Offering rare insiders' perspectives, Trends in Corrections: Interviews with Corrections Leaders Around the World is a comprehensive survey of correctional programming and management styles used across nations. Twelve chapters present transcribed interviews of corrections leaders along with a brief portrait of the corrections system in those jurisdictions. The leaders interviewed represent a variety of cultures, political environments, and economic systems and come from North America (Canada, Mexico, and the United States), Asia (Singapore), Australia, the Caribbean (Trinidad and Tobago), and Europe (England, Hungary, and Bosnia-Herzegovina). Topics discussed in this insightful collection of interviews include: Working conditions for correction officers How governmental changes can impact a prison system Overcrowding problems and efforts to modernize prisons Recidivism concerns and programs that facilitate offender reintegration into society upon release Effects of the media's portrayal of prisons on communities The final chapter reflects on the interviews and summarizes the common themes evident throughout the book. Advancing knowledge about corrections systems worldwide, this volume bridges the gap of knowledge that exists between scholars and researchers in academia and practitioners in the field. The candid discussions presented herein are destined to open further dialogue among these professionals, adding value to current operations and informing future directions.

If prison regimes had continued as normal during the COVID-19 lockdown, social distancing would have been impossible. Therefore, sweeping restrictions were imposed confining prisoners to their cells, cancelling communal activity and prohibiting visits from family and friends. This insightful book identifies the risks posed by prison lockdowns to minority ethnic prisoners, foreign national prisoners and prisoners from Traveller and Roma communities across the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. It documents the unequal impacts on their mental and physical health, feelings of isolation and fear, access to services and contact with visitors. The legacy of the lockdown will be profound. This book exposes the long-term significance and impact on minority ethnic prisoners.

Between the years of 1820 and 1913, penitentiaries and reformatories came to be in the states of Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. The rise of these institutions is not simply a result of historical and theological trends, but was directly influenced by the American religious community. Drawing on various primary source materials, the author evaluates the influence of the religious community on the American penal system, with specific emphasis on the role of prison chaplains.

Francesca Biagi-Chai's book - a translation from the French of Le Cas Landru - tackles the issue of criminal responsibility in the case of serial killers, and other 'mad' people who are nonetheless deemed to be answerable before the law. The author, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and senior psychiatrist in France, with extensive experience working in institutional settings, analyses the logic informing the crimes of famous serial killers. Addressing the Landru case (which was the inspiration for Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux), as well as those of Pierre Riviere and Donato Bilancia, Biagi-Chai casts light on the confusion that pervades forensic psychiatry and criminal law as to the distinction between mental illness and 'madness'. She then elaborates the consequences of her argument in a sustained critique of the insanity defence. The book includes a Foreword by the renowned psychoanalyst, Jacques-Alain Miller, and an introduction by the translators on the question of insanity before the law in the US and in the UK, which considers the pertinence of Biagi-Chai's argument for forensic psychiatry, for criminal law, and for the increasing contemporary focus on the assessment of dangerousness and risk-management strategies in crime control practices.

Sex offending, and in particular child sex offending, is a complex area for policy makers, theorists and practitioners. A focus on punishment has reinforced sex offending as a problem that is essentially other to society and discourages engagement with the real scale and scope of sexual offending in the UK. This book looks at the growth of work with sex offenders, questioning assumptions about the range and types of such offenders and what effective responses to these might be.

Divided into four sections, this book sets out the growth of a broad legislative context and the emergence of child sexual offenders in criminal justice policy and practice. It goes on to consider a range of offences and victim typologies arguing that work with offenders and victims is complex and can provide a rich source of theoretical and practical knowledge that should be utilised more fully by both policy makers and practitioners. It includes work on female sex offenders, electronic monitoring and animal abuse as well as exploring interventions with sex offenders in three different contexts; prisons, communities and hostels.

Bringing together academic, practice and policy experts, the book argues that a clear but complex theoretical and policy approach is required if the risk of re- offending and further victimisation is to be reduced. Ultimately, this book questions whether it makes sense to locate responsibility for responding to sexual offending solely within the criminal justice domain.

"Backed up by the best science, Todd Clear and Natasha Frost make a compelling case for why the nation's forty-year embrace of the punitive spirit has been morally bankrupt and endangered public safety. But this is far more than an expose of correctional failure. Recognizing that a policy turning point is at hand, Clear and Frost provide a practical blueprint for choosing a different correctional future--counsel that is wise and should be widely followed."--Francis T. Cullen, Distinguished Research Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati Over the last 35 years, the US penal system has grown at a rate unprecedented in US history--five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. This growth was part of a sustained and intentional effort to "get tough" on crime, and characterizes a time when no policy options were acceptable save for those that increased penalties. In The Punishment Imperative, eminent criminologists Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost argue that America's move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the early 2000s was more than just a response to crime or a collection of policies adopted in isolation; it was a grand social experiment. Tracing a wide array of trends related to the criminal justice system, The Punishment Imperative charts the rise of penal severity in America and speculates that a variety of forces--fiscal, political, and evidentiary--have finally come together to bring this great social experiment to an end. Clear and Frost stress that while the doubling of the crime rate in the late 1960s represented one of the most pressing social problems at the time, this is not what served as a foundation for the great punishment experiment. Rather, it was the way crime posed a political problem--and thereby offered a political opportunity--that became the basis for the great rise in punishment. The authors claim that the punishment imperativeis a particularly insidious social experiment because the actual goal was never articulated, the full array of consequences was never considered, and the momentum built even as the forces driving the policy shifts diminished. Clear and Frost argue that the public's growing realization that the severe policies themselves, not growing crime rates, were the main cause of increased incarceration eventually led to a surge of interest in taking a more rehabilitative, pragmatic, and cooperative approach to dealing with criminal offenders. The Punishment Imperative cautions that the legacy of the grand experiment of the past forty years will be difficult to escape. However, the authors suggest that the United States now stands at the threshold of a new era in penal policy, and they offer several practical and pragmatic policy solutions to changing the criminal justice system's approach to punishment. Part historical study, part forward-looking policy analysis, The Punishment Imperative is a compelling study of a generation of crime and punishment in America. Todd R. Clear is Dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He is the author of Imprisoning Communities and What Is Community Justice? and the founding editor of the journal Criminology & Public Policy.

This book tells a story of successful prison reform that brought the recidivism rate of prisoners down from 44% to 24%. In the process of this reform, the entire Prison Service was transformed from a custody focused mindset to a rehabilitation centred culture. This change was wrought despite the lack of enthusiasm of the then political leadership.The author describes his personal role in the reform effort, the methodology used to engender change in organizational culture and the struggles for the soul of the prison service and the hearts and minds of all those involved. These include organizations involved in the aftercare of ex-offenders, volunteers who came forward to assist in the efforts and the families and employers of offenders and ex-offenders. The journey ends with the Yellow Ribbon Project that now embodies the rehabilitative efforts for ex-offenders.The Making of Captains of Lives is a personal account of a public sector leader who has helped built a highly efficient prison system in Singapore, providing a strong case study for successful change management and public sector leadership. It will encourage the hearts of all those civil servants who believe in serving their nations and societies by devoting themselves to a worthy cause in their day-to-day work.

Crime and Intelligence Analysis: An Integrated Real-Time Approach, 2nd Edition, covers everything crime analysts and tactical analysts need to know to be successful. Providing an overview of the criminal justice system as well as the more fundamental areas of crime analysis, the book enables students and law enforcement personnel to gain a better understanding of criminal behavior, learn the basics of conducting temporal analysis of crime patterns, use spatial analysis to better understand crime, apply research methods to crime analysis, and more successfully evaluate data and information to help predict criminal offending and solve criminal cases. A new chapter provides expert advice about terrorist threats and threat assessment. Criminal justice and police academy students, as well as civilians, sworn officers, and administrators, can build the skills to be credible crime analysts who play a critical role in the daily operations of law enforcement.

This book brings together internationally renowned academics and professionals from a variety of disciplines who, in a variety of ways, seek to understand the legal, conceptual and practical consequences of parental imprisonment through a children's rights lens. Children whose parents have been incarcerated are often referred to as "invisible victims of crime and the penal system." It is well accepted that the imprisonment of a parent, even for a short period of time, not only negatively affects the lives of children but it can also result in a gross violation of their fundamental human rights, such as the right of access to their parent and the right to have an input into decision-making processes affecting them, the outcomes of which will without doubt affect the life of the child concerned. This collection foregrounds the voice of these children as it explores transdisciplinary boundaries and examines the practice and development of the rights of both children and their families within the wider dynamic of criminal justice and penology practice. The text is divided into three parts which are dedicated to 1) hearing the voices of children with parents in prison, 2) understanding to what extent children's rights informs prison policy, and 3) demonstrating how law in the form of children's rights can help frame both court sentencing and prison practice in a way that minimises the harm that contact with the prison system can cause. The research drawn upon in this book has been conducted in a number of European countries and demonstrates both good and bad practice as far as the implementation of children's rights is concerned in the context of parental incarceration. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of law, children's rights, criminology, sociology, social work, psychology, penology and all those interested in, and working towards, protecting the rights of children who have a parent in prison.

Murder Stories engages with the current theoretical debate in death penalty research on the role of cultural commitments to 'American' ideologies in the retention of capital punishment. The central aim of the study is to illuminate the elusive yet powerful role of ideology in legal discourses. Through analyzing the content and processes of death penalty narratives, this research illuminates the covert life of 'the American Creed,' (a nexus of ideologies-liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez faire-said to be unique to the United States) in the law. Murder Stories draws on the entire record of California death sentence resulting trials from three large and diverse California counties for the years 1996 - 2004, as well as interviews with 26 capital caseworkers (attorneys, judges, and investigators) from the same counties. Employing the theoretical framework proposed by Ewick and Silbey (1995) to study hegemonic and subversive narratives, and also the ethnographic approach advocated by Amsterdam and Hertz (1992) to study the producers and processes of constructing legal narratives, this book traces the ideological content carried within the stories told by everyday practitioners of capital punishment by investigating the content, process, and ideological implications of these narratives. The central theoretical finding is that the narratives constructed by both prosecutors and defenders tend to instantiate rather than subvert the ideological tenets of the American Creed.

In many countries camera surveillance has become commonplace, and ordinary citizens and consumers are increasingly aware that they are under surveillance in everyday life. Camera surveillance is typically perceived as the archetype of contemporary surveillance technologies and processes. While there is sometimes fierce debate about their introduction, many others take the cameras for granted or even applaud their deployment. Yet what the presence of surveillance cameras actually achieves is still very much in question. International evidence shows that they have very little effect in deterring crime and in 'making people feel safer', but they do serve to place certain groups under greater official scrutiny and to extend the reach of today's 'surveillance society'. Eyes Everywhere provides the first international perspective on the development of camera surveillance. It scrutinizes the quiet but massive expansion of camera surveillance around the world in recent years, focusing especially on Canada, the UK and the USA but also including less-debated but important contexts such as Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey. Containing both broad overviews and illuminating case-studies, including cameras in taxi-cabs and at mega-events such as the Olympics, the book offers a valuable oversight on the status of camera surveillance in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The book will be fascinating reading for students and scholars of camera surveillance as well as policy makers and practitioners from the police, chambers of commerce, private security firms and privacy- and data-protection agencies.

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.

In many countries camera surveillance has become commonplace, and ordinary citizens and consumers are increasingly aware that they are under surveillance in everyday life. Camera surveillance is typically perceived as the archetype of contemporary surveillance technologies and processes. While there is sometimes fierce debate about their introduction, many others take the cameras for granted or even applaud their deployment. Yet what the presence of surveillance cameras actually achieves is still very much in question. International evidence shows that they have very little effect in deterring crime and in 'making people feel safer', but they do serve to place certain groups under greater official scrutiny and to extend the reach of today's 'surveillance society'. Eyes Everywhere provides the first international perspective on the development of camera surveillance. It scrutinizes the quiet but massive expansion of camera surveillance around the world in recent years, focusing especially on Canada, the UK and the USA but also including less-debated but important contexts such as Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey. Containing both broad overviews and illuminating case-studies, including cameras in taxi-cabs and at mega-events such as the Olympics, the book offers a valuable oversight on the status of camera surveillance in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The book will be fascinating reading for students and scholars of camera surveillance as well as policy makers and practitioners from the police, chambers of commerce, private security firms and privacy- and data-protection agencies.

This book brings to life the experiences of children affected by maternal imprisonment, and provides unique, in-depth analysis of judicial thinking on this issue. It explores the experiences of children whose mothers are sentenced to imprisonment in England and Wales and contrasts their state-sanctioned separation from their mothers in the criminal courts (where the court may not even be aware of the existence of a child) to the state-sanctioned separation of children from their parents in the family courts, where the child has legal representation and their best interests are the court's paramount consideration. Drawing on detailed empirical research with children, caregivers, and Crown Court judiciary, Maternal Sentencing and the Rights of the Child brings together relevant literature on law, criminology, and human rights to provide insight into the reasons for the differentiated treatment and its implications for children, their caregivers, and wider society.

- explores education in a prison setting from the perspective of the learners themselves. - examines how prisoners conceive their experiences in their own words. - adds further weight to existing 'beyond employability' discourse, which looks at 'other' or 'soft' outcomes of educational experiences in the prison setting.

This volume provides an important and exciting contribution to the knowledge on punishment across Europe. Over the past decade, punitiveness has been studied through analyses of 'increased' or 'new' forms of punishment in western countries. Comparative studies on the other hand have illustrated important differences in levels of punitiveness between these countries and have tried to explain these differences by looking at risk and protective factors. Covering both quantitative and qualitative dimensions, this book focuses on mechanisms interacting with levels of punitiveness that seem to allow room for less punitive (political) choices, especially within a European context: social policies, human rights and a balanced approach to victim rights and public opinion in constitutional democracies. The book is split into three sections: Punishment and Welfare. Chapters look into possible lessons to be learned from characteristics and developments in Scandinavian and some Continental European countries. Punishment and Human Rights. Contributions analyze how human rights in Europe can and do act as a shield against - but sometimes also as a possible motor for - criminalization and penalization. Punishment and Democracy. The increased political attention to victims' rights and interests and to public opinion surveys in European democracies is discussed as a possible risk for enhanced levels of punitiveness in penal policies and evaluated against the background of research evidence about the wishes and expectations of victims of crime and the ambivalence and 'polycentric consistency' of public opinion formations about crime and punishments. This book will be a valuable addition to the literature in this field and will be of interest to students, scholars and policy officials across Europe and elsewhere.

This volume provides an important and exciting contribution to the knowledge on punishment across Europe. Over the past decade, punitiveness has been studied through analyses of 'increased' or 'new' forms of punishment in western countries. Comparative studies on the other hand have illustrated important differences in levels of punitiveness between these countries and have tried to explain these differences by looking at risk and protective factors. Covering both quantitative and qualitative dimensions, this book focuses on mechanisms interacting with levels of punitiveness that seem to allow room for less punitive (political) choices, especially within a European context: social policies, human rights and a balanced approach to victim rights and public opinion in constitutional democracies. The book is split into three sections: Punishment and Welfare. Chapters look into possible lessons to be learned from characteristics and developments in Scandinavian and some Continental European countries. Punishment and Human Rights.Contributions analyze how human rights in Europe can and do act as a shield against -- but sometimes also as a possible motor for -- criminalization and penalization. Punishment and Democracy. The increased political attention to victims' rights and interests and to public opinion surveys in European democracies is discussed as a possible risk for enhanced levels of punitiveness in penal policies and evaluated against the background of research evidence about the wishes and expectations of victims of crime and the ambivalence and 'polycentric consistency' of public opinion formations about crime and punishments. This book will be a valuable addition to the literature in this field and will be of interest to students, scholars and policy officials across Europe and elsewhere.

This book focuses on the relationship between public morality and personal action in the American political community. It emphasizes the responsibilities of citizens and government to find and confirm truth, looking to specific sources: religious scripture and empirical events. Recognizing that we have a natural preference for distraction and distance from both sources of truth, Slack uses qualitative, open-ended interviews and direct observation to uncover the intimate consequences of life-taking in open societies.

Abortion and murder/capital punishment are instances in which there is a sequence of events that result in life-taking. The act of murder denies the sanctity of life of someone else. Abortion and capital punishment also deny the sanctity of the lives of others. The intimacy of life-taking is not typically acknowledged or remains hidden. This makes it difficult to assess the consequences for victims, survivors, and the political community as a whole. As a result, there is only a tenuous link between public actions that question the sanctity of human life and the moral compass professed by the American democracy.

The volume presumes a theocentric foundation envisioned by the American Founders. It explores the model's first source of truth, biblical scripture, as it applies to the public actions of murder, abortion, and capital punishment. Then it investigates the intimate reality of these acts. These realities are examined in a variety of settings, resulting in a mosaic pattern of public action about capital punishment and abortion. Slack underscores the importance of government's role of providing outward justice, as well as the citizen's responsibility to be supportive of government tasks in order to reconcile the reality of life-taking with the moral compass professed in the American political community.

In the growing field of comparative criminal justice, the Nordic countries are regularly used as exceptions to the global move towards growing rates of imprisonment and tougher, less welfare-oriented crime-control policies.

Why are the Nordic penal institutions viewed as so different from a non-Nordic vantage point? Are Nordic prisons and penal policies in fact positive exceptions to the general rule? If they are, what exactly are the exceptional qualities, and why are the Nordic societies lucky enough to have them? Are there important overlooked examples of Nordic bad practice in the penal area? Could there be a specifically Nordic way of doing prison research, contributing to the gap between internal and external perspectives?

In considering among others the above questions, this book explores and discusses the Nordic jurisdictions as contexts for the specific penal policies and practices that may or may not be described as exceptional.

Written by leading prison scholars from the Nordic countries as well as selected researchers from the English-speaking world looking in, this book will be particularly useful for students of criminology and practitioners across the Nordic countries, but also of relevance in a wider geographical context.

Millions in our nation are under some type of judicial sanction, with some individuals behind bars but the majority serving their sentences while living and working among us. Introduction to Corrections examines predominant issues related to the system of administering to offenders in the United States. Written in a simple, concise style and enhanced with discussion questions and a list of key terms in each chapter, this volume begins with an overview of the system and a historical review and then focuses on select issues, including: Sentencing goals and rationales, and types of sentencing Noncustodial supervision, including probation, electronic monitoring, home confinement, halfway houses, and offender registration Parole and postconfinement release Jail, prison, and jurisdictional differences in correction systems Challenges faced by corrections personnel, including overcrowding, health issues, sexual assault in institutions, and prison gangs Constitutional challenges to inmate controls Issues related to victims' rights, including federal and state funds and notification programs Correctional counseling perspectives and prevailing sociological theories Controversies surrounding capital punishment in the United States Juvenile corrections, including probation, parole, and life sentences for minors The evolution of corrections in the United States has spanned three centuries and has moved from an origin of basic community-based confinement to an extensive system that includes federal, state, local, private, and military facilities and programs. Examining diverse topics relevant to a range of professionals in the corrections community, this book explores the functions of corrections as well as those who serve in the profession.

In the growing field of comparative criminal justice, the Nordic countries are regularly used as exceptions to the global move towards growing rates of imprisonment and tougher, less welfare-oriented crime-control policies.

Why are the Nordic penal institutions viewed as so different from a non-Nordic vantage point? Are Nordic prisons and penal policies in fact positive exceptions to the general rule? If they are, what exactly are the exceptional qualities, and why are the Nordic societies lucky enough to have them? Are there important overlooked examples of Nordic bad practice in the penal area? Could there be a specifically Nordic way of doing prison research, contributing to the gap between internal and external perspectives?

In considering among others the above questions, this book explores and discusses the Nordic jurisdictions as contexts for the specific penal policies and practices that may or may not be described as exceptional.

Written by leading prison scholars from the Nordic countries as well as selected researchers from the English-speaking world looking in, this book will be particularly useful for students of criminology and practitioners across the Nordic countries, but also of relevance in a wider geographical context.

As of 2007, more than 9.25 million people were imprisoned worldwide. Almost half of the persons imprisoned are in the United States, China and Russia. The United States has more persons in prison per capita than any country in the world. Prisons The World Over offers a comprehensive overview of prison demographics and conditions for each of the following countries: United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, South Africa, India, China, Japan, and Australia. The book includes reports on the number of prisoners, the rate per population, the percent of female prisoners, the number of penal institutions and their occupancy level, and the number of privately run prisons Also reported are the offenses for which the inmates are interred, the average length of incarceration, the availability of parole, conditions in the prisons, the availability of educational and work programs, provisions for children of female prisoners, the availability and quality of medical care, the characteristics of the prison staff, the visitation rights of prisoners, and the presence and treatment of political prisoners.

Restorative justice has made significant progress in recent years and now plays an increasingly important role in and alongside the criminal justice systems of a number of countries in different parts of the world. In many cases, however, successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses have not been evaluated sufficiently systematically and comprehensively, and it has been difficult to gain an accurate picture of its implementation and the lessons to be drawn from this. Restorative Justice in Practice addresses this need, analyzing the results of the implementation of three restorative justice schemes in England and Wales in the largest and most complete trial of restorative justice with adult offenders worldwide. It aims to bring out the practicalities of setting up and running restorative justice schemes in connection with criminal justice, the costs of doing so and the key professional and ethical issues involved. At the same time the book situates these findings within the growing international academic and policy debates about restorative justice, addressing a number of key issues for criminal justice and penology, including: how far victim expectations of justice are and can be met by restorative justice aligned with criminal justice whether 'community' is involved in restorative justice for adult offenders and how this relates to social capital how far restorative justice events relate to processes of desistance (giving up crime), promote reductions in reoffending and link to resettlement what stages of criminal justice may be most suitable for restorative justice and how this relates to victim and offender needs the usefulness of conferencing and mediation as forms of restorative justice with adults. Restorative Justice in Practice will be essential reading for both students and practitioners, and a key contribution to the restorative justice debate.

Offender profiling is now viewed as an integral part of serious crime investigations by many law enforcement agencies across the world and continues to attract a high public and media profile. Despite almost three decades of research and developments in the field, the public impression of offender profiling is still influenced by misleading media portrayals, which fail to acknowledge the significant developments in theory, research and practice. This book is the only book on the market to illustrate in detail the actual practice of Behavioural Investigative Advice, its diversity in application, the underpinning academic literature and the remaining research questions and recommendations. Focussing on the professionalization of this developing discipline, it provides a fascinating insight into the modern role of a Behavioural Investigative Adviser, dispelling many of the myths still associated with offender profiling, and illustrating the continued aspiration of contemporary practitioners to adhere to the highest scientific standards. It provides a journey through the significant efforts to professionalise both the process and product of Behavioural Investigative Advice, supported by relevant theoretical, methodological and operational considerations. Edited by and containing contributions from some of the most respected and experienced researchers and practitioners working today, this book will be essential reading for Police Officers, researchers, students and anyone with an interest in the professionalization and contemporary contribution of forensic psychology to 21st century criminal investigation.

"Supermax" prisons, conceived by the United States in the early 1980s, are typically reserved for convicted political criminals such as terrorists and spies and for other inmates who are considered to pose a serious ongoing threat to the wider community, to the security of correctional institutions, or to the safety of other inmates. Prisoners are usually restricted to their cells for up to twenty-three hours a day and typically have minimal contact with other inmates and correctional staff. Not only does the Federal Bureau of Prisons operate one of these facilities, but almost every state has either a supermax wing or stand-alone supermax prison. The Globalization of Supermax Prisons examines why nine advanced industrialized countries have adopted the supermax prototype, paying particular attention to the economic, social, and political processes that have affected each state. Featuring essays that look at the U.S.-run prisons of Abu Ghraib and Guantanemo, this collection seeks to determine if the American model is the basis for the establishment of these facilities and considers such issues as the support or opposition to the building of a supermax and why opposition efforts failed; the allegation of human rights abuses within these prisons; and the extent to which the decision to build a supermax was influenced by developments in the United States. Additionally, contributors address such domestic matters as the role of crime rates, media sensationalism, and terrorism in each country's decision to build a supermax prison.