Exploring the first purpose-built prison community of its kind, the HMP Dovegate Therapeutic Community, this book provides the most comprehensive coverage of this research to date, following the progress of individual prisoners' through therapy and highlighting the key essentials for prisoners to address their motivations and criminal behaviour.

'A stunning debut . . . I loved every page' CLARE MACKINTOSH 'I loved this book. Its witchy, and sweaty and unputdownable. It takes a traditional thriller structure and turns it on it's head' DAISY JOHNSON 'Refreshing, heartbreaking and magical . . . Every mother should read this' CATH WEEKS 'A riveting and utterly convincing story, that shines a light on the shadows between right and wrong. A sensitive and thought-provoking into the lives of women' KAREN MILLWARD HARGRAVE THE BATTLE ON THE INSIDE IS JUST THE BEGINNING Dani hasn't had an easy life. She's made some bad choices and now she's paying the ultimate price; prison. With her young daughter Bethany, growing up in foster care, Dani is determined to be free and reunited with her. There's only one problem; Dani can't stay out of trouble. Dani's new cellmate Martha is quiet and unassuming. There's something about her that doesn't add up. When Martha offers Dani one last chance at freedom, she doesn't hesitate. Everything she wants is on the outside, but Dani is stuck on the inside. Is it possible to break out when everyone is trying to keep you in . . .

Taken over the course of more than a year of exclusive access, this work applies large format still life photography to the context of a unique prison community, E Wing at Kingston Prison in Portsmouth. For eight years this was Britain's only wing dedicated to holding elderly lifers: murderers, rapists, paedophiles and other violent criminals aged from their late 50s to over 80 years old. "Still Life: Killing Time", is not simply a reportage about a particular prison. Elements of metaphor, abstraction and documentary explore the experience of long term incarceration and the passage of time, and touch on how ageing and physical decline affect the prison environment. The claustrophobia of these close up, deliberate and regular compositions reflects both the nature of the place and the experience of working in E Wing.The recurring motifs - bars, squares, boxes, grids - show the segmentation and ordering of time and space that is fundamental to prison life, while the details of the inmates' possessions, notice-boards, walls, tables and bedsides suggest their state of mind and how they adapt to long term incarceration and getting old in an institution.

The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic expanses, included varied institutions, and brought together inmates from all the Soviet Union's ethnicities, professions, and social classes? Drawing on a massive body of documentary evidence, Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies explores the Soviet penal system from various disciplinary perspectives. Divided into three sections, the collection first considers "identities"-the lived experiences of contingents of detainees who have rarely figured in Gulag histories to date, such as common criminals and clerics. The second section surveys "sources" to explore the ways new research methods can revolutionize our understanding of the system. The third section studies "legacies" to reveal the aftermath of the Gulag, including the folk beliefs and traditions it has inspired and the museums built to memorialize it. While all the chapters respond to one another, each section also concludes with a reaction by a leading researcher: geographer Judith Pallot, historian Lynne Viola, and cultural historian and literary scholar Alexander Etkind. Moving away from grand metaphorical or theoretical models, Rethinking the Gulag instead unearths the complexities and nuances of experience that represent a primary focus in the new wave of Gulag studies.

What happens inside Latin American prisons? How does the social organisation of prisoners relate to the political structures beyond the walls? Is it possible to resist corrupt penal regimes? In Prison Writing of Latin America, Joey Whitfield turns to those best placed to answer these questions: people who have been imprisoned themselves. Drawing on a century of material produced by Latin American prisoners from Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, Whitfield weaves readings of novels, memoirs and testimonial texts with social and political analysis. Rather than distinguishing between dictatorial and democratic periods of government, he shows that from the point of view of the prisoner, all states are authoritarian in nature. In the face of oppression, however, prisoners both 'political' and 'criminal' have found ways not only to resist but also to create alternative communities both real and imagined, sometimes in collaboration with each other.

Examining works by some of the most famous prisoners from the early modern period including Thomas More, Lady Jane Grey and Thomas Wyatt, Ruth Ahnert presents the first major study of prison literature dating from this era. She argues that the English Reformation established the prison as an influential literary sphere. In the previous centuries we find only isolated examples of prison writings, but the religious and political instability of the Tudor reigns provided the conditions for the practice to thrive. This book shows the wide variety of genres that prisoners wrote, and it explores the subtle tricks they employed in order to appropriate the site of the prison for their own agendas. Ahnert charts the spreading influence of such works beyond the prison cell, tracing the textual communities they constructed, and the ways in which writings were smuggled out of prison and then disseminated through script and print.

"Call me what you want--corrections officer, C.O., guard, jailcop, turnkey--I helped keep people there against their will. For this, the jail rewarded me with food." When Ben Langston took a job at the State Correctional Institute at Rockview, it was because there were few other options. At his previous job--putting labels on water bottles--he did not have cups of human waste thrown in his face. He did not have to finger sweaty armpits in search of weapons. There were no threats against his life. But the jail paid better. Jail Speak is a memoir written from a guard's perspective. It's about the grind, about dehumanization, drama, punishment, and the cycles of harm perpetrated by the prison industry. It's about masculinity and conformity and emotional detachment. It's a look at the inside that you didn't want to know about, and it's for mature audiences only. Know your limits.

This book distills thirty years of research on the impacts of jail and prison environments. The research program began with evaluations of new jails that were created by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which had a novel design intended to provide a nontraditional and safe environment for pretrial inmates, and documented the stunning success of these jails in reducing tension and violence. This book uses assessments of this new model as a basis for considering the nature of environment and behavior in correctional settings, and more broadly in all human settings. It provides a critical review of research on jail environments and of specific issues critical to the way they are experienced and places them in historical and theoretical context. It presents a contextual model for the way environment influences the chance of violence.

The United States arrests, punishes, and locks up far more people-both juveniles and adults-than any other democratic country in the world. Indeed, despite the fact that the U.S holds 5 percent of the world's population, it contains 25 percent of its prisoners. These individuals not only constitute a disproportionately large group, but also suffer decreased employment opportunities and housing discrimination after their release, making a return to prison all the more likely. Headlines of articles in US media allude to "Prison Without Punishment" in Germany and "Radical Humaneness" in Norway, but why are prison conditions in those countries so notably less bleak than those here? And when recidivism rates are lower in countries with these kinder, gentler prisons than in America, why do prisons here remain so harsh? In Unusually Cruel, Mark Morje Howard argues that the United States' prison system is exceptional-in a truly shameful way. Due to its exceptional nature, most scholars have focused on the internal dynamics that have produced the US' unusually large and severe prison system. Howard conducts a comparative analysis as a corrective to this myopia, demonstrating just how far the US lies outside of the norm of established democracies in this regard. He uses a new methodology in order to put American incarceration rates in perspective. The book compares data from 21 countries-all advanced industrialized societies, liberal democracies, and OECD members-ultimately showing that the US holds more than three times the number of incarcerated people of its closest competitor, New Zealand. This method reveals interesting findings, including that, although the female incarceration rate is only a fraction of the male incarceration in America, the US imprisons more than five times as many women as any other comparable country. And strikingly, while crime rates are roughly equal among countries in the western world, the US incarceration rate is seven times the average rate of European countries. Howard shows that in every measure of punitiveness-including policing, sentencing, prison conditions, and rehabilitation-US policies are harsher, producing worse individual outcomes and lower public safety, than those of any comparable country. The book does not merely paint a grim picture, however. Unusually Cruel also identifies solutions that are less punishing and more productive, arguing that, by learning from models that have worked elsewhere, the US can get out of its criminal justice quagmire.

This book presents the first-ever English translation of the Prison Narratives written by the seventeenth-century French mystic and Quietist, Jeanne Guyon (1648-1717). Although she was marginalized and ignored by French historians for two centuries after her death, Guyon became a major figure in the development of transatlantic Protestant spirituality in the eighteenth century, and her writings have remained popular among English-speaking audiences.
Guyon's narrative describes her confinement between 1695 and 1703 in various prisons, including the dreaded Bastille. It also maps, in moving and unforgettable detail, the political and religious hegemony that sought to destroy her reputation and erase her from history. Although she published an autobiography in 1720, Guyon kept the part that described her experience in prison private and the text remained undiscovered for almost three centuries - until an archival version was found and published in 1992 under the title Recits de Captivite (Prison Narratives).
Mourad and Guenin-Lelle provide here not only a translation of the full Narratives but a thorough introduction, including a brief biography of Guyon, an analysis of the Quietist Affair (the religious and political conflict responsible for her persecution), and a summary of the key historical, literary, and theological aspects of Guyon's prison writings. The introduction represents the most detailed examination of the Prison Narratives presently available in either English or French.
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This book is a thoroughly updated version of the popular first edition of The Prison Officer. It incorporates the significant increase in knowledge about the work of prison officer since the first edition was published and provides a live account of prison work and ways of understanding the role of the prison officer in the late-modern context.

Few detailed narratives exist of prison work and the sort of role the prison officer occupies; this book addresses the gap. Using a range of quantitative and qualitative data and drawing on available theoretical literature it explores the role of the prison officer in an appreciative way, taking into account the little-discussed issues of power and discretion.

It provides a single accessible guide to the world and work of the prison officer, looking in detail at the present role of the prison officer in Britain and demonstrating the centrality of staff-prisoner relationships to every operation carried out by officers.

This book will be of relevance to anyone with an interest in the work of a prison officer; students and others looking for an introductory survey of the literature and essential reading for any established and aspiring officers.

Kaneko Fumiko (1903-1926) wrote this memoir while in prison after being convicted of plotting to assassinate the Japanese emperor. Despite an early life of misery, deprivation, and hardship, she grew up to be a strong and independent young woman. When she moved to Tokyo in 1920, she gravitated to left-wing groups and eventually joined with the Korean nihilist Pak Yeol to form a two-person nihilist organization. Two days after the Great Tokyo Earthquake, in a general wave of anti-leftist and anti-Korean hysteria, the authorities arrested the pair and charged them with high treason. Defiant to the end (she hanged herself in prison on July 23, 1926), Kaneko Fumiko wrote this memoir as an indictment of the society that oppressed her, the family that abused and neglected her, and the imperial system that drove her to her death.

A look at the contemporary crisis in U.S. jails with recommendations for improving and protecting the dignity of inmates Twelve million Americans go through the U.S. jail system on an annual basis. Jails, which differ significantly from prisons, are designed to house inmates for short amounts of time, and are often occupied by large populations of legally innocent people waiting for a trial. Jails often have deplorable sanitary conditions, and there are countless records of inmates being brutalized by staff and other inmates while in custody. Local municipalities use jails to institutionalize those whom they perceive to be a threat, so hundreds of thousands of inmates suffer from mental illness. People abandoned by families or lacking health insurance, or those who cannot afford bail, often cycle in and out of jails. In America's Jails, Derek Jeffreys draws on sociology, philosophy, history, and his personal experience volunteering in jails and prisons to provide an understanding of the jail experience from the inmates' perspective, focusing on the stigma that surrounds incarceration. Using his research at Cook County Jail, the nation's largest single-site jail, Jeffreys attests that jail inmates possess an inherent dignity that should govern how we treat them. Ultimately, fundamental changes in the U.S. jail system are necessary and America's Jails provides specific policy recommendations for changing its poor conditions. Highlighting the experiences of inmates themselves, America's Jails aims to shift public perception and understanding of jail inmates to center their inherent dignity and help eliminate the stigma attached to their incarceration.

Despite the fact that 160,000 people are locked up in our federal correctional facilities, practical information about the federal prison system remains difficult to locate. While some information may be found scattered on the Internet, in directions given at court, or through shared personal experience, there is no single source available that is a collection of all available information. The U.S. Federal Prison System is the first comprehensive reference work that includes official prison policies, first-person accounts from prisoners, and information about each federal facility.

The book is organized into two parts. Part I is an introduction to federal prison facilities, including key statistics and "views from inside" provided by inmates of federal prisons. Part II is a look at the Federal Bureau of Prisons policies on various matters such as discipline, education, visits, and religious practices. The book also contains valuable Appendices that give a thorough listing and description of all Federal prison facilities, as well as the services and charities available to prisoners and their families. With the publication of this book there will finally be an up-to-date, comprehensive reference on the U.S. federal prisons that will prove to be of lasting value to families of inmates, researchers, and the general public.

• Comprehensive and up-to-date information?with a thorough overview of both prison policies and the federal facilities themselves
• Photos of selected prisons
• Part II is consistently organized with historical background information leading up to an account of the current policies. The specific federal rules and regulations governing the policies conclude each topical discussion.
• Appendix A is the first comprehensive listing of every Federal prison in the U.S., complete with facility details and service information
• Commentary from prisoners?first-person accounts take the reader behind the walls

James Crosbie was Britain's most wanted man in 1974. With a successful business and an enviable lifestyle, he seemed to have everything going for him - until he got bored with his life and turned to armed robbery. He ended up in Peterhead Prison, doing time with some of the hardest, and funniest, men in crime. Peterhead Porridge is a remarkable account of the people he met. People like The Saughton Harrier who escaped from prison by dressing up as a runner, complete with running vest and number, and joining in as a race went by. And another escapee, Tweety Pie, was so-called because, when he flew the coop, he had a nasty case of jaundice. Then there's Square Go, the prison warder who was always up for a fight. And discover the practical jokes that were the trademark of Glasgow's Godfather Arthur Thompson and what really happened when someone poured their porridge over his head in the breakfast queue. Funny, sad and at times barely believable, Peterhead Porridge is a unique insight into the other side of prison life.

When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration-to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen's work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America. From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America's largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the role of the prison as a source of political ideas and site of political engagement, as well as in the prisoner's quest for citizenship. The rising number of prisoners has increased fiscal burdens, which has meant that imprisonment has become a more important political issue. There is also greater interest in the prison as a site of political activism and in the generation of radical political ideas within the prison context and the formation of political networks within prison which extend beyond the prison walls. This book considers the prison as a site of political protest, discusses the quest for citizenship and the denial or negation of citizenship in prison, examines the discovery of politics in prison and the role of the prison in increasing political awareness, explores the treatment of political prisoners and reflects on the prisoner as a political problem for politicians negotiating pressures from the media and the public when addressing prisoners' demands. Drawing on a range of contemporary and historical topics such as prison riots, radicalisation and the denial of voting rights, and including discussion of cases from the UK, US and Russia, this book examines the prison as a political institution and as a site of both politicisation and political protest. This book will be of interest to students and academics engaged with prisons, penology, punishment and corrections.

This book explores the growing importance of prisons, both lay and ecclesiastical, in western Europe between 1000 and 1300. It attempts to explain what captors hoped to achieve by restricting the liberty of others, the means of confinement available to them, and why there was an increasingly close link between captivity and suspected criminal activity. It discusses conditions within prisons, the means of release open to some captives, and writing in or about prison.

Imprisonment has become big business in the United States. Using a "history of ideas" approach, this book examines the cultural underpinnings of prisons in the United States and explores how shared ideas about imprisonment evolve into a complex, loosely connected nationwide system of prisons that keeps enough persons to populate a small nation behind bars, razor wire and electrified fences. Tracing both the history of the prison and the very idea of imprisonment in the United States, this book provides students with a critical overview of American prisons and considers their past, their present and directions for the future. Topics covered include: * a history of imprisonment in America from 1600 to the present day; * the twentieth-century prison building binge; * the relationship between U.S. prisons and the private sector; * a critical account of capital punishment; * less-visible prison minorities, including women, children and the elderly; and * sex, violence and disease in prison. This comprehensive book is essential reading for advanced courses on corrections and correctional management and offers a compelling and provocative analysis of the realities of American penal culture from past to present. It is perfect reading for students of criminal justice, corrections, penology and the sociology of punishment.

Shadowboxing is an explosive analysis of the history and practice of black feminisms. Joy James charts new territory by synthesizing theories of social movements with cultural and identity politics. She brings into the spotlight images of black female agency and intellectualism in radical and anti-radical political contexts, challenging us to rethink our understanding of the changing African presence in American culture. From a comparative look at Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur to analyses of the black woman in white cinema and the black man in feminist coalitions, she focuses attention on the invisible or the forgotten. James convincingly demonstrates how images of powerful women are either consigned to oblivion or transformed into icons robbed of intellectual power. Shadowboxing honors and analyzes the work of black activists and intellectuals and redefines the sharp divide between intellectual work and political movements.

This study explores the pre-history of Irish convict transportation to New South Wales which began with the Queen in April 1791. It traces earlier attempts to revive the trans-Atlantic convict trade and the frustrated efforts by Irish authorities to join in the Botany Bay scheme after 1786. The nine Irish shipments to North America and the West Indies are described in detail for the first time, including the dramatic outcomes in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and the Leeward Islands which eventually forced the Home Office to find space for Irish convicts on the Third Fleet. These events are related against the background of Dublin's burgeoning crime rate in the 1780s, the critical insecurity of its prison system and the troubled political relationship between Ireland and Britain.

A classic memoir of prison breaks and adventure -- a bestselling phenomenon of the 1960s. Condemned for a murder he had not committed, Henri Charriere (nicknamed Papillon) was sent to the penal colony of French Guiana.

Forty-two days after his arrival he made his first break, travelling a thousand gruelling miles in an open boat. Recaptured, he went into solitary confinement and was sent eventually to Devil's Island, a hell-hole of disease and brutality. No one had ever escaped from this notorious prison -- no one until Papillon took to the shark-infested sea supported only by a makeshift coconut-sack raft. In thirteen years he made nine daring escapes, living through many fantastic adventures while on the run -- including a sojourn with South American Indians whose women Papillon found welcomely free of European restraints!

Papillon is filled with tension, adventure and high excitement. It is also one of the most vivid stories of human endurance ever written. Henri Charriere died in 1973 at the age of 66.

More than two million people are incarcerated in America's prisons - one in nine is serving a life sentence. Mass long-term imprisonment devours state budgets, adversely affects community well-being and skews our collective moral compass. This study examines the human costs of keeping the convicted out of sight, out of mind. Beginning in 1994, the author began recording the personal stories of 50 incarcerated felons - 17 of them were still in prison 20 years later. The men candidly discuss what it means to commit a serious crime and to be confined for perhaps the remainder of their lives. Their stories are balanced by conversations with correctional officers, prison administrators, chaplains and parole board members. The author identifies circumstances that ruin some prisoners and save others and presents insights for possible improvements in the criminal justice system.