In the last 15 years, the prison population in the U.S. increased by more than 188 percent. The increase has been fueled largely by increases in the number of individuals convicted of drug-related offenses. These offenders constitute a disproportionate number of recidivists who, in turn, are responsible for a relatively large proportion of criminal activity in our society. The vast majority of these offenders were arrested for committing violent crimes, and most of the offenders are poor, unemployed, uneducated, come from dysfunctional families, and are African-American. Contrary to public opinion, many of these offenders are tired of their "revolving door" relationship with the police, courts, and correctional institutions. However, without appropriate social and therapeutic support, there is little hope of altering their behavior. This volume seeks to address specific issues relevant to prisons in America and includes contributions by practitioners in the field of prison-based drug treatment and therapy programs. The work is an important contribution to the literature examining the extent to which rehabilitation (i.e., prison-based drug treatment programs) has effectively reduced recidivism, drug relapse, and violent crime in our society.

This is an English-language translation of P.F. Iakubovich's popular roman a clef about his exile and experiences as a Siberian penal laborer during the late 19th century.

Stories of non-US citizens caught in the jaws of the immigration bureaucracy and subject to indefinite detention are in the headlines daily. These men, women, and children remain almost completely without rights, unprotected by law and the Constitution, and their status as outsiders, even though many of have lived and worked in this country for years, has left them vulnerable to the most extreme forms of state power. Although the rhetoric surrounding these individuals is extreme, the US government has been locking up immigrants since the late nineteenth century, often for indefinite periods and with limited ability to challenge their confinement. Forever Prisoners offers the first broad history of immigrant detention in the United States. Elliott Young focuses on five stories, including Chinese detained off the coast of Washington in the late 1880s, an "insane" Russian-Brazilian Jew caught on a ship shuttling between New York and South America during World War I, Japanese Peruvians kidnapped and locked up in a Texas jail during World War II, a prison uprising by Mariel Cuban refugees in 1987, and a Salvadoran mother who grew up in the United States and has spent years incarcerated while fighting deportation. Young shows how foreigners have been caged not just for immigration violations, but also held in state and federal prisons for criminal offenses, in insane asylums for mental illness, as enemy aliens in INS facilities, and in refugee camps. Since the 1980s, the conflation of criminality with undocumented migrants has given rise to the most extensive system of immigrant incarceration in the nation's history. Today over half a million immigrants are caged each year, some serving indefinite terms in what has become the world's most extensive immigrant detention system. And yet, Young finds, the rate of all forms of incarceration for immigrants was as high in the early twentieth century as it is today, demonstrating a return to past carceral practices. Providing critical historical context for today's news cycle, Forever Prisoners focuses on the sites of limbo where America's immigration population have been and continue to be held.

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.

A concise survey of the treatment of jailed women in America since the early 1800s, their unique problems, the effect on their families, and the state of prisons today. Focusing on an often overlooked subject, this volume explores women's incarceration, from the first women-only prison to modern state-of-the-art facilities. It explores controversies, problems, and solutions, such as excessive discipline, the lack of training programs, sexual abuse, medical services, and visitation policies. The book also investigates key issues such as the background of inmates, the disproportionate number of African American and Hispanic prisoners because of the "war on drugs," and how women cope with the separation from their children and families. A full chapter is devoted to important people and events, from the first female jail keeper in 1822 to changing prison goals and the impact of feminism. Includes an abundance of resources for further research including extensive statistics on the number of women in state and federal prisons by race, the proportion of women jailed for violent offenses, and characteristics of female state prison inmates An annotated bibliography of print and nonprint resources such as Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, Corrections Today, and Women, Crime, and Justice

Voices From American Prisons: Faith, Education and Healing is a comprehensive and unique contribution to understanding the dynamics and nature of penal confinement. In this book, author Kaia Stern describes the history of punishment and prison education in the United States and proposes that specific religious and racial ideologies - notions of sin, evil and otherness - continue to shape our relationship to crime and punishment through contemporary penal policy. Inspired by people who have lived, worked, and studied in U.S. prisons, Stern invites us to rethink the current punishment crisis in the United States.

Based on in-depth interviews with people who were incarcerated, as well as extensive conversations with students, teachers, corrections staff, and prison administrators, the book introduces the voices of those who have participated in the few remaining post-secondary education programs that exist behind bars. Drawing on individual narrative and various modern day case examples, Stern focuses on dehumanization, resistance, and community transformation. She demonstrates how prison education is essential, can provide healing, and yet is still not enough to interrupt mass incarceration. In short, this book explores the possibility of transformation from a retributive punishment system to a system of justice.

The book s engaging, human accounts and multidisciplinary perspective will appeal to criminologists, sociologists, historians, theologians and scholars of education alike. Voices from American Prisons will also capture general readers who are interested in learning about a timely and often silenced reality of contemporary modern society."

There are millions of children experiencing parental imprisonment all over the world. This book is about their problems, human rights and how they are treated throughout the justice process from the arrest of a parent to imprisonment and release.

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.

Little of what we know about prison comes from the mouths of prisoners, and very few academic accounts of prison life manage to convey some of its most profound and important features: its daily pressures and frustrations, the culture of the wings and landings, and the relationships which shape the everyday experience of being imprisoned. The Prisoner aims to redress this by foregrounding prisoners' own accounts of prison life in what is an original and penetrating edited collection. Each of its chapters explores a particular prisoner sub-group or an important aspect of prisoners' lives, and each is divided into two sections: extended extracts from interviews with prisoners, followed by academic commentary and analysis written by a leading scholar or practitioner. This structure allows prisoners' voices to speak for themselves, while situating what they say in a wider discussion of research, policy and practice. The result is a rich and evocative portrayal of the lived reality of imprisonment and a poignant insight into prisoners' lives. The book aims to bring to life key penological issues and to provide an accessible text for anyone interested in prisons, including students, practitioners and a general audience. It seeks to represent and humanize a group which is often silent in discussions of imprisonment, and to shine a light on a world which is generally hidden from view.

"Buried Lives" offers the first critical examination of the experience of imprisonment in early America. These interdisciplinary essays investigate several carceral institutions to show how confinement shaped identity, politics, and the social imaginary both in the colonies and in the new nation. The historians and literary scholars included in this volume offer a complement and corrective to conventional understandings of incarceration that privilege the intentions of those in power over the experiences of prisoners.
Considering such varied settings as jails, penitentiaries, almshouses, workhouses, floating prison ships, and plantations, the contributors reconstruct the struggles of people imprisoned in locations from Antigua to Boston. The essays draw upon a rich array of archival sources from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War, including warden logs, petitions, execution sermons, physicians' clinical notes, private letters, newspaper articles, runaway slave advertisements, and legal documents. Through the voices, bodies, and texts of the incarcerated, "Buried Lives" reveals the largely ignored experiences of inmates who contested their subjection to regimes of power.

This book explores the development of the global phenomenon of Prison Shakespeare, from its emergence in the 1980s to the present day. It provides a succinct history of the phenomenon and its spread before going on to explore one case study the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble's (Australia) Shakespeare Prison Project in detail. The book then analyses the phenomenon from a number of perspectives, and evaluates a number of claims made about the outcomes of such programs, particularly as they relate to offender health and behaviour. Unlike previous works on the topic, which are largely individual case studies, this book focuses not only on Prison Shakespeare's impact on the prisoners who directly participate, but also on prison culture and on broader social attitudes towards both prisoners and Shakespeare.

This book is the first examination of the history of prison policy in Ireland. Despite sharing a legal and penal heritage with the United Kingdom, Ireland's prison policy has taken a different path. This book examines how penal-welfarism was experienced in Ireland, shedding further light on the nature of this concept as developed by David Garland. While the book has an Irish focus, it has a theoretical resonance far beyond Ireland.

This book investigates and describes prison policy in Ireland since the foundation of the state in 1922, analyses and assesses the factors influencing policy during this period and explores and examines the links between prison policy and the wider social, economic, political and cultural development of the Irish state.

It also explores how Irish prison policy has come to take on its particular character, with comparatively low prison numbers, significant reliance on short sentences and a policy-making climate in which long periods of neglect are interspersed with bursts of political activity all prominent features.

Drawing on the emerging scholarship of policy analysis, the book argues that it is only through close attention to the way in which policy is formed that we will fully understand the nature of prison policy. In addition, the book examines the effect of political imprisonment in the Republic of Ireland, which, until now, has remained relatively unexplored.

This book will be of special interest to students of criminology within Ireland, but also of relevance to students of comparative criminal justice, criminology and criminal justice policy making in the UK and beyond.

This is the first collection of essays to survey punishment in England in the four centuries after 1500. Its principal concerns include the punishment of petty crime, the roots of transportation, mercy, changing perceptions of the nature and impact of capital punishment, and the cultural values affecting penal developments. The contributors explore compelling new bodies of evidence to offer fresh perspectives on this area.

Disability Incarcerated gathers thirteen contributions from an impressive array of fields. Taken together, these essays assert that a complex understanding of disability is crucial to an understanding of incarceration, and that we must expand what has come to be called 'incarceration.' The chapters in this book examine a host of sites, such as prisons, institutions for people with developmental disabilities, psychiatric hospitals, treatment centers, special education, detention centers, and group homes; explore why various sites should be understood as incarceration; and discuss the causes and effects of these sites historically and currently. This volume includes a preface by Professor Angela Y. Davis and an afterword by Professor Robert McRuer.

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

Hardbound. Doing Time describes life in a maximum security prison, as experienced by first-time prisoners. The study is based on a collaboration between an inmate-sociology graduate student and a sociologist. The analysis presented focuses on the phenomenological experience of the prison world and the consequent adaptations and transformations that it evokes. Doing Time is not an expose on prison conditions; it is an intimate view of a maximum security prison and its effects on new inmates.

The Evolving Protection of Prisoners' Rights in Europe explores the development of the framing of penal and prison policies by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), clarifying the European expectations of national authorities, and describing the various models existing in Europe, with a view to analysing their mechanisms and highlighting those that seem the most suitable. A new frame of penal and prison policies in Europe has been progressively established by the ECHR and the Council of Europe (CoE) to protect the rights of detainees in Europe. European countries have reacted very diversely to these policies. This book has several key benefits for readers: * A global and detailed overview of the ECHR jurisprudence on penal and prison policies through an analysis of its development over time. * An analysis of the interactions between the Strasbourg Court and the CoE bodies (Committee of Ministers, Committee for the Prevention of Torture ...) and their reinforced framing of domestic penal and prison policies. * A detailed examination of the impacts of the European case law on penal and prison policies within ten nation states in Europe (including Romania which is currently very underresearched). * A robust engagement with the diverse national reactions to this European case law as a policy strategy. This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Law, Criminal Justice, Criminology and Sociology. It will also appeal to civil servants (judges, lawyers, etc.), professionals and policymakers working for the CoE, the European Union, and the United Nations; Ministries of Justice; prison departments; and human rights institutions, as well as activists working for INGOs and NGOs.

The controversy surrounding community responses to housing for sexually violent predators When a South Carolina couple killed a registered sex offender and his wife after they moved into their neighborhood in 2013, the story exposed an extreme and relatively rare instance of violence against sex offenders. While media accounts would have us believe that vigilantes across the country lie in wait for predators who move into their neighborhoods, responses to sex offenders more often involve collective campaigns that direct outrage toward political and criminal justice systems. No community wants a sex offender in its midst, but instead of vigilantism, Monica Williams argues, citizens often leverage moral, political, and/or legal authority to keep these offenders out of local neighborhoods. Her book, the culmination of four years of research, 70 in-depth interviews, participant observations, and studies of numerous media sources, reveals the origins and characteristics of community responses to sexually violent predators (SVP) in the U.S. Specifically, The Sex Offender Housing Dilemma examines the placement process for released SVPs in California and the communities' responses to those placements. Taking the reader into the center of these related issues, Monica Williams provokes debate on the role of communities in the execution of criminal justice policies, while also addressing the responsibility of government institutions to both groups of citizens. The Sex Offender Housing Dilemma is sure to promote increased civic engagement to help strengthen communities, increase public safety, and ensure government accountability.

This comprehensive examination of the effectiveness of prisons is virtually alone in showing that prisons are moderately effective in achieving specific and general deterrence and collective and selective incapacitation. Wright provides evidence which defends prisons as important social institutions and argues that noninterventionist alternative measures are less likely to prevent crime than conventional imprisonment policies. He also offers sentencing recommendations that may maximize the effectiveness of prisons as agents of social control. This up-to-date assessment is required reading for students, teachers, policymakers, and practitioners in corrections, penology, and criminal justice.

Hell, the first volume in Jeffrey Archer's The Prison Diaries, is the author's daily record of the time he spent there. The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day. I've been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement. There is a child of seventeen in the cell below me who has been charged with shoplifting - his first offence, not even convicted - and he is being locked up for eighteen and a half hours, unable to speak to anyone. This is Great Britain in the twenty-first century, not Turkey, not Nigeria, not Kosovo, but Britain. On Thursday 19 July 2001, after a perjury trial lasting seven weeks, Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in jail. He was to spend the first twenty-two days and fourteen hours in HMP Belmarsh, a double A-Category high-security prison in South London, which houses some of Britain's most violent criminals. This is his illuminating insight into prison life.

Prison Readings provides a comprehensive, critical introduction to the main debates and dilemmas associated with prisons and imprisonment, bringing together a selection of the key readings on the subject, along with a comprehensive introduction and commentary written by the editors. The book will be essential reading for practitioners working in this field, and students studying prisons as part of courses in criminology, sociology, law, psychology, and other disciplines. Prison Readings introduces students to the history and development of prisons, contemporary theories and issues relating to prison populations, sociological and psychological literature on the effects of imprisonment, and to debates about the management and privatization of the prison estate and emerging trends.

Prison Readings provides a comprehensive, critical introduction to the main debates and dilemmas associated with prisons and imprisonment, bringing together a selection of the key readings on the subject, along with a comprehensive introduction and commentary written by the editors. The book will be essential reading for practitioners working in this field, and students studying prisons as part of courses in criminology, sociology, law, psychology, and other disciplines. Prison Readings introduces students to the history and development of prisons, contemporary theories and issues relating to prison populations, sociological and psychological literature on the effects of imprisonment, and to debates about the management and privatization of the prison estate and emerging trends.

Using close-up studies of eight prison riots, Resolution of Prison Riots gives readers an inside view of what these events are like. The riots examined include those that grabbed national attention - one in which over 100 hostages were taken and held for 11 days - as well as lesser-known disturbances whose details are equally gripping. The book explores the conditions that precipitate disturbances, the course of events during the disturbances, and the aftermath and recovery on the part of the corrections agencies. At its heart, the book seeks to explain why and how these events occurred. Along the way, the authors explore issues related to conflict management, negotiations, the use of force, and strategies of administrative organization. The analysis offers practical and timely advice for those responsible for preventing and resolving large-scale disorders.

Boot campswhat are their effects on criminal behavior? Public and political support for boot camps as alternative correctional facilities has rarely faltered since their inception decades ago, though their efficacy remains uncertain. Rehabilitation Issues, Problems, and Prospects in Boot Camp explores all facets of the controversial issue, from the attitudes and perceptions of the public, to the political motivations in maintaining them, on to the latest research on the camps and their graduates. Respected authorities discuss boot camps' effectiveness on diverse groups according to age, gender, race, and correctional facility. Cost factors between boot camps and other correctional institutions are compared, along with the latest criminal recidivism data. Boot camps provide inmates with an uncomfortable, paramilitary-style environment with an eye toward shorter incarceration time, lower costs, and more positive effects on criminal behavior. Does this correctional model work as anticipated? Rehabilitation Issues, Problems, and Prospects in Boot Camp gives you the facts, revealing the public and political arguments for and against boot camps as well as the research on the theoretical predictors of criminal recidivism and the differing attitudes of attendees toward the facilities according to gender and race. Critical policy issues are identified and discussed in-depth, with particular emphasis given to the positive and negative aspects of rehabilitation possibilities of boot camps. Helpful tables clearly illustrate statistics while extensive references provide opportunities for further insight. Rehabilitation Issues, Problems, and Prospects in Boot Camp explores questions such as: criminal recidivismwhat are the theoretical predictors? what effect does gender have on criminal recidivism? what is the effect of this hypermasculine paramilitary prison environment have on males and females? what are the differences between Native American and non-Native American perceptions of boot camp? is the perceived severity of boot camp different for gender? what is the process for policymaking in creating and maintaining boot camps? what role does politics play in the continuation of boot camps? what corrections to boot camp facilities should be made based upon evidence and research? Rehabilitation Issues, Problems, and Prospects in Boot Camp is a thorough examination of the social and political issues about boot camps that makes essential reading for educators, students, sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, counselors, and criminal justice professionals.