularly marked in advanced democratic societies, the chapters include comparative contributions from jurisdictions where Corston's recommendations have relevance. It concludes with a critical appraisal of reformism and the case for penal abolition. Essential for applied and theory courses on prisons, punishment, and penology; social justice and the criminology of human rights; gender and crime; and feminist criminology.

Over the last fifteen years, the analytical field of punishment and society has witnessed an increase of research developing the connection between economic processes and the evolution of penality from different standpoints, focusing particularly on the increase of rates of incarceration in relation to the transformations of neoliberal capitalism. Bringing together leading researchers from diverse geographical contexts, this book reframes the theoretical field of the political economy of punishment, analysing penality within the current economic situation and connecting contemporary penal changes with political and cultural processes. It challenges the traditional and common sense understanding of imprisonment as 'exclusion' and posits a more promising concept of imprisonment as a 'differential' or 'subordinate' form of 'inclusion'. This groundbreaking book will be a key text for scholars who are working in the field of punishment and society as well as reaching a broader audience within law, sociology, economics, criminology and criminal justice studies.

First published in 1937, Prison from Within is a first-person account of a prisoner sentenced to imprisonment for eighteen months for fraud. It is a linear narrative honestly recording the various facets of prison culture, along with candid character analysis. The book touches upon philosophical notions of sin and remorse; the social groups of prisoners and the camaraderie shared among them; the poor living condition of prisons and the exploitation of prison labour; and the general politics of the time. The book successfully humanizes criminals and is an excellent reminder of the fact that the prison industry has only worsened with time. Prisons were designed for the purpose of 'cleansing' bourgeoise society; therefore, it is important to revisit the institution and question its utility in modern times. This book will be of interest to students and teachers of history, sociology, criminology, criminal justice, literature, and penology.

Rethinking the American Prison Movement provides a short, accessible overview of the transformational and ongoing struggles against America's prison system. Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier show that prisoners have used strikes, lawsuits, uprisings, writings, and diverse coalitions with free-world allies to challenge prison conditions and other kinds of inequality. From the forced labor camps of the nineteenth century to the rebellious protests of the 1960s and 1970s to the rise of mass incarceration and its discontents, Rethinking the American Prison Movement is invaluable to anyone interested in the history of American prisons and the struggles for justice still echoing in the present day.

This book summarizes and synthesizes a vast body of research on the effects of legal punishment and criminal behavior. Covering studies conducted between 1967 and 2015, Punishment and Crime evaluates the assertion that legal punishment reduces crime by investigating the impacts, both positive and negative, of legal punishment on criminal behavior, with emphasis on the effects of punitive crime control policies via the mechanisms of deterrence and incapacitation. Brion Sever and Gary Kleck, author of the renowned Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, present a literature review on legal punishment in the United States that is unparalleled in depth and scope. This text is a must-read for students, researchers, and policymakers concerned with the fields of corrections and crime prevention.

The impact of the United Nations "Healthy Prisons" initiative has highlighted the importance of health and health promotion in incarcerated populations. This invaluable book discusses the many health and medical issues that arise or are introduced into prisons from the perspective of both inmates and prison staff. Health and Health Promotion in Prison places key issues in prison healthcare into a historical perspective and investigates contemporary policy drivers. It then addresses the significant legal issues relating to health in prison settings and the human rights implications and questions that arise. The book presents a useful framework for health education in prison and a model for introducing structural, policy and health-related changes based on the UN Health in Prisons model, and also includes a special chapter on mental health issues. Providing a comprehensive and thought-provoking overview of health promotion issues in correctional environments, this is an essential reference for all those involved in prison healthcare.

Women continue to be one of the fastest growing groups of offenders with an increasing group of women involved in the criminal justice system around the world. Whilst internationally women comprise a low percentage of the total prison population, there is an escalating use of custody inextricably linked to the high levels of personal and social needs of women involved in the justice system. This book presents original research undertaken with Corrections Victoria, Australia, which examines the effectiveness of services and programmes women access in prison and after release, and the impact of this on successful reintegration into the community and on other trends such as reoffending. Victoria's Department of Justice introduced the Better Pathways strategy in response to a growing number of women entering the Victorian corrections system, and the concerning extent to which prison is used for women with inadequate accommodation and complex treatment and support needs. The strategy was developed to address the causes of women's offending and to try and help break the cycle of women's reoffending, by funding more holistic initiatives to support women in their transition to life after prison. It is well acknowledged that pathways into offending by women can also be the factors that most affect their reintegration. The research outlined in this book presents data about individual women's pathways through the programmes offered as part of the Better Pathways strategy and the views of the women themselves about the effectiveness of these programmes. Negligible research attention has been paid to what services and programmes are effective for women after prison. This book addresses this gap and provides a cohesive presentation of the key issues salient to the needs of women offenders.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the inadequacies of the state's response to public health and public order issues through deeply flawed legislation. Written in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, this book explores why law enforcement responses to a public health emergency are prioritised over welfare provision and what this tells us about the state's criminal justice institutions. Informing scholarly, civic and activist thinking on the political nature of policing, it reveals how increasing police powers disproportionately affects Black people and suggests alternative ways of designing public safety beyond a law enforcement context.

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.

Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration works from the premise that if the law establishes and maintains both its practical and symbolic authority on the basis of its monopoly on legally sanctioned violence and the suffering threatened and delivered by such violence, then we cannot know the full human cost or concrete moral status of any legal state without human witness to the depth and manner of suffering meted out by such violence. The prison writer stands in the position to offer such witness. The prison writer knows the law's violence in the flesh. For every other writer, reflection upon the degree and manner of suffering meted out under legal sanction-that is, reflection upon the full human cost of the contemporary legal order-is necessarily speculative. In close readings of first-person witness from prisons in the U.S., Ireland, and Africa, Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration discovers literary tropes that chart at once local, national, and transnational conditions of carceral experience-the extant conditions of legalized suffering. In exhibiting the labor required to move from institutionalized abjection to the minimum requirements of rights-bearing personhood, this witness offers the sole credible vision of the possubility of a post carceral understanding of freedom.