Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them "serve" time. The Cage of Days combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral's field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to prisoners and what prisoners do to time. Carceral and Flaherty consider the connection between the subjective dimensions of time and the existential circumstances of imprisonment. Convicts find that their experience of time has become deeply distorted by the rhythm and routines of prison and by how authorities ensure that an inmate's time is under their control. They become obsessed with the passage of time and preoccupied with regaining temporal autonomy, creating elaborate strategies for modifying their perception of time. To escape the feeling that their lives lack forward momentum, prisoners devise distinctive ways to mark the passage of time, but these tactics can backfire by intensifying their awareness of temporality. Providing rich and nuanced analysis grounded in the distinctive voices of diverse prisoners, The Cage of Days examines how prisons regulate time and how prisoners resist the temporal regime.

Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them "serve" time. The Cage of Days combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral's field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to prisoners and what prisoners do to time. Carceral and Flaherty consider the connection between the subjective dimensions of time and the existential circumstances of imprisonment. Convicts find that their experience of time has become deeply distorted by the rhythm and routines of prison and by how authorities ensure that an inmate's time is under their control. They become obsessed with the passage of time and preoccupied with regaining temporal autonomy, creating elaborate strategies for modifying their perception of time. To escape the feeling that their lives lack forward momentum, prisoners devise distinctive ways to mark the passage of time, but these tactics can backfire by intensifying their awareness of temporality. Providing rich and nuanced analysis grounded in the distinctive voices of diverse prisoners, The Cage of Days examines how prisons regulate time and how prisoners resist the temporal regime.

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.

This book examines the control of prison disorder through the application of situational crime prevention principles. It spans two subject areas--crime prevention and corrections--and may interest academics as well as practitioners in these fields. On one hand, the book presents a new model of situational prevention that has applications beyond institutions to community settings. On the other, the examination of particular problem behaviors provides a comprehensive review of the prison control literature that does not depend upon a specific interest in situational crime prevention.

The United States is the world leader in incarceration; 707 people out of every 100,000 are imprisoned. If the US prison system were a country, it would be the 143rd most populated nation in the world. Aside from looking at the numbers, if we could look at prison from a new view as its own country rather than an institution made up of walls and wiers, policies and procedures, and legal statues, what might we be able to learn? In A Country Called Prison Mary Looman and John Carl attempt to answer this question by proposing a paradigm shift in the way that American society views mass incarceration. Weaving together sociological and psychological principles, theories of political reform, and real-life stories from experiences working in prison and with at-risk families, Looman and Carl form a fundamental fabric of understanding to demonstrate that prison is a culture, that transcends the fences and buildings of correctional facilities. This culture, they argue,begins in the prisons of disadvantage, abusive and neglected childhoods, continues in correctional facilities, and proceeds to infiltrate life post-incarceration, as ex-felons leave correctional facilities (and often return to impoverished neighborhoods)without money or legal identification of American citizenship. Caught in the isolation of poverty, these legal aliens turn to illegal means of providing for themselves, and are often reimprisoned. This situation is unsustainable and America is clearly facing an incarceration epidemic that requires a new perspective to eradicate it. A Country Called Prison offers pragmatic, transformative, and economical suggestions to reform the prison system and help prisoners return to a healthier life after incarceration.

Between 1965 and 1990, federal judges in almost all of the states handed down sweeping rulings that affected virtually every prison and jail in the United States. Without a doubt judges were the most important prison reformers during this period. This book provides an account of this process, and uses it to explore the more general issue of the role of courts in the modern bureaucratic state. In doing so, it provides detailed accounts of how the courts formulated and sought to implement their orders, and how this action affected the traditional conception of federalism, separation of powers, and the rule of law.

Between 1965 and 1990, federal judges in almost all of the states handed down sweeping rulings that affected virtually every prison and jail in the United States. Without a doubt judges were the most important prison reformers during this period. This book provides an account of this process, and uses it to explore the more general issue of the role of courts in the modern bureaucratic state. It provides detailed accounts of how the courts formulated and sought to implement their orders, and how this action affected the traditional conception of federalism, separation of powers, and the rule of law.

This book provides a unique analysis of prisons and the violence at work inside them. It not only addresses aspects such as racial discrimination, especially in US prisons, but also gender differences, specific criminal groups operating within prisons, the reintegration processes and its failures. Combining works by various authors, it presents diverse perspectives on prison violence: in countries ranging from the USA to Australia, crossing European countries such as Portugal and Spain, among others, but also specific aspects such as prohibitions on phone calls, the economic crisis, and the current challenges of mass incarceration. As such, it offers a broad overview of several problems relevant to all scholars interested in deepening their understanding of violence in prisons.

Hu Feng, the 'counterrevolutionary' leader of a banned literary school, spent twenty-five years in the Chinese Communist Party's prison system. But back in the Party's early days, he was one of its best known literary theoreticians and critics-at least until factional infighting, and his short fuse, made him persona non grata among the establishment. His wife, Mei Zhi, shared his incarceration for many years. F is her account of that time, beginning ten years after her and Hu Feng's initial arrest. She herself was eventually released, after which she navigated the party's Byzantine prison bureaucracy searching for his whereabouts. Having finally found him, she voluntarily returned to gaol to care for him in his rage and suffering, watching his descent into madness as the excesses of the Cultural Revolution took their toll. Both an intimate portrait of Mei Zhi's life with Hu Feng and a stark account of the prison system and life under Mao, F is at once beautiful and harrowing. With support from English PEN This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN's Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers' freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas. For more information visit www.englishpen.org.

Millions in India have long been obsessed with the vicissitudes of the Nehru-Gandhi family's fate. Inextricably linked to the ups and downs of their lives was the future of the nation itself. It was Jawaharlal Nehru's leadership that guided India onto the world stage as a modern nation. Despite the varied scholarship of Nehruvian studies, one important aspect-the experiences of the Nehrus in prison during the national movement-has received only scant consideration. This book addresses that omission by highlighting the significance of prison time in shaping the lives of the members of this illustrious family. For Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, and Krishna Hutheesing, among others, serving prison time was much more than just a marker of participation in the Independence movement. The grim walls of jail provided the place and time to the Nehrus to reflect on and give direction to the nationalist struggle. Such important literary works as Glimpses of World History and Discovery of India, which remain timeless in their appeal, were crafted in gaol. In tracing the intellectual biography of the Nehru-Gandhi family, this book documents the ethos of an entire era during the colonial period.

**WINNER OF THE 2019 MOORE PRIZE ** **THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** 'A riveting account of the multiple outrages of the criminal justice system of Alabama. A harrowing masterpiece' Guardian 'Hinton somehow navigates through his rage and despair to a state of forgiveness and grace' Independent At age 29, Anthony Ray Hinton was wrongfully charged with robbery and murder, and sentenced to death by electrocution for crimes he didn't commit. The only thing he had in common with the perpetrator was the colour of his skin. Anthony spent the next 28 years of his life on death row, watching fellow inmates march to their deaths, knowing he would follow soon. Hinton's incredible story reveals the injustices and inherent racism of the American legal system, but it is also testament to the hope and humanity in us all. 'You will be swept away in this unbelievable, dramatic true story' Oprah Winfrey

This book explores the dramatic evolution of a feminist movement that mobilised to challenge a women's prison system in crisis. Through in-depth historical research conducted in the Australian state of Victoria that spans the 1980s and 1990s, the authors uncover how incarcerated women have worked productively with feminist activists and community coalitions to expose, critique and resist the conditions and harms of their confinement. Resisting Carceral Violence tells the story of how activists-through a combination of creative direct actions, reformist lobbying and legal challenges-forged an anti-carceral feminist movement that traversed the prison walls. This powerful history provides vital lessons for service providers, social justice advocates and campaigners, academics and students concerned with the violence of incarceration. It calls for a willingness to look beyond the prison and instead embrace creative solutions to broader structural inequalities and social harm.

This edited collection analyses the prison through the most fundamental challenge it faces: escapes. The chapters comprise original research from established prison scholars who develop the contours of a sociology of prison escapes. Drawing on firm empirical evidence from places like India, Tunisia, Canada, the UK, France, Uganda, Italy, Sierra Leone, and Mexico, the authors show how escapes not only break the prison, but are also fundamental to the existence of such institutions: how they are imagined, designed, organized, justified, reproduced and transformed. The chapters are organised in four interconnected themes: resistance and everyday life; politics and transition; imaginaries and popular culture; and law and bureaucracy, which reflect how escapes are productive, local, historical, and equivocal social practices, and integral to the mysterious intransigence of the prison. The result is a critical and theoretically informed understanding of prison escapes - which has so far been absent in prison scholarship - and which will hold broad appeal to academics and students of prisons and penology, as well as practitioners.

This book is a reflection on the nature of confinement, experienced by prison inmates as everyday life. It explores the meanings, purposes, and consequences involved with spending every day inside prison. Female Imprisonment results from an ethnographic study carried out in a small prison facility located in the south of Portugal, and Frois uses the data to analyze how incarcerated women talk about their lives, crimes, and expectations. Crucially, this work examines how these women consider prison: rather than primarily being a place of confinement designed to inflict punishment, it can equally be a place of transformation that enables them to regain a sense of selfhood. From in-depth ethnographic research involving close interaction with the prison population, in which inmates present their life histories marked by poverty, violence, and abuse (whether as victims, as agents, or both), Frois observes that the traditional idea of "doing time", in the sense of a strenuous, repressive, or restrictive experience, is paradoxically transformed into "having time" - an experience of expanded self-awareness, identity reconstruction, or even of deliverance. Ultimately, this engaging and compassionate study questions and defies customary accounts of the impact of prisons on those subjected to incarceration, and as such it will be of great interest for scholars and students of penology and the criminal justice system.

Little is known about life imprisonment and the process of releasing offenders back into the community in Ireland. Addressing this scarcity of information, Griffin's empirical study examines the legal and policy framework surrounding life imprisonment and parole. Through an analysis of the rationales expressed by parole decision-makers in the exercise of their discretionary power of release, it is revealed that decision-makers view public protection as central to the process. However, the risk of reoffending features amidst an array of other factors that also influence parole outcomes including personal interpretations of the purposes of punishment, public opinion and the political landscape within which parole operates. The findings of this study are employed to provide a rationale for the upward trend in time served by life sentence prisoners prior to release in recent times. With reform of parole now on the political agenda, will a more formal process of release operate to constrain the increase in time served witnessed over the last number of decades or will the upward trajectory continue unabated?

Prison is a word which conjures up different things to the people who hear it. To some, it is a place where people are simply locked away for a period of time, away from society. Others may think it is place where torture, fear, violence and hopelessness are common place, whereas some may think it a place of rehabilitation. Then there are those who believe it is a state of mind. In the best-selling '34 Years In Hell', author Jamie Morgan Kane told the story of how, after being born on the Isle of Man, he was taken to Canada as a baby and then transported into the United States of America where, at the age of 14, he was sold to an American couple to replace, as he found out many years later, a child they had previously adopted who had mysteriously disappeared. He recounted how he had joined the US military the day he left school in the belief that he was an American citizen; how circumstances persuaded him to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit, and how that had resulted in him being sentenced to prison for more than three decades. Since then, he has been asked many times: "But what was prison really like?" This new follow-up book attempts to answer that question. This is the ultimate guide to what it's like to be behind bars in America. It lays bare the day-to-day existence of prisoners and the hustles they get up to in order to survive. It is a fascinating, sometimes shocking and raw account of life at its most brutal.

Winner of the 2021 ESC Book Award. Despite its dramatic proliferation and diversification in recent decades, supervisory forms of punishment in the community (like probation, parole and unpaid work) have been largely invisible in scholarly and public discussion of criminal justice and its development in late-modern societies. The long-standing pre-occupation with the prison, and more recent concerns about 'mass incarceration' have allowed the emergence of 'mass supervision' to remain in the shadows. Pervasive Punishment insists that we remedy this neglect and exemplifies how we can do so. Drawing on thirty years of personal, practice and research experiences, it offers a compelling and rich account of the scale and social distribution of mass supervision, of the processes by which it has been legitimated, and of how it is experienced by those subject to it. Its innovative approach invites readers to look at, listen to and imagine punishment beyond the prison, through the use of innovative and creative methods including photography, song-writing and story-telling to explore and to represent 'mass supervision'. By so doing, this book offers new insights into how and why combining social science and creative practice can help develop a different kind of democratic dialogue about contentious social issues like crime and punishment. Though focused on the UK and the USA, the methods used in and analysis developed in this book will be of interest to scholars, students and practitioners elsewhere.

This book examines American solitary confinement - in which around 100,000 prisoners are held at any one time - and argues that under a moral reading of individual rights such punishment is not only a matter of public interest, but requires close constitutional scrutiny. While Eighth Amendment precedent has otherwise experienced a generational fixation on the death penalty, this book argues that such scrutiny must be extended to the hidden corners of the US prison system. Despite significant reforms to capital sentencing by the executive and legislative branches, Eastaugh shows how the American prison system as a whole has escaped meaningful judicial oversight. Drawing on a wide range of socio-political contexts in order to breathe meaning into the moral principles underlying the punishments clause, the study includes an extensive review of professional (medico-legal) consensus and comparative transnational human rights standards united against prolonged solitary confinement. Ultimately, Eastaugh argues that this practice is unconstitutional. An informed and empowering text, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of law, punishment, and the criminal justice system.

This is a comparative study of prisoners' human rights in England, Wales and the Netherlands. Over the years changes in Dutch penal policy have smoothed to some degree the sharp contrasting differences that were once characteristic of the English and the Dutch prison systems. In this context, the study documents the impact of the two countries' penal policies on prisoners' human rights and presents prisoners' views on the human rights contribution to prison life and prisoner treatment. English and Dutch prisoners treat human rights recognition and protection as the yardstick of the prison's legitimacy in contemporary democracies. Drawing on their respective experiences, Karamalidou highlights valuable lessons on what practices to adopt and what practices to cease with a view to embedding human rights in prison. A compassionate and thought-provoking study, this book will be of interest to undergraduate and postagraduate students of penology and human rights.

This moving book provides an inside-view of life in prison, and people's remarkable ability to make sense of their lives there as they learn to meditate. Drawing on years of intimate correspondence between prisoners and charity workers of the Prison Phoenix Trust, it traces prisoners' struggles through the harshest of circumstances to find authenticity, friendship and hope. This is not only an empowering guide for those in prison, but a testament to the liberating power of peace, which, in spite of all obstacles, can be unlocked within us all.

The Man in the Iron Mask has all the hallmarks of a thrilling adventure story: a glamorous and all-powerful king, ambitious ministers, a cruel and despotic gaoler, dark and sinister dungeons - and a secret prisoner. It is easy for forget that this story, made famous by Alexandre Dumas, is that of a real person, who spent more than thirty years in the prison system of Louis XIV's France never to be freed. This book brings to life the true story of this mysterious man and follows his journey through four prisons and across decades of time. It introduces the reader to those with whom he shared his imprisonment, those who had charge of him and those who decided his fate. The Man in the Iron Mask is one of the most enduring mysteries of Louis XIV's reign, but, above all, it is a human story. Using contemporary documents, this book shows what life was really like for state prisoners in seventeenth-century France and offers tantalising insight into why this mysterious man was arrested and why, several years later, his story would become one of France's most intriguing legends.

'Truly remarkable' DAMIEN LEWIS Trapped in a living nightmare, former-para Nick Dunn, one of the 'Chennai Six', was wrongly imprisoned in an Indian jail. While battling to be heard both at home and abroad, Nick summoned the resilience and endurance of his elite training to survive inhumane conditions, keep himself alive and fight for his right to return home. Now, he tells his full story of struggle and survival for the very first time.

Dangerous Politics: Risk, Political Vulnerability, and Penal Policy brings together relevant literature in law, criminology, and politics to provide insights into the nature of British penal politics, the role of the judiciary and pressure groups, and the interrelation between risk, the 'public voice', and penal politics. It presents a detailed case study of the IPP story: the creation and eventual demise of the Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence. Drawing on over 60 in-depth interviews with key policymakers, the author investigates the beliefs, traditions, and political processes that propelled developments in the 'IPP story', namely the creation, contestation, amendment, and demise of the IPP sentence. An indeterminate sentence modelled upon the existing life sentence but targeted far more broadly, the IPP sentence has been described as 'one of the least carefully planned and implemented pieces of legislation in the history of British sentencing' (Jacobson and Hough, 2010) and has dramatically increased the indeterminate-sentenced prison population, from approximately 3,000 in 1992 to over 13,000 in 2014. Though abolished in 2012, it remains a pressing issue: over 5,000 IPP prisoners remain, with ongoing campaigns pressing for their release. Standing as one of the most striking examples of the expansion of preventive goals in sentencing policy, this study of the IPP story stands as a cautionary tale, with important lessons for Australia, Canada, the United States, and other nations that continue to pursue preventive goals. This book argues that the IPP story demonstrates the need to be cautious of equating substance with process - while on one view the IPP sentence constitutes a penal manifestation of the risk society, its development refutes the 'evolutionary growth' of such policies as implied by the 'new penology' thesis. Dangerous Politics makes an original contribution to our understanding of the genesis and demise of the IPP sentence, and to our broader understanding of the nature of penality in early 21st century Britain. It will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of criminology, criminal law, politics and policymaking, as well as sentencing and criminal justice policymakers.