Mao Zedong's labour reform camps were notoriously brutal: modeled after the Soviet gulag, their inmates were subject to backbreaking labour, malnutrition, and vindictive wardens. They were thought to be impossible to escape but one man did. Xu Hongci, a young medical student, was a loyal member of the Communist Party until he fell victim to Mao's Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. After posting a criticism of the party, he spent the next fourteen years in the labor camps. Despite horrific conditions and terrible odds, Hongci was determined to escape, failing three times before he succeeded in 1972. Hongci broke out of a prison near the Burmese border, traveled across China to see his mother in Shanghai one last time, and then finally crossed the Mongolian border. There he eventually married and settled into a new life, until he was able to return home after Mao's death. Originally published in Hong Kong, Hongci's remarkable memoir recounts his life from childhood through his prison break. After discovering the book in a Hong Kong library, the journalist Erling Hoh tracked down the original manuscript and compiled this abridged translation of Hongci's memoir, which includes background on this turbulent period, an epilogue following Hongci up to his death in 2008, and Hongci's own drawings and maps. Almost nobody was able to escape from Mao's labor camps, but No Wall Too High tells the true story of someone who did.

Foreword by Kathleen de la Pena McCook This book provides librarians and those studying to enter the profession with tools to grapple with their own implication within systems of policing and incarceration, melding critical theory with real-world examples to demonstrate how to effectively serve people impacted by incarceration. As part of our mission to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all library patrons, our profession needs to come to terms with the consequences of mass incarceration, which has saturated the everyday lives of people in the United States and heavily impacts Black, Indigenous, and people of color; LGBTQ people; and people who are in poverty. Jeanie Austin, a librarian with San Francisco Public Library's Jail and Reentry Services program, helms this important contribution to the discourse, providing tools applicable in a variety of settings. This text covers practical information about services in public and academic libraries, and libraries in juvenile detention centers, jails, and prisons, while contextualizing these services for LIS classrooms and interdisciplinary scholars. It powerfully advocates for rethinking the intersections between librarianship and carceral systems, pointing the way towards different possibilities. This clear-eyed text begins with an overview of the convergence of library and information science and carceral systems within the United States, summarizing histories of information access and control such as book banning, and the ongoing work of incarcerated people and community members to gain more access to materials; examines the range of carceral institutions and their forms, including juvenile detention, jails, immigration detention centers, adult prisons, and forms of electronic monitoring; draws from research into the information practices of incarcerated people as well as individual accounts to examine the importance of information access while incarcerated; shares valuable case studies of various library systems that are currently providing both direct and indirect services, including programming, book clubs, library spaces, roving book carts, and remote reference; provides guidance on collection development tools and processes; discusses methods for providing reentry support through library materials and programming, from customized signage and displays to raising public awareness of the realities of policing and incarceration; gives advice on supporting community groups and providing outreach to transitional housing; includes tips for building organizational support and getting started, with advice on approaching library management, creating procedures for challenges, ensuring patron privacy, and how to approach partners who are involved with overseeing the functioning of the carceral facility; and concludes with a set of next steps, recommended reading, and points of reflection.

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

Trust and Change explains the democratic basis of therapeutic communities (TCs) and what exactly happens in community meetings including those in prison. It deals with commonly asked questions about TCs and describes their four basic pillars: democratisation, tolerance, communality and reality confrontation as well as the `no secrets' principle (commonly referred to as a footstool). It examines the need to create a culture of enquiry and ways of avoiding trauma and other risks. It shows how TCs integrate with normal prison regimes and locations and the arrangements for record keeping and auditing. Throughout, the book contains `Thinking Points' and gives examples of typical structures and schedules together with the aims, purposes and rationale of key aspects of TC work.

How does a holy God associate with paedophiles, murderers, drug addicts, alcoholics and others rejected by mainstream society? This book is a product of many years working with and in some cases befriending the most despised people in society, prisoners. It addresses questions such as: Why do some people end up in prison? Do they just wake up one morning and think: `I am going to rob a bank today'? What happens when they get to prison? How do they cope with the violence? Is rehabilitation a realistic expectation? How can victims of crime be helped and supported?

The California youth corrections system is undergoing the most sweeping transformation in its 154-year history. The extraordinary nature of this change is revealed by the striking decline in the state's youth incarceration rate. In 1996, with 10,000 youth confined in 11 state-run correctional facilities, California boasted the nation's third highest youth incarceration rate. Now, with only 800 youth remaining in a system comprised of just three institutions, California has one of the nation's lowest youth incarceration rate. How did such unprecedented changes occur and what were the crucial conditions that produced them? Daniel E. Macallair answers these questions through an examination of the California youth corrections system's origins and evolution, and the patterns and practices that ultimately led to its demise. Beginning in the 19th century, California followed national juvenile justice trends by consigning abused, neglected, and delinquent youth to congregate care institutions known as reform schools. These institutions were characterized by their emphasis on regimentation, rigid structure, and harsh discipline. Behind the walls of these institutions, children and youth, who ranged in age from eight to 21, were subjected to unspeakable cruelties. Despite frequent public outcry, life in California reform schools changed little from the opening of the San Francisco Industrial School in 1859 to the dissolution of the California Youth Authority (CYA) in 2005. By embracing popular national trends at various times, California encapsulates much of the history of youth corrections in the United States. The California story is exceptional since the state often assumed a leadership role in adopting innovative policies intended to improve institutional treatment. The California juvenile justice system stands at the threshold of a new era as it transitions from a 19th century state-centered institutional model to a decentralized structure built around localized services delivered at the county level. After the Doors Were Locked is the first to chronicle the unique history of youth corrections and institutional care in California and analyze the origins of today's reform efforts. This book offers valuable information and guidance to current and future generations of policy makers, administrators, judges, advocates, students and scholars.

This book was drafted to provide an overview of restrictive housing in the American criminal justice system and propose recommendations for safely reducing the use of this practice.

The study of American institutional confinement, its presumed successes, failures, and controversies, is incomplete without examining the remnants of relevant sites no longer standing. Asking what archaeological perspectives add to the understanding of such a provocative topic, Eleanor Conlin Casella describes multiple sites and identifies three distinct categories of confinement: places for punishment, for asylum, and for exile. Her discussion encompasses the multifunctional shelters of the colonial era, Civil War prison camps, Japanese-American relocation centers, and the maximum-security detention facilities of the twenty-first century. Her analysis of the material world of confinement takes into account architecture and landscape, food, medicinal resources, clothing, recreation, human remains, and personal goods. Casella exposes the diversity of power relations that structure many of America's confinement institutions. Weaving together themes of punishment, involuntary labor, personal dignity, and social identity, ""The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement"" tells a profound story of endurance in one slice of society. It will illuminate and change contemporary notions of gender, race, class, infirmity, deviance, and antisocial behavior.

Prison Management, Prison Workers, and Prison Theory develops a new conception of prison infrastructure, organization, and policy to explore how workers and administrators are essential in the development of culture and morality within the prison environment. Stephen C. McGuinn demonstrates that effective managers prioritize prison workers in order to meet external social demands of imprisonment and internal demands of daily operation. McGuinn argues that prison administrators need to unify prison staff under a new conception of the institution. The exploration of current power structures and their opportunities for improvement provides insight for those interested in criminology, criminal justice, prison theory and reform, policy studies, and labor studies.

In 2015 the landmark suicide of the 100th woman to kill herself in prison custody passed largely unnoticed. This book by two experts set out to redress the balance by examining all aspects of the history, present practices, causes and prevention prospects connected to this tragic chain of events. A long overdue analysis of a subject that is at last beginning to receive enhanced scrutiny. Focuses on both women and adolescent girls in custody. Looks at psychological, demographic, environmental and clinical factors. The first book of its kind.

Just as Canada's population has changed in the past four decades, so has its prison population. The increasing diversity among prisoners raises important questions about how we punish those who break the law. Parole in Canada is the first book to explore how concerns about Aboriginality, gender, and the multicultural ideal of "diversity" have been interpreted and used to alter parole policy and practice. Using the Parole Board of Canada as a case study, this book shows how some offender differences are selectively included in conditional release decision making, while the structures, practices, and power arrangements that would enable fundamental change remain unaltered.

This book offers the reader an incisive view into the political, social and economic evolutions of mass incarceration across the globe. It examines the different political and social contexts that combine with free market mechanisms of mass incarceration to ascertain how economic incentives shape penal policy. Using qualitative analysis of a wide variety of incarceration forms, each chapter compares a US example with a non-US case study, showing how first world countries that occupy the economic forefront of prison privatization are exporting new models of penal institutionalization to developing countries. The chapters examine issues such as the privatization of asylum detention centres, the economic impacts of maintaining vast forced labour camps, the social consequences of imprisoning journalists, and the use of state sanctioned torture. Capturing a nascent international trend through an interdisciplinary lens, this book questions why so many languish in prison, whether the incarceration of thousands benefits society as a whole, and how these penal policies might be roundly reconsidered.

Letters to a Lifer provides a rare insight into life without parole (LWOP) for juveniles in the USA. A true story from Pennsylvania, it is a compelling tale of faith and redemption. Cindy Sanford tells how a chance correspondence with Ken, a prisoner artist, began to change her entrenched ideas about offenders. Her book now adds voice to the work of the USA's National Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth and will also be of interest to students of restorative justice. In 1999, America's Most Wanted broadcast details of a notorious crime. Twelve years later Cindy was introduced to Ken, one of the two boys convicted, through his remarkable wildlife art. By then a young man, Ken had spent half his life in prison. Initially wary, Cindy was surprised to find him humble, polite and deeply grateful for her interest. Gradually she and her family were able to look beyond his crime to the person he had become. Despite a hardening of attitudes generally towards offenders in the USA and other parts of the western world, Letters to a Lifer shows why the campaign against LWOP sentences for juveniles is nonetheless gaining momentum.

This collection includes a kaleidoscope of voices and perspectives from prisoners, former prisoners, scholars, and activists to examine the extraordinarily invisible and closed system of incarceration that characterizes the massive U.S. prison industry. The book explores in multiple ways, the role of writing in carceral settings, including material realities, ethics, and social justice. It is a book about the power of writing as well as its limits. It is a book that celebrates and critiques, challenges, and reveals. It is a book that, like the writing of incarcerated women, repays careful reading.

Cries for Help opens a window on the closed world of Holloway, other women's prisons and the lives of those held there in the 1970s. This was an era when personal style and charismatic leadership was the order of the day for governors and prison officers, before ideas of 'new management', when problems were solved using personal initiatives. It catalogues the daily lives of women prisoners, their anxieties, fears and preoccupations. The book looks at a lost segment of the population, hundreds of women who were hidden from view, lacking a voice, part of a system for men that hardly knew what to do with them. It contains stories about murderers and other serious offenders and looks at their personal correspondence, including that of moors murderer Myra Hindley.

Informative, entertaining, against the grain, Her Majesty's Philosophers highlights the artificiality of prison life. By a Guardian correspondent (and with extracts to be published in that newspaper) this book is set to be a penal affairs classic which every student of crime and punishment should read. Building on his Guardian pieces about teaching Philosophy in prison, this is Alan Smith's account in extensio. From introducing Plato to ever-changing groups of hard-nosed prisoners to them wrestling with Bentham, Phillip Larkin and Shakespeare, it is packed with insights and unexpected turns. It paints a picture in which worlds collide and conventional thinking is turned inside out as 'new modes of discourse' change the men's thinking and ideas. At times surreal the book brings fresh perspectives to the minutiae of prison life: survival, coping, soap, teabags, cell mates, the constant noise and immediacy. And needless to say, the men come up with philosophical gems of their own. Her Majesty' Philosophers is also about isolation, the long hours, knockbacks and the emotional mutilation of imprisonment; and whilst philosophy is 'soft and fluffy' it contrasts starkly with the pragmatic world of prison officers, for whom the Holy Grail is Security, Keys and Prison Craft. The book charts how learning changes lives, especially for prisoners who missed out on formal education, who - once motivated - become voracious readers and extraordinary students. It demonstrates more than any official report the value of a wider agenda than Basic Skills. Prisons have been labelled 'Universities of Crime', but colleges are increasingly populated by those who began their studies in a prison cell. In a book packed with wisdom and humour the author laments the fact that prison policy means that this is becoming a far less easy step.

Confessions of a Prison Chaplain explains the 'lifeline' provided by the work of the prison chaplaincy. Written by a Quaker chaplain (but equally compelling for all faith groups), it shows how important to prisoners contact can be - how chaplains fit into the ever-pressing world of prison regimes. Among the diverse topics covered are Christmas in prison, death in prison (or of a loved one on the outside) and learning in prison - as well as restorative justice (which is in line with the teachings of various faiths: as old as religion itself). As the author writes, prisoners are 'Children of God' no matter what their crime, how petty, serious or heinous. How to deal with those whose crimes are so distressing as to challenge this idea is also a feature of the book. It contains a chapter on life-sentence prisoners, those with only a distant and in some cases forlorn hope of release as well as telling the stories of individual prisoners, their time in prison and the 'calming' role of the chaplain when contrasted with the security pre-occupations and rule dominated routines of governors and prison officers. With a Foreword by Juliet Lyon, Director of the Prison Reform Trust, General Secretary of Prison Reform International and one of the UK's leading commentators on penal matters.

This interdisciplinary volume of essays studies human rights in political prison literature, while probing the intersections of suffering, politics, and aesthetics in an interliterary and intercultural context. As the first book to explore the concept of global aesthetics in political prison narratives, it demonstrates how literary insight enhances the study of human rights. Covering varied geographical and geopolitical regions, this collection encourages comparative analyses and cross-cultural understanding. Seeking to interrogate linguistic, structural, and cultural constructions of the political prison experience, it highlights the literary aspects without losing sight of the political and the theoretical. The contributors cross various disciplinary boundaries and adopt different interpretive perspectives in analyzing prison narratives, especially memoirs, from such diverse countries as China, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Romania, Russia, Uruguay, and the U.S. The volume emphasizes the literary works produced since the second half of the twentieth century, particularly since the political seismic shift in 1989. The authors treated range from the canonical to the less well-known: Nawal El Saadawi, Varlam Shalamov, Zhang Xianliang, Cong Weixi, Wumingshi, Carlos Liscano, Fatna El Bouih, Nabil Sulayman, Faraj Bayraqdar, Hasiba 'Abdalrahman, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Nicolae Steinhardt, Irina Ratushinskaya, etc. Critical issues investigated include how the writers represent their sufferings, experiences, and emotions during incarceration; their strategies of survival; and how political prison literature can reveal hidden violations of human rights, while resisting official discourse and serving other functions in society. Examining the commonalities and differences in global experiences of imprisonment, the eight chapters engage with the aesthetics of self-making and resistance, individual and collective memory, denial and conversion, catharsis and redemption, and the experiencing and witnessing of trauma. Topics also include the politics of remembering and the politics of representation, such as the problematic relationship between narrative, language, and representations of torture. Similarly under discussion are prison aesthetics of happiness, the role of spectacle in the criminal justice system, and the intersection of prison, gender, and silences. At a juncture when more and more people all over the world actively defy repressive regimes and demand political reform, this book makes a timely contribution to the advocacy and discourse of universal human rights.

In 1970 Tony Parker was permitted by the Home Office to make a series of visits to HMP Grendon Underwood, the UK's first psychiatric prison, there to interview inmates and staff for a study of the institution and its unique community. 'Tony Parker deserves a place in any future history of literature for his contribution to the creative use of the tape-recorder... We can only guess at the qualities of patience and perceptiveness which have enabled Mr Parker to make of his material one of the most important studies ever to have been published of the habitual criminal.' TLS 'The reader will find himself as deeply involved with his characters as Mr Parker is himself.' Spectator

The overall number of inmates in the Bureau of Prisons' (BOP) three main types of segregated housing units, Special Housing Units (SHU), Special Management Units (SMU), and Administrative Maximum (ADX), increased at a faster rate than the general inmate population. Inmates may be placed in SHUs for administrative reasons, such as pending transfer to another prison, and for disciplinary reasons, such as violating prison rules; SMUs, a four-phased program in which inmates can progress from more to less restrictive conditions; or ADX, for inmates that require the highest level of security. From fiscal year 2008 to February 2013, the total inmate population in segregated housing units increased approximately 17 percent, from 10,659 to 12,460 inmates. By comparison, the total inmate population in BOP facilities increased by about 6 percent during this period. This book examines the trends in the BOP's segregated housing population; the extent to which the BOP centrally monitors how prisons apply segregated housing policies; and the impact segregated housing has on institutionalised safety and inmates.

In America, 2.3 million people-a population about the size of Houston's, the country's fourth-largest city-live behind bars. Sick Justice explores the economic, social, and political forces that hijacked the criminal justice system to create this bizarre situation. Presenting frightening true stories of (sometimes wrongfully) incarcerated individuals, Ivan G. Goldman exposes the inept bureaucracies of America's prisons and shows the real reasons that disproportionate numbers of minorities, the poor, and the mentally ill end up there. Goldman dissects the widespread phenomenon of jailing for profit, the outsized power of prison guards'unions, California's exceptionally rigid three-strikes law, the ineffective and never-ending war on drugs, the closing of mental health institutions across the country, and other blunders and avaricious practices that have brought us to this point. Sick Justice tells a big, gripping story that's long overdue. By illuminating the system's brutality and greed and the prisoners'gratuitous suffering, the book aims to be a catalyst for reform, complementing the work of the Innocence Project and mirroring the effects of Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), which became the driving force behind the war on poverty. About the Author IVAN G. GOLDMAN is the New York Times-best-selling author of four novels, including Isaac: A Modern Fable (The Permanent Press, 2012), and one nonfiction book, L.A. Secret Police: Inside the LAPD Elite Spy Network, with Mike Rothmiller (Pocket, 1992), a book that prompted the department to padlock its intelligence division. He has covered Congress for the Washington Post, worked the national and foreign desks of the Los Angeles Times, and was an editorial writer for the Seattle Post- Intelligencer. His articles have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times, and he blogs about current events at www.ivangoldman.blogspot.com. He lives in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

Since the early 1980s, there has been a historically unprecedented increase in the federal prison population. Some of the growth is attributable to changes in federal criminal justice policy during the previous three decades. An issue before Congress is whether policy makers consider the rate of growth in the federal prison population sustainable, and if not, what changes could be made to federal criminal justice policy to reduce the prison population while maintaining public safety. This book explores the issues related to the growing federal prison population, with a focus on the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) operations and budget; federal mandatory minimum sentences; maximum fines and terms of imprisonment for violation of the Federal Controlled Substances Act and related laws; and a statistics report of prisoners in 2011 from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The only book on Dovegate TC Contains first-hand insider accounts by staff and inmates Describes the latest developments in TC work Provides extensive data and references A closely observed account of the UK's first private sector prison-based Therapeutic Community (TC) - a 200-bed facility. The book considers: the background to and regimes at Dovegate; modern developments in TC work with (often high-risk) offenders; the differences between Dovegate, Grendon and other UK prison-based TCs; private and public sector imperatives; democratic and hierarchical TCs; reparative, restorative and punitive approaches; accreditation, group work, assessment, suitability and de-selection TC-culture versus prison culture the role of positive attitudes, relationships and experiences; psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, security and control; how TCs alter behaviour and prevent crime.