Can the morality of a nation really be judged by how it treats its prisoners? The United States has more people in prison than any other nation, and the nature of the American correctional system continues to be the subject of passionate debate. This unique combination of historical overview and personal testimony provides an unprecedented look at the U.S. correctional system. The first section of the book places the notion of corrections within an historical context. The second examines contemporary correctional issues. In the third and final section, Stephen Stanko, an inmate in the South Carolina correctional system, provides a detailed look at prison life from the inside. Stanko offers his perspective--in a voice that is blunt but never preachy--on the harsh realities of prison life, making this a rigorous exploration of our correctional system in both theory and practice.

During the Zimbabwean struggle for independence, the settler regime imprisoned numerous activists and others it suspected of being aligned with the guerrillas. This book is the first to look closely at the histories and lived experiences of these political detainees and prisoners, showing how they challenged and negotiated their incarceration.

This volume recognizes and addresses the health care issues of prisoners, to establish best practices and to learn about approaches to these challenges from around the world. It presents new evidence on several emerging and classical prison health issues. The first goal of this volume is to address emerging issues related to health in prison. Second, it presents the most recent research-based evidence and translates it to the practice. The third goal, is that it allows for sufficient diversity while also incorporating updates of some important already recognized prison health. The volume discusses prisons and the life and well-being of prisoners and staff, after growing problems as drug misuse (incl. tobacco smoking), infectious diseases (HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, STIs and TB), psychiatric problems, inadequate and unhealthy living conditions (incl. nutrition), overcrowding of prisons. These are addressed adequately in order to meet the international requirements of equivalence of health care. The scope of this volume is at the same type specific and diverse enough to cover the interests of a large audience that includes many types of practitioners involved in health-related issues in the field of prison health care, such as psychologists, nurses and prison administration officers responsible for health care, legal professionals and social workers.

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.

This unique book adopts a rich theoretical, empirical and political perspective to explore the gendered incarceration of women and girls and the marginalization of their needs and rights within predominantly male penal systems.Focusing on a decade's research inside prisons in Northern Ireland, Moore and Scraton integrate in-depth interviews, focus groups, regime observation and documentary analysis to examine issues of equality, discipline, mental health, self-harm, abuse and suicide. The independent, primary research engages in controversies regarding the deaths of women in custody, a hunger strike concerning the status of politically-affiliated women prisoners, media revelations of sexual exploitation of women prisoners by male prison guards, and the use of punitive strip-searches and punishment cells for vulnerable women.Telling the story of female incarceration through the voices and experiences of women, this book provides a rare insight into the destructive and debilitating impact of prison regimes, advancing feminist analysis of women's incarceration and the criminalization of women. Moore and Scraton's study raises questions over the potential and limitations of gender specific policies, the silencing of prisoners' voices and agency, the significance of critical research in voicing prisoners' resistance and the possibilities of decarceration through adopting an abolitionist agenda.

Political instability is nearly always accompanied by fuller prisons, and this was particularly true during the "long" Second World War, when military mobilization, social disorder, wrenching political changes, and shifting national boundaries swelled the ranks of the imprisoned and broadened the carceral reach of the state. This volume brings together theoretically sophisticated, empirically rich studies of key transitional moments that transformed the scope and nature of European prisons during and after the war. It depicts the complex interactions of both penal and administrative institutions with the men and women who experienced internment, imprisonment, and detention at a time when these categories were in perpetual flux.

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.

This book explores the idea of the prison boundary, identifying where it is located, which processes and performances help construct and animate it, and who takes part in them. Although the relationship between prison and non-prison has garnered academic interest from various disciplines in the last decade, the cultural performance of the boundary has been largely ignored. This book adds to the field by exploring the complexity of the material and symbolic connections that exist between society and carceral space. Drawing on a range of cultural examples including governmental legislation, penal tourism, prisoner work programmes and art by offenders, Jennifer Turner attends to the everyday, practised manifestations and negotiations of the prison boundary. The book reveals how prisoners actively engage with life outside of prison and how members of the public may cross the boundary to the inside. In doing so, it shows the prison boundary to be a complex patchwork of processes, people and parts. The book will be of great interest to scholars and upper-level students of criminology, carceral geography and cultural studies.

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 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.

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.

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.

Examining two overlapping aspects of the prison experience that, despite their central importance, have not attracted the scholarly attention they deserve, this book assesses both the degree to which prisoners can withstand the rigours of solitude and how they experience the passing of time. In particular, it looks at how they deal with the potentially overwhelming prospect of a long, or even indefinite, period behind bars. While the deleterious effects of penal isolation are well known, little systematic attention has been given to the factors associated with surviving, and even triumphing over, prolonged exposure to solitary confinement. Through a re-examination of the roles of silence and separation in penal policy, and by contrasting the prisoner experience with that of individuals who have sought out institutional solitariness (for example as members of certain religious orders), and others who have found themselves held in solitary confinement although they committed no crime (such as hostages and some political prisoners), Prisoners, Solitude, and Time seeks to assess the impact of long-term isolation and the rationality of such treatment. In doing so, it aims to stimulate interest in a somewhat neglected aspect of the prisoner's psychological world. The book focuses on an aspect of the prison experience - time, its meanderings, measures, and meanings - that is seldom considered by academic commentators. Building upon prisoner narratives, academic critiques, official publications, personal communications, field visits, administrative statistics, reports of campaigning bodies, and other data, it presents a new framework for understanding the prison experience. The author concludes with a series of reflections on hope, the search for meaning, posttraumatic growth, and the art of living.

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 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

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 edited collection focuses on the sociology of 'social censure' - the sociological term advocated by Colin Sumner in his seminal writing of the 1980s and 1990s. Social censure has become increasingly important in contemporary criminological writing. This can especially be seen in recent writing on gender and race and also in terms of the way that the state's relationship to crime is now understood. This collection addresses a deficit in the published literature and both revisits themes from an earlier era and looks forward to the development of new writing that develops Sumner's seminal work on social censure. The contributors are drawn from leading scholars from across the Social Sciences and Law and they address a wide range of issues such as: race, youth justice, policing, welfare, and violence. The resulting volume is an interdisciplinary text which will be of special interest to scholars and students of Critical Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies, as well as those interested in the operation of the criminal justice system and criminological theory.

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.

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.

The final volume of Jeffrey Archer's prison diaries, A Prison Diary Volume III: Heaven, covers the period of his transfer from Wayland to his eventual release on parole in July 2003. It includes a shocking account of the traumatic time he spent in the notorious Lincoln jail and the events that led to his incarceration there - it also throws light on a system that is close to breaking point. Told with humour, compassion and honesty, it closes with a thought-provoking manifesto that should be applauded by the Establishment and prison population alike. Day 115 Saturday 10th November 2001 6.38am It's all an act. I am hopelessly unhappy, dejected and broken. I smile when I am at my lowest, I laugh when I see no humour, I help others when I need help myself. I am alone. If I were to show any sign, even for a moment, of what I'm going through, I would have to read the details in some tabloid the following day. Everything I do is only a phone call away from a friendly journalist with an open cheque book. I don't know where I have found the strength to maintain this facade and never break down in anyone's presence.

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.

What is the nature and impact of faith and religion in prison? This book summarizes contemporary and cutting-edge research on religion in correctional contexts, enabling a scientific understanding of how prisoners use faith in their everyday lives. Religion long has been a tool for correctional treatment. In the United States, religion was the primary treatment modality in the first prisons. Only since the 1980s, however, have social scientists begun to study the nature, extent, practice, and impact of faith and faith-based prison programs. Bringing together the knowledge of scholars from around the world, this single-volume book offers readers a science- and research-based understanding of how prisoners use faith in everyday life, examining the role of religion in prison/correctional contexts from a variety of interdisciplinary and international viewpoints. By considering the perspectives of professionals actually working in corrections or prison settings as well as those of scholars studying religion and/or criminal justice, readers of Finding Freedom in Confinement: The Role of Religion in Prison Life can gain insight into the most contemporary research on religion in correctional contexts. The book contains data-driven, conceptual, and policy-oriented essays that cover major religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam within correctional environments. It also addresses subject matter such as the roles of prison chaplains and correctional officers and the relationships between religion and common aspects of prison life, such as drug abuse, gangs, violence, prisoner identity, rights of prisoners, and rehabilitation. Presents an international scope that covers a diversity of faith traditions Comprises contributions from leading scholars who incorporate various research methodologies, such as surveys, in-depth interviews, participant observation, and content analysis into their writings Moves the discussion of religion in prison away from popular discourse, advocacy works, and media stories that prioritize emotion and sensationalism over empirical verification