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

By studying the development of Italy's penal system, Pires Marques provides valuable insights into the wider political culture of European society. Focusing on the rise of fascism in Spain and Portugal as well as Italy, he examines the role of religious, economic, and political factors in the making of penal laws.

This interdisciplinary volume of essays studies human rights in political prison literature, while probing the intersections of suffering, politics, and aesthetics in an interliterary and intercultural context. As the first book to explore the concept of global aesthetics in political prison narratives, it demonstrates how literary insight enhances the study of human rights. Covering varied geographical and geopolitical regions, this collection encourages comparative analyses and cross-cultural understanding. Seeking to interrogate linguistic, structural, and cultural constructions of the political prison experience, it highlights the literary aspects without losing sight of the political and the theoretical. The contributors cross various disciplinary boundaries and adopt different interpretive perspectives in analyzing prison narratives, especially memoirs, from such diverse countries as China, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Romania, Russia, Uruguay, and the U.S. The volume emphasizes the literary works produced since the second half of the twentieth century, particularly since the political seismic shift in 1989. The authors treated range from the canonical to the less well-known: Nawal El Saadawi, Varlam Shalamov, Zhang Xianliang, Cong Weixi, Wumingshi, Carlos Liscano, Fatna El Bouih, Nabil Sulayman, Faraj Bayraqdar, Hasiba 'Abdalrahman, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nicolae Steinhardt, Irina Ratushinskaya, etc. Critical issues investigated include how the writers represent their sufferings, experiences, and emotions during incarceration; their strategies of survival; and how political prison literature can reveal hidden violations of human rights, while resisting official discourse and serving other functions in society. Examining the commonalities and differences in global experiences of imprisonment, the eight chapters engage with the aesthetics of self-making and resistance, individual and collective memory, denial and conversion, catharsis and redemption, and the experiencing and witnessing of trauma. Topics also include the politics of remembering and the politics of representation, such as the problematic relationship between narrative, language, and representations of torture. Similarly under discussion are prison aesthetics of happiness, the role of spectacle in the criminal justice system, and the intersection of prison, gender, and silences. At a juncture when more and more people all over the world actively defy repressive regimes and demand political reform, this book makes a timely contribution to the advocacy and discourse of universal human rights.

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.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book provides an assessment of contemporary international knowledge about the experiences of life after release from prison. For over 100 years people leaving prison have been supervised by probation services, but little has been written about how those who are supervised experience this process, or how this process influences experiences post-release. Research suggests that the success or failure of supervision in terms of reoffending may be related to how it is experienced, but little has been written about how supervision interacts with these experiences. Despite this lack of grounded knowledge, post-prison supervision continues to grow internationally. This book addresses issues relating to life after release through providing a vision of contemporary life after prison in different social and economic climates from those who are the subjects of this growing and changing form of penal power. An engaging and timely study, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of criminal justice and punishment.

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how contemporary American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States, and in so doing, compellingly engages popular culture in order to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not.

Incarceration Without Conviction addresses an understudied fairness flaw in the criminal justice system. On any given day, approximately 500,000 Americans are in pretrial detention in the US, held in local jails not because they are considered a flight or public safety risk, but because they are poor and cannot afford bail or a bail bond. Over the course of a year, millions of Americans cycle through local jails, most there for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. These individuals are disproportionately Black and poor. This book draws on extensive legal data to highlight the ways in which pretrial detention drives guilty pleas and thus fuels mass incarceration--and the disproportionate impact on Black Americans. It shows the myriad harms that being detained wreaks on people's lives and well-being, regardless of whether or not those who are detained are ever convicted. Rabinowitz argues that pretrial detention undermines the presumption of innocence in the American criminal justice system and, in so doing, erodes the very meaning of innocence.

Despite a resurgence in the number of studies of Chinese social control over the past decade or so, no sustained work in English has detailed the recent developments in policy and practice against serious crime, despite international recognition that Chinese policing of serious crime is relatively severe and that more people are executed for crime in China each year than in the rest of the world combined. In this book the author skilfully explores the politics, practice, procedures, and public perceptions of policing serious crime in China, focusing on one particular criminal justice practice - anti-crime campaigns - in the period of transition from planned to market economy from the 1980s to the first years of the twenty-first century. Susan Trevaskes analyzes the elements that led to the Hard Strike becoming the preferred method of attacking the growing problem of serious crime in China before going on to examine the factors surrounding the failure of the Hard Strike as a way of addressing the main problems of serious crime in China today, that is drug trafficking and organized crime . Drawing on a rich variety of Chinese sources Serious Crime in China is an original and informed read for scholars of China, criminologists generally and the international human rights community.

P&P Brantingham's enormous contribution to criminology has paved the way for major theoretical and empirical developments in the understanding of crime and its respective patterns, prevention, and geometry. In this unique collection of original essays, Andresen and Kinney bring together leading scholars in the field of environmental criminology to honour the work of P&P Brantingham with new research on the geometry of crime, patterns in crime and crime generators and attractors. Chapters include new perspectives on the crime mobility triangle, electronic monitoring, illegal drug markets, the patterns of vehicle theft for export, prolific offender patterns,crime rates in hotels and motels, violent crime and juvenile crime. A final chapter gathers together a collection of letters to P&P Brantingham, from key scholars reflecting on and celebrating their important contribution. This volume provides essential readings for those interested in the field of environmental criminology.

This book draws together the work of a new community of scholars with a growing interest in carceral geography: the geographical study of practices of imprisonment and detention. It combines work by geographers on 'mainstream' penal establishments where people are incarcerated by the prevailing legal system, with geographers' recent work on migrant detention centres, where irregular migrants and 'refused' asylum seekers are detained, ostensibly pending decisions on admittance or repatriation. Working in these contexts, the book's contributors investigate the geographical location and spatialities of institutions, the nature of spaces of incarceration and detention and experiences inside them, governmentality and prisoner agency, cultural geographies of penal spaces, and mobility in the carceral context. In dialogue with emergent and topical agendas in geography around mobility, space and agency, and in relation to international policy challenges such as the (dis)functionality of imprisonment and the search for alternatives to detention, this book presents a timely addition to emergent interdisciplinary scholarship that will prompt dialogue among those working in geography, criminology and prison sociology.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1970 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

This short text, ideal for Social Problems and Criminal Justice courses, examines the American prison system, its conditions, and its impact on society. Wehr and Aseltine define the prison industrial complex and explain how the current prison system is a contemporary social problem. They conclude by using California as a case study, and propose alternatives and alterations to the prison system.

The words we use to talk about justice have an enormous impact on our everyday lives. As the first in-depth, ethnographic study of language, "Talking Criminal Justice" examines the speech of moral entrepreneurs to illustrate how our justice language encourages social control and punishment.

This book highlights how public discourse leaders (from both conservative and liberal sides) guide us toward justice solutions that do not align with our collectively professed value of "equal justice for all" through their language habits. This contextualized study of our justice language demonstrates the concealment of intentions with clever language use which mask justice ideologies that differ greatly from our widely espoused justice values.

By the evidence of our own words "Talking Criminal Justice "shows that we consistently permit and encourage the construction of people in ways which attribute motives that elicit and empower social control and punishment responses, and that make punitive public policy options acceptable.This book will be of interest to academics, students and professionals concerned with social and criminal justice, language, rhetoric and critical criminology.

This accessible book introduces the key concepts and theoretical developments of queer criminology and explains what they mean for modern criminal justice frameworks and practitioners. The book sets out experiences of the LGBTQ+ population as victims, offenders and professionals in legal systems in the US and internationally and explores what they mean for elements of those systems including police, courts, corrections and victims' services. It is both a useful reference point for academics, students and professionals and a guide to how queer criminology can be theoretically applied and practically implemented in the worlds of policing, courts, corrections, and victims' services.

This unique collection brings together international contributors from a range of disciplines to explore crime and responses to crime through a religious/faith-based lens. At a time when religion is under the media spotlight in terms of religiously-motivated hate crime, terrorism and child abuse this book provides an important platform for academic debate. It examines these and other key issues including: faith as a coping strategy, religion as a motivating factor and the role of religion and morality in shaping criminal justice responses. This collection clearly places religion/faith at the heart of criminological enquiry and illustrates its relevance in addressing wider social issues and would be of benefit to students and academics researching or studying in these areas. It will also be of interest to community and criminal justice practitioners and those with an interest in community engagement and multi-faith work.

A Restorative Justice Reader brings together carefully chosen extracts from the most important and influential contributions to the literature of restorative justice, accompanying these with an informative commentary providing context and explanation. It includes works by both well known advocates of restorative justice and by some of the key critics of the restorative justice movement.

The new edition has been thoroughly revised to take account of the rapid expansion of the literature of restorative justice over the last decade. Classical readings are accompanied by more recent literature representing the most significant contributions to research, discussion and debate concerning restorative justice. The latest edition also contains:

• a new section containing key contributions to the research literature evaluating what works in restorative justice.
• a brief guide to studying restorative justice

As a punishment for our most serious crime-the intentional killing of a victim in an egregious way-the death penalty naturally attracts opposing moral views. One view says that the state should never execute a criminal no matter what the crime may be. The other view requires execution as justice is sought for the victim. This book considers a third possible view: capital punishment should be judged by its pragmatic value to society. Does the prospect of possible execution save lives by deterring the act of murder? Heilbrun presents evidence concerning whether state death penalties demonstrate the two necessary properties of a true deterrent: a reduction in intentional killing when present and an increase when removed. The Case for Capital Punishment contains an analysis of rarely-considered factors that influence the deterrence of murder and a discussion of the common criticisms of capital punishment.

Why do some modern societies punish their offenders differently to others? Why are some more punitive and others more tolerant in their approach to offending and how can these differences be explained? Based on extensive historical analysis and fieldwork in the penal systems of England, Australia and New Zealand on the one hand and Finland, Norway and Sweden on the other, this book seeks to answer these questions. The book argues that the penal differences that currently exist between these two clusters of societies emanate from their early nineteenth-century social arrangements, when the Anglophone societies were dominated by exclusionary value systems that contrasted with the more inclusionary values of the Nordic countries. The development of their penal programmes over this two hundred year period, including the much earlier demise of the death penalty in the Nordic countries and significant differences between the respective prison rates and prison conditions of the two clusters, reflects the continuing influence of these values. Indeed, in the early 21st century these differences have become even more pronounced. John Pratt and Anna Eriksson offer a unique contribution to this topic of growing importance: comparative research in the history and sociology of punishment. This book will be of interest to those studying criminology, sociology, punishment, prison and penal policy, as well as professionals working in prisons or in the area of penal policy across the six societies that feature in the book.

This is a history of the California prison movement from 1950 to 1980, focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area's San Quentin State Prison and highlighting the role that prison reading and writing played in the creation of radical inmate ideology in those years. The book begins with the Caryl Chessman years (1948-60) and closes with the trial of the San Quentin Six (1975-76) and the passage of California's Determinate Sentencing Law (1977). This was an extraordinary era in the California prisons, one that saw the emergence of a highly developed radical convict resistance movement inside prison walls. This inmate groundswell was fueled at times by remarkable individual prisoners, at other times by groups like the Black Muslims or the San Quentin chapter of the Black Panther Party. But most often resistance grew from much wider sources and in quiet corners: from dozens of political study groups throughout the prison; from an underground San Quentin newspaper; and from covert attempts to organize a prisoners' union. The book traces the rise and fall of the prisoners' movement, ending with the inevitably bloody confrontation between prisoners and the state and the subsequent prison administration crackdown. The author examines the efforts of prison staff to augment other methods of inmate management by attempting to modify convict ideology by means of "bibliotherapy" and communication control, and describes convict resistance to these attempts as control. He also discusses how Bay Area political activists became intensely involved in San Quentin and how such writings as Chessman's Cell 2455, Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and Jackson's Soledad Brother reached far beyond prison walls to influence opinion, events, and policy.

In 2003, the US Senate and Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), prompting a number of research projects that cumulatively began to broaden and deepen our understanding of this complex aspect of prison life. Risk Markers for Sexual Victimization and Predation in Prison contains the results of Dr. Warren and Dr. Jackson's study, and it extends the literature on prison rape in important and distinct ways. Their research, which encompasses the full continuum of sexual behavior among incarcerated individuals, succeeds in identifying multi-layered predictive models for different types of sexual behavior across and within genders. The process by which the authors came to their study design, their experiences while implementing it, and the nature and significance of their findings, represent the content of this book.

"Reaffirming Rehabilitation," 2nd Edition, brings fresh insights to one of the core works of criminal justice literature. This groundbreaking work analyzes the rehabilitative ideal within the American correctional system and discusses its relationship to and conflict with political ideologies. Many researchers and policymakers rejected the value of rehabilitation after Robert Martinson s proclamation that "nothing works." Cullen and Gilbert s book helped stem the tide of negativism that engulfed the U.S. correctional system in the years that followed the popularization of the "nothing works" doctrine. Now Cullen traces the social impact on U.S. corrections policy. This new edition is appropriate as a textbook in corrections courses and as recommended reading in related courses. It also serves as a resource for researchers and policymakers working in the field of corrections.

The first edition continues to be used in corrections courses even though it is out of print. This new edition makes the book readily available, along with rich new content in the introduction and concluding chapter.
Introduces a new generation to the ongoing clash of political agendas and research-based corrections policies.
Supports critical thinking about the role of rehabilitation in our society."

Texas convicts and inmates have made the Texas prison system the most colorful in the world over the past 150 years. There was a famous gunslinger in the 1800s and a burlesque stripper in the 1950s. There were notorious gang members in the thirties, a Kiowa Indian chief, a blues musician, an escape artist, and a Mexican vaquero.These prison tales include chain-bus drivers, wild bull riders, and a prison baseball team that took on the Texas semi-pro champions in Houston's old Buff Stadium. They include inmates and prisoners of war supplying materials to the Confederate army and convict laborers building a state railroad and quarrying granite for the beautiful state capitol in Austin.You can read the history of [Old Sparky] and the final moments leading up to the electrocution of two of Texas's most infamous criminals.Author Gary Brown spent twenty-three years working as counselor and teacher in the Texas prison system. He is also the author of Volunteers in the Texas Revolution: The New Orleans Greys and Hesitant Martyr in the Texas Revolution: James Walker Fannin.

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.