The Welsh criminal justice system is unique. While the country has its own devolved government and parliament, there is no Welsh equivalent of the Scottish or Northern Irish justice systems. Rather, the writ of England and Wales criminal justice institutions continues to run. Yet the extensive responsibilities of Wales's devolved institutions ensure that they necessarily play a significant role in criminal justice. As a result, the Welsh criminal justice system operates across a 'jagged edge' of devolved and reserved powers and responsibilities. This book provides the first academic account of this system. It demonstrates not only that Wales has some of the worst criminal justice outcomes in western Europe, but that even if the will existed to try to address these problems, the current constitutional underpinnings of the Welsh criminal justice system would make it nigh-on impossible. Based on official data and in-depth interviews, this is an urgent and challenging book, required reading for anyone interested in Welsh politics and society.

Long-term prisoners need to be given the space to reflect, and grow. This ground-breaking study found that engaging prisoners in philosophy education enabled them to think about some of the 'big' questions in life and as a result to see themselves and others differently. Using the prisoners' own words, Szifris shows the importance of this type of education for growth and development. She demonstrates how the philosophical dialogue led to a form of community which provided a space for self-reflection, pro-social interaction and communal exploration of ideas, which could have long-term positive consequences.

San Pedro is Bolivia's most notorious prison. Small-time drug smuggler Thomas McFadden found himself on the inside. Marching Powder is the story of how he navigated this dark world of gangs, drugs and corruption to come out on top. Thomas found himself in a bizarre world, the prison reflecting all that is wrong with South American society. Prisoners have to pay an entrance fee and buy their own cells (the alternative is to sleep outside and die of exposure), prisoners' wives and children often live inside too, high quality cocaine is manufactured and sold from the prison. Thomas ended up making a living by giving backpackers tours of the prison - he became a fixture on the backpacking circuit and was named in the Lonely Planet guide to Bolivia. When he was told that for a bribe of $5000 his sentence could be overturned, it was the many backpackers who'd passed through who sent him the money. Written by lawyer Rusty Young, Marching Powder - sometimes shocking, sometimes funny - is a riveting story of survival.

Americans are frustrated with prisons. They recognize the need for these institutions, but at the same time, they worry about whether the money used to build and maintain them is well spent. Older prisons are dirty, disgusting, and dangerous, but even newer facilities come up lacking in terms of offering inmates opportunities to take responsibility for their crimes, support their loved ones, further their education, learn job skills, and develop positive relationships in healthy, safe, respectful communities. This book provides insight into the philosophy of restorative justice, which aims to develop ways we can manage our prisons differently to achieve more positive outcomes. Using the case study of an honor dorm in a maximum security prison, the book posits that most of the inmates never learned the basic tools for living life productively and responsibly. They never thought much about their victims or how their actions affected others. They never learned how to get along with others, pick up after themselves, or how to be of service to their fellow man. Swanson uses the writings and reflections of inmates participating in a restorative justice program to demonstrate the challenges and transformative possibilities of this alternative approach to rehabilitation.

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.

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.

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.

The growth of Islam both worldwide and particularly in the United States is especially notable among African-American inmates incarcerated in American state and federal penitentiaries. This growth poses a powerful challenge to American penal philosophy, structured on the ideal of rehabilitating offenders through penance and appropriate penal measures. Islam in American Prisons argues that prisoners converting to Islam seek an alternative form of redemption, one that poses a powerful epistemological as well as ideological challenge to American penology. Meanwhile, following the events of 9/11, some prison inmates have converted to radical anti-Western Islam and have become sympathetic to the goals and tactics of the Al-Qa'ida organization. This new study examines this multifaceted phenomenon and makes a powerful argument for the objective examination of the rehabilitative potentials of faith-based organizations in prisons, including the faith of those who convert to Islam.

John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment a " an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, societya (TM)s purposes of imprisonment, and offendersa (TM) reformability. Through the lifersa (TM) stories, he reveals what happens to prisoners serving very long sentences in correctional facilities and what this should tell us about effective sentencing policy.

Americans are frustrated with prisons. They recognize the need for these institutions, but at the same time, they worry about whether the money used to build and maintain them is well spent. Older prisons are dirty, disgusting, and dangerous, but even newer facilities come up lacking in terms of offering inmates opportunities to take responsibility for their crimes, support their loved ones, further their education, learn job skills, and develop positive relationships in healthy, safe, respectful communities. This book provides insight into the philosophy of restorative justice, which aims to develop ways we can manage our prisons differently to achieve more positive outcomes. Using the case study of an honor dorm in a maximum security prison, the book posits that most of the inmates never learned the basic tools for living life productively and responsibly. They never thought much about their victims or how their actions affected others. They never learned how to get along with others, pick up after themselves, or how to be of service to their fellow man. Swanson uses the writings and reflections of inmates participating in a restorative justice program to demonstrate the challenges and transformative possibilities of this alternative approach to rehabilitation.

Long sentenced young people are a small but significant part of the juvenile prison population. The current approach to young people convicted of serious crime speaks to wider issues in criminal and social justice, including the idealisation of (some) childhoods, processes of racialisation and identity and the sociology of the body. Analysing the relationships between biography, trauma and habitus reveals the ways in which class, racial and legal status are experienced and resisted. Young Men's Experiences of Long-Term Imprisonment: Living Life considers the need for the reinvigoration of prison ethnography and calls for a phenomenological approach to understanding youth crime and punishment. An insightful ethnographic study on imprisoned 15- to 17-year-olds in England, this volume examines how young people experience long-term imprisonment, manage their time and imagine and shape their futures. Drawing on observations, interviews and correspondence, Tynan situates long-term imprisonment of young men within the wider social context of criminal and social justice; and analyses constructs and practices that locate responsibility for crime with individuals and communities. Young Men's Experiences of Long-Term Imprisonment: Living Life will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the sociology of prisons, punishment and youth justice and qualitative research methodology.

Once a prominent radio reporter, Mumia Abu-Jamal is now in a Pennsylvania prison awaiting his state-sactioned execution. In 1982 he was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner after a trial many have criticized as profoundly biased. Live From Death Row is a collection of his prison writings--an impassioned yet unflinching account of the brutalities and humiliations of prison life. It is also a scathing indictment of racism and political bias in the American judicial system that is certain to fuel the controversy surrounding the death penalty and freedom of speech.

This poignant play, written by current and formerly incarcerated authors, uses gripping truths and soulful dialogue to reveal the human cost of America's for-profit justice system. The story follows Omar, pulled back into the prison system after trying to lift his family out of poverty, who struggles to maintain a sense of humanity while fighting to keep his loved ones close. According to NJ.com, "From institutionalized racism to addiction to the prison-industrial complex, this is a play about a great many large, pressing social challenges, but at its core it is a play about one family and its struggles to remain united as their world steadily crumbles. Impactful, warm, and unrelenting, this play that began as an experiment turns out to be an excellent examination of the human cost of a harsh and inhospitable world." All profits from the book will go to a prison re-entry fund run by The Second Presbyterian Church of Elizabeth, New Jersey to help the playwrights secure housing and continue their schooling upon release.

The best-selling bible of the movement to defund the police in an updated edition.

The massive uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020— by some estimates the largest protests in US history—thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefront of international politics. That case had been put persuasively a few years earlier in The End of Policing by Alex Vitale, now a leading figure in the urgent public discussion over policing and racial justice.

The central problem, Vitale demonstrates, is the dramatic expansion of the police role over the last forty years. Drawing on firsthand research from across the globe, he shows how the implementation of alternatives to policing—such as drug legalization, regulation, and harm reduction instead of the policing of drugs—has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice.

This updated edition includes a new introduction that takes stock of the renewed movement to challenge police impunity and shows how we move forward, evaluating protest, policy, and the political situation.

A thoroughly researched pioneering work based on personal interviews with inmates and prison personnel and on data compiled from questionnaires and inmate record files, Women's Prison reveals that homosexual liaisons are the primary foundation of the social structure of female inmates; shows that homosexual behavior can be a superficial kind of adjustment to particular situational privations; amplifies and broadens the application of earlier findings on men's prisons; opens the way for future studies involving the delineation of homosexual roles in the free community.

This study began with both of the authors' interest in gathering data on women in prison to see whether there were female prisoner types consistent with the reported characteristics of male prisoners. Early in the course of this study it became apparent that the most salient distinction to be made among the female inmates was between those who were and those who were not engaged in homosexual behavior in prison, and further, of those who were so involved, between the incumbents of "masculine" and "feminine" roles.

It has become increasingly apparent that prison behavior is rooted in more than just the conditions of confinement. Unlike their male counterparts who establish the so-called inmate code, women prisoners suffer intensely from the loss of affectional relationships and form homosexual liaisons as the primary foundation of their social organization. The great majority of homosexually involved inmates have their first affair in prison, returning to heterosexual roles outside prison.

Women's Prison is a revealing study of social structure and homosexuality for sociologists; of vital interest to social workers, parole officers and chaplains dealing with female inmates as well as penologists and criminologists; and provocative reading for the non-specialist.

David A. Ward is professor of sociology, University of Minnesota. Gene G. Kassebaum is professor of sociology at the American University, Cairo. Both have published widely in professional journals.

This book provides the first systematic study of prison governors, a hidden and powerful, but much neglected, group of criminal justice practitioners. Its focus is on how they carry out their task, how that has changed over time and how their role has evolved. The author, himself a former prison governor, explains how prison governors have changed under external pressures, and examines a number of the factors that have been influential in changing their working environment in particular the changing status of prisoners and the development of the concept of prisoners rights, the increasing scrutiny of the press and politicians, competitive elements introduced by privatization of the penal institutions, and the introduction of risk management approaches. Based on extensive research, including interviews with 42 prison governors, this book also explores a number of important biographical factors. The author describes the demographic characteristics of the sample of governors interviewed, including their social origins, educational and occupational backgrounds, their reasons and motivation for joining the prison service, their career paths, and also explores their values and beliefs. In the light of the findings of this study the author also makes a number of important suggestions for changes that should be made to policy and practice, and explores the implications for how our prisons should be governed in the future.

Power on the Inside is the first book to examine the historical development of prison gangs worldwide, from those that emerged inside mid-nineteenth-century Neapolitan prisons to the new generation of younger inmates challenging the status quo within gang subcultures today. Historian-criminologist Mitchel P. Roth examines prison gangs throughout the world, from the Americas, Oceania, and South Africa to Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond. The book examines the many variables that influence the evolution of prison subcultures, from colonialism and population demographics to prison architecture and staff-prisoner relations. Power on the Inside features eighty historical and contemporary images and will inform professionals in the field as well as general readers who want to know more about the realities of prison gangs today.

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

This book examines how young men between the ages of 18 and 21 make the transition to prison life, and how they adapt practically, socially, and psychologically. Based on extensive research in the UKs Feltham Young Offenders Institution, this book examines in particular the role of social support, both inside and outside prison, in relation to their adaptation, along with the constructs of trust, locus of control, and safety. The book concentrates both on the successful adaptation to prison life and on the experience of individuals who have difficulties in adapting. It pays special attention to those who harm themselves while in prison. Young Men in Prison is the first study to provide an in-depth account of the psycho-social experience of imprisonment for young adults. Understanding this early stage of imprisonment is of major importance to policy makers and practitioners in the light of the fact that up to two-thirds of completed suicides occur within the first month in prison.

This book provides a much-needed sociological account of the social world of the English prison officer, making an original contribution to our understanding of the inner life of prisons in general and the working lives of prison officers in particular. As well as revealing how the job of the prison officer - and of the prison itself - is accomplished on a day-to-day basis, the book explores not only what prison officers do but also how they feel about their work. In focusing on how prison officers feel about their work this book makes a number of interesting revelations - about the essentially domestic nature of much of the work they do, about the degree of emotional labour invested in it and about the performance nature of many of the day-to-day interactions between officers and prisoners. Finally, the book follows the prison officer home after work, showing how the prison can spill over into their home lives and family relationships. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in different types of prisons (including interviews with prison officers' wives and children as well as prison officers themselves), this book will be essential reading for all those with an interest in how prisons and organisations more generally operate in practice.

Prison narratives are an invaluable source for the study of minority positions or discourses of otherness in US culture. Particularly in the discourses of the US criminal justice system, politics and the visual media, criminals are represented as the other, from the perspectives of race, sexuality and moral inferiority. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this compelling study analyzes how American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States. For the first time, this book puts various subgenres of prison narratives into a dialogue in order to demonstrate a polar dichotomy in the institutional and public discourses of criminality. It draws together fascinating materials that have rarely, if ever, received careful attention and examines popular culture to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not.

This book aims to present key aspects of the prison-based bullying research which has taken place over the last few years. It is a field in which there has been considerably increased interest. One of the main features of this book is the recognition that much previous bullying research has been descriptive in nature, with little underlying theory to assist its development as an area of academic interest. In addressing this need this book will serve as an indispensable resource for students, academics and professionals with interests in this field. Chapters in the book address the following areas: need for innovation in prison bullying research, statistics on bullying, combining methods to research prison bullying, bullying behaviour among women in prison, bullying and suicides in prisons, developmental antecedents of prison bullies and/or victims, applying evolutionary theory to prison bullying, applying social problem solving models to prison bullying.

In this unique study, authors Komanduri Murty, Angela Owens, and Ashwin Vyas examine the life histories of Black male prisoners in the U.S. Federal Prison system to determine what patterns of behavior or life experiences influenced or precipitated their involvement in criminal behavior. The authors focus on Black male prisoners, using pre-sentence investigation reports to provide readers with detailed descriptions of prisoner characteristics. Through the use of lengthy interview processes, Murty, Owens, and Vyas investigate the phenomenology of Black male offenders, to give understanding to the circumstances under which their crimes were committed. Their study provides valuable lessons for rehabilitation through deterrence and rational theories of human behavior.

The author's book combines a historical approach to the literature of Freud, Klein and the Post Kleinian development, with demonstrations of the central role of dream analysis. Students and practitioners of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, educationalists, social scientists, doctors, and alll those who value the endeavour to enrich their work w

This book provides a much-needed sociological account of the social world of the English prison officer, making an original contribution to our understanding of the inner life of prisons in general and the working lives of prison officers in particular. As well as revealing how the job of the prison officer - and of the prison itself - is accomplished on a day-to-day basis, the book explores not only what prison officers do but also how they feel about their work. In focusing on how prison officers feel about their work this book makes a number of interesting revelations - about the essentially domestic nature of much of the work they do, about the degree of emotional labour invested in it and about the performance nature of many of the day-to-day interactions between officers and prisoners. Finally, the book follows the prison officer home after work, showing how the prison can spill over into their home lives and family relationships. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in different types of prisons (including interviews with prison officers' wives and children as well as prison officers themselves), this book will be essential reading for all those with an interest in how prisons and organisations more generally operate in practice.