The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson's term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer "social death". Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families. Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and children. Moreover, this isolation of people in prison renders them highly vulnerable to other forms of violence, including sexual violence. Price stresses that the violence they face goes beyond physical abuse by prison guards and it involves institutionalized forms of mistreatment, ranging from abysmally poor health care to routine practices that are arguably abusive, such as pat-downs, cavity searches, and the shackling of pregnant women. And social death does not end with prison. The condition is permanent, following people after they are released from prison. Finding housing, employment, receiving social welfare benefits, and regaining voting rights are all hindered by various legal and other hurdles. The mechanisms of social death, Price shows, are also informal and cultural. Ex-prisoners face numerous forms of distrust and are permanently stigmatized by other citizens around them. A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.

From 1935 until 1975, just about every junkie busted for dope went to the Narcotic Farm. Equal parts federal prison, treatment center, farm, and research laboratory, the Farm was designed to rehabilitate addicts and help researchers discover a cure for drug addiction. Although it began as a bold and ambitious public works project, and became famous as a rehabilitation center frequented by great jazz musicians among others, the Farm was shut down forty years after it opened amid scandal over its drug-testing program, which involved experiments where inmates were being used as human guinea pigs and rewarded with heroin and cocaine for their efforts. Published to coincide with a documentary to be aired on PBS, The Narcotic Farm includes rare and unpublished photographs, film stills, newspaper and magazine clippings, government documents, as well as interviews, writings, and anecdotes from the prisoners, doctors, and guards that trace the Farm's noble rise and tumultuous fall, revealing the compelling story of what really happened inside the prison walls.

At the start of the twenty-first century, America is in the midst of a profound national reconsideration of the death penalty. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of people being sentenced to death as well as executed, exonerations have become common, and the number of states abolishing the death penalty is on the rise. The essays featured in The Road to Abolition? track this shift in attitudes toward capital punishment, and consider whether or not the death penalty will ever be abolished in America.

The interdisciplinary group of experts gathered by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., and Austin Sarat ask and attempt to answer the hard questions that need to be addressed if the death penalty is to be abolished. Will the death penalty end only to be replaced with life in prison without parole? Will life without the possibility of parole become, in essence, the new death penalty? For abolitionists, might that be a pyrrhic victory? The contributors discuss how the death penalty might be abolished, with particular emphasis on the current debate over lethal injection as a case study on why and how the elimination of certain forms of execution might provide a model for the larger abolition of the death penalty.

The Culture of Urban Control: Jail Overcrowding in the Crime Control Era explores and analyzes the growth and expansion of the United States' largest single-site urban jail system. Through an analysis of a United States Federal Court initiated consent decree this research provides a narrative of criminal justice policy, politics and legal maneuvering between the years of 1993 and 2003 associated with overcrowding within the Cook County Jail. As a result of increased policing presence and subsequent arrests during the crime control era of the 1990's, the Cook County Department of Corrections experienced a continually overcrowded correctional facility resulting in pre-trial and post-convicted inmates sleeping on floors in overcrowded and dilapidated facilities. Beginning in the early 1990's and under the supervision of the federal court, Chicago and Cook County, Illinois undertook the largest expansion of local level incarceration and correctional control in their history. The disputing process between local, state and federal level claims-makers within the legal arena and through media representations are analyzed in conjunction with infrastructure growth, changing correctional populations, community level expansion of correctional programming and the social reality of the inmate experience. How local level corrections and federal interdiction were shaped by local level politics and criminal justice systems are examined.

Indigenous communities are typically those that challenge the laws of the nation states of which they have become-often very reluctantly-a part. Around the world, community policing has emerged in many of these regions as a product of their physical environments and cultures. Through a series of case studies, Community Policing in Indigenous Communities explores how these often deeply divided societies operate under the community policing paradigm. Drawing on the local expertise of policing practitioners and researchers across the globe, the book explores several themes with regard to each region: How community policing originated or evolved in the community and how it has changed over time The type of policing style used-whether informal or formal and uniformed or non-uniformed, whether partnerships are developed with local community organizations or businesses, and the extent of covert operations, if any The role played by community policing in the region, including the relative emphasis of calls for service, the extent to which advice and help is offered to citizens, whether local records are kept of citizen movement and locations, and investigation and arrest procedures The community's special cultural or indigenous attributes that set it apart from other models of community policing Organizational attributes, including status in the "hierarchy of control" within the regional or national organization of policing The positive and negative features of community policing as it is practiced in the community Its effectiveness in reducing and or preventing crime and disorder The book demonstrates that community policing cannot be imposed from above without grassroots input from local citizens. It is a strategy-not simply for policing with consent-but for policing in contexts where there is often little, if any, consent. It is an aspirational practice aimed to help police and communities within contested contexts to recognize that positive gains can be made, enabling communities to live in relative safety.

Topical discussion of how social bureaucracies are increasingly used as a means to control immigration and mobility

Today's high recidivism rates, combined with the rising costs of jails and prisons, are increasingly seen as problems that must be addressed on both moral and financial grounds. Research on prison and jail reentry typically focuses on barriers stemming from employment, housing, mental health, and substance abuse issues from the perspective of offenders returning to urban areas. This book explores the largely neglected topic of the specific challenges inmates experience when leaving jail and returning to rural areas. Rural Jail Reentry provides a thorough background and theoretical framework on reentry issues and rural crime patterns, and identifies perceptions of the most significant challenges to jail reentry in rural areas. Utilizing three robust samples-current inmates, probation and parole officers, and treatment staff-Ward examines what each group considers to be the most impactful factors surrounding rural jail re-entry. A springboard for future research and policy discussions, this book will be of interest to international researchers and practitioners interested in the topic of rural reentry, as well as graduate and upper-level undergraduate students concerned with contemporary issues in corrections, community-based corrections, critical issues in criminal justice, and criminal justice policy.

Mobilities research is now centre stage in the social sciences with wide-ranging work that considers the politics underscoring the movements of people and objects, critically examining a world that is ever on the move. At first glance, the words 'carceral' and 'mobilities' seem to sit uneasily together. This book challenges the assumption that carceral life is characterised by a lack of movement. Carceral Mobilities brings together contributions that speak to contemporary debates across carceral studies and mobilities research, offering fresh insights to both areas by identifying and unpicking the manifold mobilities that shape, and are shaped by, carceral regimes. It features four sections that move the reader through the varying typologies of motion underscoring carceral life: tension; circulation; distribution; and transition. Each mobilities-led section seeks to explore the politics encapsulated in specific regimes of carceral movement. With contributions from leading scholars, and a range of international examples, this book provides an authoritative voice on carceral mobilities from a variety of perspectives, including criminology, sociology, history, cultural theory, human geography, and urban planning. This book offers a first port of call for those examining spaces of detention, asylum, imprisonment, and containment, who are increasingly interested in questions of movement in relation to the management, control, and confinement of populations.

In this ethnographic study Maria Adams turns a geographical and feminist lens on prisoners' families. She captures the testimonies of families as they navigate the sociological and social challenges of the imprisonment of loved ones, exploring key concepts including inequality, penal power, and vulnerability. She also measures the impacts on many aspects of families' emotions, relationships, and identities, and considers the sources of support and resilience they draw on. With original research and fresh insights, the book deepens our understanding of carceral geography and how families experience spaces, both inside prison and beyond the bars.

In one of the lengthiest, noisiest, and hottest legal debates in U.S. history, Cruel and Unusual Punishment stands out as a levelheaded, even-handed, and thorough analysis of the issue. The Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution created one of the nation's most valued freedoms but, at the same time, one of its most persistent controversies. On 184 separate occasions, the Supreme Court attempted to decide what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment." Constitutional scholars Joseph A. Melusky and Judge Keith A. Pesto help readers make sense of the controversy. The authors begin by sketching the context of the debate in a general overview that addresses issues such as excessive bails and fines, and noncapital offenses. But their primary focus is capital punishment. In a detailed, chronologically ordered discussion, they trace the evolving opinion of the nation's highest court from the late 19th century to the present, analyzing issues, arguments, holdings, and outcomes. A focused list of primary source documents includes the Magna Carta, the Northwest Ordinance, the 5th, 8th, and 14th Amendments, and excerpts from the Federalist Papers Appendixes include tables and charts on public opinion on the death penalty, state statistics, federal sentencing guidelines, and a bibliography

The Netflix series Orange is the New Black has drawn widespread attention to many of the dysfunctions of prisons and the impact prisons have on those who live and work behind the prison gates. This anthology deepens this public awareness through scholarship on the television program and by exploring the real-world social, psychological, and legal issues female prisoners face. Each chapter references a particular connection to the Netflix series as its starting point of analysis. The book brings together scholars to consider both media representations as well as the social justice issues for female inmates alluded to in the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. The chapters address myriad issues including cultural representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality; social justice issues for transgender inmates; racial dynamics within female prisons; gender and female prison structures/policies; treatment of women in prison; re-incarcerated and previously incarcerated women; self and identity; gender, race, and sentencing; and reproduction and parenting for female inmates.

First published in 1990, The Politics of Redress is a product of and commentary on significant developments in critical criminology. It shifts the emphasis from the criminologist as a police agent to a fighter for social justice. The author focuses on the role of punishment in society, in general, and in criminology, in particular, urging the reader to reimagine the concept of punishment, especially penal punishment. The arguments addressed in this book range from a comparative analysis of penal policies in various countries to philosophical debates about whether punishment is compatible with a just social order. With the Black Lives Matter movement, the topic of prison abolition has, once again, gripped society's conscience making this text a vital read for students of law, criminology, sociology, philosophy, and history.

It has long been acknowledged that the death penalty in the United States of America has been shaped by the country's history of slavery and racial violence, but this book considers the lesser-explored relationship between the two practices' respective abolitionist movements. The book explains how the historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. The comparative study also sheds light on the nature of such efforts, and offers lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Using the history of slavery and abolition, it is argued that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists.

The post 9/11 era has produced structured rehabilitation programmes in a wide range of countries including Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Pakistan, Malaysia, Egypt, Iraq, and Uzbekistan. There are also ad hoc and emerging programmes in Nigeria, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Denmark, Germany, United Kingdom, and Nepal. Due to the threat from global Islamist terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS), the focus has tended to be on Islamist groups. However, Sri Lanka also has a multifaceted rehabilitation programme that was created after the ethno-nationalist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) group was defeated in 2009, which can teach us some valuable lessons. This book consists of a series of case studies of different terrorist rehabilitation initiatives that have been attempted around the world. Each initiative is critically analysed to develop a sound understanding of the significance of different approaches and strategies of terrorist rehabilitation in helping potential terrorists integrate back into society. Sharing and examining case studies, by both practitioners and scholars, this book provides vital tools to address the challenges faced by practitioners of terrorist rehabilitation programmes.

Predictive Sentencing addresses the role of risk assessment in contemporary sentencing practices. Predictive sentencing has become so deeply ingrained in Western criminal justice decision-making that despite early ethical discussions about selective incapacitation, it currently attracts little critique. Nor has it been subjected to a thorough normative and empirical scrutiny. This is problematic since much current policy and practice concerning risk predictions is inconsistent with mainstream theories of punishment. Moreover, predictive sentencing exacerbates discrimination and disparity in sentencing. Although structured risk assessments may have replaced 'gut feelings', and have now been systematically implemented in Western justice systems, the fundamental issues and questions that surround the use of risk assessment instruments at sentencing remain unresolved. This volume critically evaluates these issues and will be of great interest to scholars of criminal justice and criminology.

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, African Americans made up approximately twelve percent ofthe United States population but close to forty percent of the United States prison population. Now, in the latter half of the decade, the nation is in the midst of the largest multi-year discharge of prisoners in its history. In Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities, Anthony C. Thompson discusses what is likely to happen to these ex-offenders and why.

For Thompson, any discussion of ex-offender reentry is, de facto, a question of race. After laying out the statistics, he identifies the ways in which media and politics have contributed to the problem, especially through stereotyping and racial bias. Well aware of the potential consequences if this country fails to act, Thompson offers concrete, realizable ideas of how our policies could, and should, change.

Punishment for Sale is the definitive modern history of private prisons, told through social, economic and political frames. The authors explore the origin of the ideas of modern privatization, the establishment of private prisons, and the efforts to keep expanding in the face of problems and bad publicity. The book provides a balanced telling of the story of private prisons and the resistance they engendered within the context of criminology, and it is intended for supplemental use in undergraduate and graduate courses in criminology, social problems, and race & ethnicity.

The Netflix series Orange is the New Black has drawn widespread attention to many of the dysfunctions of prisons and the impact prisons have on those who live and work behind the prison gates. This anthology deepens this public awareness through scholarship on the television program and by exploring the real-world social, psychological, and legal issues female prisoners face. Each chapter references a particular connection to the Netflix series as its starting point of analysis. The book brings together scholars to consider both media representations as well as the social justice issues for female inmates alluded to in the Netflix series Orange is the New Black. The chapters address myriad issues including cultural representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality; social justice issues for transgender inmates; racial dynamics within female prisons; gender and female prison structures/policies; treatment of women in prison; re-incarcerated and previously incarcerated women; self and identity; gender, race, and sentencing; and reproduction and parenting for female inmates.

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.

This volume brings together leading researchers to celebrate the significant contributions of Peter Grabosky to the field of Criminology, and in particular his work developing and adapting regulatory theory to the study of policing and security. Over the past three decades, his path-breaking theoretical and empirical research has contributed to a burgeoning literature on the myriad ways regulatory systems drive state and non-state interactions in an effort to control crime. This collection of essays showcases Grabosky's pioneering treatment of key regulatory concepts as they relate to such interactions, and illustrate how his work has been instrumental in shaping contemporary scholarship and practice around the governance of security. Revisiting the work of a key figure in the field, this book will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists, socio-legal studies and those engaged with security and policy studies.

"This is an exceptional personal testimony and story of achievement - Ahmed Othmani tells of his own appalling treatment when in detention and how it informed and inspired a lifetime vocation to struggle for the rights of all prisoners everywhere. As the story demonstrates, Othmani is one of those rare individuals who moved from passion and conviction to effective action - he was responsible for the establishment of one of the world's most reliable and mature human rights organizations, in the field of penal reform, Penal Reform International (PRI). His untimely death in Morocco in 2004 deprived the cause of a passionate advocate, but the work goes on." [From the Preface]

Deterrence, Choice, and Crime explores the various dimensions of modern deterrence theory, relevant research, and practical applications. Beginning with the classical roots of deterrence theory in Cesare Beccaria's profoundly important contributions to modern criminological thought, the book draws out the many threads in contemporary criminology that are explicitly mentioned or at least hinted by Beccaria. These include sanction risk perceptions and their behavioral consequences, the deterrent efficacy of the certainty versus the severity of punishment, the role of celerity of punishment in the deterrence process, informal versus formal deterrence, and individual differences in deterrence. The richness of the volume is seen in the inclusion of chapters that focus on the theoretical development of deterrence across disciplines such as criminology and economics. In an innovative section, the role of agents of deterrence is considered. Lessons are learned from the practical applications of deterrence undertaken in the areas of policing, corrections, and the community. The closing section includes Michael Tonry's "An Honest Politician's Guide to Deterrence: Certainty, Severity, Celerity, and Parsimony," a reminder of Beccaria's dictum that "it is better to prevent crimes than punish them." In the current environment, deterrence arguments are routinely used to justify policies that do just the opposite. Ray Paternoster, who contributed two chapters, passed away as this volume was being finalized. Fittingly, this book is dedicated to him and ends with Alex Piquero's poignant remembrance of Ray, a path-breaking deterrence scholar, beloved mentor, and ardent supporter of social justice. Suitable for researchers and graduate students as well as for advanced courses in criminology, this book breaks new ground in theorizing the effects of punishment and other sanctions on crime control.

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.

Over the past few decades, there has been a sharp increase in the number of elderly prisoners, and hence a rise in the number of prisoners dying in custody. In this book, Khechumyan questions whether respect for human dignity would justify releasing older and seriously ill prisoners. He also examines the normative justifications which could limit the administration of the imprisonment of the elderly and seriously ill. Khechumyan argues that factors such as a prisoner's age and health could alter the balance between the legitimate goals of punishment, rendering the continued imprisonment 'grossly disproportionate'. To address these issues, Articles 3 and 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights are extensively examined. This book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy-makers working in the fields of Criminal Justice, Human Rights Law, and Gerontology.

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.