A remarkable new book about a dark stain on modern South Africa – our enormous and problematic prison population – and what we can do to fix it.

"Lock them up and throw away the key!" is a cry we hear often in South Africa today. But this simplistic solution to crime simply isn’t working. As Father Babychan Arackathara, a Catholic chaplain to some of the Western Cape’s most notorious prisons, shows in this compassionate reflection on his work, even criminals have stories, and crime invariably has roots. He listens to those stories and untangles those roots on our behalf, sharing insights into the brokenness of our society and communities – and offering real, workable suggestions for fixing them.

Can we move to the ideal of hating the crime, but loving the criminal? What must we do to see that offenders are themselves victims and to engage them constructively? How do we break the cycles of addiction, trauma and crime to reach for reconciliation and transformation?

After matriculating from a top Jewish school, Nikki Munitz finds herself in the clutches of a heroin addiction. She's sent to a remote rehab, run by a pastor who brandishes a tattoo of Satan. There she meets the handsome son of a wealthy Afrikaans family. Lured by the illusion of her ‘happy-ever-after’ she marries him. But the facade soon crumbles.

Money is in short supply. Nikki takes on a job at a reputable law firm. Encrypted passwords are entrusted to her. She begins to siphon small, undetectable amounts from trust funds of loyal clients. The amounts increase. Caught red-handed, she's fired. By the time the law catches up with her, Nikki is clean and sober. On the advice of her lawyer who reassures her she will never go to jail, she pleads guilty to all 37 counts of fraud. After a gruelling 2-year court battle, she's found guilty.

Fraud is a powerful memoir about a young woman who is forced to face her life of deceit in a prison cell where she ultimately finds her freedom to fly.

The issue of human rights and its contemporary theory has drawn the attention of the author for a long period of time. Specifically, the rights of two groups of citizens of our planet that have existed next to one another for as long as the world has been turning a " the perpetrators of crimes and their victims. And, unfortunately, this will never change. To learn more about the author please visit his website at www.stanik.name and www.kosmas.cz. Also published by Zsolt StanA k (in English) are in printed form and available on www.amazon.co.uk: An Angel in Hell, Humour at its Best, Joy Till Death and I Forgive You One Sin on www.fast-print.net/bookshop: Farewell to Bad Times and I Forgive You One Sin on www.kosmas.cz: Ita s enough to drive you crazy (as an E-book)

This exciting new book brings together the experiences and expertise of a range of practitioners who work within criminal justice and provides a broad and informative account of a variety of intervention techniques. From pharmacological approaches, through the treatment of various specific conditions and on to the use of poetry and art by prisoners, the book offers a series of thought-provoking chapters that will help inform the practice of anyone who works with this vulnerable population. The book is edited by Peter Jones, a leading figure in the field of working therapeutically with offenders. Vital information for: Probation officers, social workers, counsellors, psychologists who work within the criminal justice system.

Critical stories are narratives that recount the writer's experiences, situating those experiences in broader cultural contexts. In this volume of Critical Storytelling, marginalized, excluded, and oppressed peoples share insights from their liminality to help readers learn from their perspectives on living from behind invisible bars. Female inmates at Decatur's Correctional Center and the undergraduate Millikin University students who worked with them come together to give voice to their specific histories of living from behind invisibile bars and pose important questions to the reader about inciting change for the future. Specifically, the voices in this volume seek to expose, analyze, and challenge deeply-entrenched narratives and characterizations of incarcerated women, whose histories are often marked by sexual abuse, domestic violence, poverty, PTSD, a lack of education, housing insecurity, mental illness, and substance addiction. These silenced female inmate voices need to be heard and contextualized within the larger metanarrative of prison literature. Through telling critical stories, these writers attempt to: sustain recovery from trauma, make positive changes and informed decisions, create a real sense of empowerment, strengthen their capacity to exercise personal agency, and inspire audiences to create change far outside the reaches of physical and metaphorical bars. Contributors are: Anonymous, Soren Belle, Megan Batty, Dwight G. Brown, Jr., Sandra Brown, Kathryn Coffey, Kelly Cunningham, Paiten Hamilton, Kathlyn J. Housh, Rebekah Icenesse, Kala Keller, Jelisa Lovette, Bric Martin, Amanda Minetti, Laura Nearing, Angie Oaks, Claire Prendergast, Cara Quiett, J. M. Spence, Noah Villarreal and Alisha Walker.

Typical offender risk factors include a history of antisocial behavior, an antisocial personality, antisocial cognition, antisocial associates, family and/or marital problems, school or work problems, leisure or recreation problems, and substance abuse. Though there are roughly 66 risk assessment instruments that measure these factors, only 19 of them are in wide use. Of these tools, micro-level and personal factors are included on typical risk instruments while external or macro-level matters are not. Community Risk and Protective Factors for Probation and Parole Risk Assessment Tools: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential research publication that explores tools for predicting recidivism rates among incarcerated individuals. The study provides evidence for an alternative explanation for a still prevailing notion that recidivism is primarily a result of personal/internal failings (such as mental illness or cognitive impairment) versus external/societal ones. Featuring a wide range of topics such as affordable housing, policy reform, and adult education, this book is ideal for criminologists, sociologists, law enforcement, corrections officers, wardens, therapists, rehabilitation counselors, researchers, policymakers, criminal justice professionals, academicians, and students.

Are advantaged offenders defenseless against the harshness of prison life? Based upon a qualitative study of the prison adjustment of advantaged offenders--those who, prior to prison, possessed college degrees and held high status occupations with commensurately high incomes--this book challenges the special sensitivity hypothesis and concludes that these offenders adjust well to incarceration. The author compared a group of advantaged offenders to a similar group of nonadvantaged offenders, both drawn from New York State prisons, and discovered that the advantaged offenders exhibited little (if any) engagement in institutional misconduct. They also adopted effective coping strategies.

DeRosia presents a thematic analysis of in-depth, focused interviews with both subsamples, as well as vignettes based upon those interviews. Her findings reveal that advantaged offenders hold a perspective on doing time, including prescriptions for avoiding trouble, and make conscious efforts to avoid trouble by "using" time beneficially. This study contains the most current statistics available on corrections in the U.S., including its organization, the overcrowding crisis, and prisoner profiles. The nature of life in prison and prior research on adjustment are also examined.

This book is a comprehensive inquiry into the rehabilitation of criminal offenders and is based on extensive cross-cultural research on legal, ethical, philosophical, psychological, and sociological aspects of rehabilitation. Materials from these disciplines are integrated into a cohesive argument for a new concept of rehabilitation. Particularly innovative is the book's differentiation between various historical models that have been generally confounded until now, the distinction between an authoritarian and a liberty-centered concept of rehabilitation, the development of the latter into the notion of rehabilitation as a right and the definition of this right essentially as an opportunity. Beyond its contribution to theory, the book is also intended to shape policy and practices. After dealing with the general issues of the history of rehabilitation, the author chronicles the evolution of the idea from ancient China to the present and compares the legislative impact of this evolution in Anglo-American and civil law systems. Four historical models of rehabilitation are defined and examined. Rotman clarifies the controversy over rehabilitation by responding in detail to the full range of recent criticisms of the rehabilitative idea. After examining the complex interrelation of rehabilitation with imprisonment, the book reviews a number of past and present forms of rehabilitation in the community, with an eye for their potential for future development. Particular attention is given to rehabilitation of mentally disordered offenders, including the special treatment of sex offenders and European social therapeutic establishments. The book's audience will include anyone interested in law, sociology and criminal justice.

Explore the possibilities for successfully treating incarcerated or community-based substance abusersSubstance Abuse Treatment with Correctional Clients: Practical Implications for Institutional and Community Settings provides key research findings and policy implications for treating alcohol- and drug-addicted correctional clients. This book addresses a range of critical issues associated with delivering treatment in institutional and community settings. The critical thinking questions, tables, extensive bibliographies, and name and subject index will help academics and practitioners in criminal justice, sociology, counseling/psychology, and public policy. Substance Abuse Treatment with Correctional Clients shares the practical knowledge of researchers and practitioners in the fields of drug and alcohol addictions, substance abuse counseling, and criminal justice. The first section provides a review of the theoretical explanations for substance abuse, "best practice" treatment programs for substance abusers, and the use of coerced/mandated treatment. The second section addresses the substance-addicted offender in the institutional setting, the third includes works that describe community-based treatment programs and the problems associated with them, and the fourth looks at special treatment populations, including juveniles and adolescent females. In Substance Abuse Treatment with Correctional Clients, you will find: reviews of various types of treatment programs being used to treat substance-addicted individuals a study of the predictors of success and/or failure in corrections-based substance abuse programming--how to identify and use the predictors to prevent relapse arguments for and against coerced treatment in the correctional environment, and the concept of "motivation" a thorough investigation of the therapeutic community (TC) program for institutional-based substance abusers descriptions of treatment programming designed specifically for substance abusing community corrections clients--drug courts and Pennsylvania's Restrictive Intermediate Punishment treatment programSubstance Abuse Treatment with Correctional Clients guides you through the major policy issues faced by those who provide substance abuse treatment under what can only be described as coercive circumstances. In this important resource, you will discover major treatment modules as well as advice for working with adult, juvenile, and male or female offenders. This book provides you with the techniques that treatment communities need for helping offenders stay clean after they re-enter the community environment.

This book offers the first ethnographic account of prison managers in England. It explores how globalised changes, in particular managerialism, have intersected with local occupational cultures, positioning managers as micro-agents in the relationship between the global and local that characterises late modernity. The Working Lives of Prison Managers addresses key aspects of prison management, including how individuals become prison managers, their engagement with elements of traditional occupational culture, and the impact of the 'age of austerity'. It offers a particular focus on performance monitoring mechanisms such as indicators, audits and inspections, and how these intersect with local culture and individual identity. The book also examines important aspects of individual agency, including values, discretion, resistance and the use of power. It also reveals the 'hidden injuries' of contemporary prison managerialism, especially the distinctive effects experienced by women and members of minority ethnic groups.

This book demonstrates that alternative approaches to criminal rehabilitation succeed in developing pro-social attitudes and in improving mental, physical and spiritual health for youth and adults in prison and community settings. The use of mindfulness is highlighted as a foundational tool of self-reflexivity, creative expression and therapy.

This critical perspective on prison education is a marked departure from a literature dominated by descriptions of the criminal mind and correctional education strategies to cure it. Davidson's contributors are prisoners or former prisoners who finished their schooling in prison, some taking advanced degrees, or social scientists who taught in prisons but are not professional correctional educators. Conventionally, prison education is about correcting cognitive deficiencies and improving job opportunities. Here the issues are schooling as surveillance, as politics, and as a means to reconstruct a historical consciousness that remembers personal histories. The essays examine prison schools as they originated and developed, identify processes of differentiation and segregation, expose contradictions, and recount occurrences of prison resistance. There are chapters on prison education as critical pedagogy, literacy and higher education, women prisoners and education, and the irony that most prisoners believe in the American Dream while often being victims of socioeconomic inequity.

This is an innovative study of 300 delinquent boys in a medium security institution and after their release. This longitudinal field experiment shows how peers affect the rehabilitation of different group members, how staff use those influences to lead to prosocial change after release from the institution, and how different behavior, values, and feelings improved. This well-designed research has broad implications for use in graduate courses in sociology, criminology and penology, social and personality psychology, and group dynamics. The book is equally useful to administrators and policymakers dealing with delinquents and individuals with behavior problems. The field experiment was devised with both practical and theoretical purposes in mind, to develop corrective programs for delinquent youth and to test social science hypotheses in the context of a longitudinal experimental research design. The study presents a typology of delinquent boys that guides differential treatment, focuses on peer group and staff influences, and identifies factors in residential treatment and in the open community that facilitate prosocial reentry. The findings test hypotheses about group and staff impact on anti-social behavior within the institution and after release.

The voluntary sector has a long history of involvement in criminal justice by providing a variety of services to offenders and their families, victims and witnesses. This collection brings together leading experts to provide critical reflections and cutting edge research on the contemporary features of voluntary sector work in criminal justice. At a time when the voluntary sector's role is being transformed, this book examines the dynamic nature of the voluntary sector and its responses to current uncertainties, and some of the conflicting positions with regards to its present and future role in criminal justice work. It also examines the potential impact of economic, political and ideological trends on the role and remit of voluntary sector organisations which undertake criminal justice work.

Rehabilitation and Probation in England and Wales, 1900-1950 draws on a wide range of archive material to describe the arrival of a modern probation service. Focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, it describes the debates, conflicts and compromises that resulted in the creation of a state sponsored, centrally controlled, professional, secular, social work and psychological based agency. Following a chronological structure, Ray Gard explores the arrival of the so-called period of 'penal optimism', showing how rehabilitation arrived in the courts of England and Wales. The book uses archive and original material to give voice to those devising and implementing policy, revealing an uneven path to a modern probation system.

This book examines the conciliatory institutions that operate within criminal law in the People's Republic of China and Taiwan. Despite having the same legal traditions, the two countries have taken very different political and social roads over the past century. Taking these important factors into account, the book compares the conciliatory mechanisms that have emerged in the two countries, particularly focusing on the influence of Confucian tradition in current criminal reconciliation practices. By drawing upon in-depth interviews with multiple experts in the area, the role of tradition in the discipline of modern Xingshi Hejie is explored, alongside an analysis of the reasons that lead victims and offenders to choose this conciliatory procedure. The book offers a fascinating account of this feature of criminal justice in China and Taiwan, and will be of particular interest to scholars interested in comparative approaches to criminology and criminal justice.

Will 'what works' in one country work in another? This unique collection examines the cross-cultural transfer of skills and expertise, drawing out the opportunities and challenges involved in taking penal practices from one country to another.

A series of essays considering the use of social groupwork with offenders in carceral and community settings

DESCRIPTION: People with mental illness in the criminal justice system are a vexing problem in many countries. Efforts to cope with this problem have taken a number of forms and this volume explores the key issues in this area. Whether and to what extent any of these efforts achieve their goals remains a significant question for researchers from a range of disciplines and for actors and stakeholders from various sectors of the mental health and criminal justice systems TABLE OF CONTENTS: Contributors; Introduction; Criminal Justice Involvement and Severe Mental Illness; Where is the 'illness' in the criminalization of mental illness?; Treatment Modalities for Offenders with Mental Illness; Community mental health services and criminal justice involvement among persons with mental illness; Case management and the forensic client; The impact of 'new generation' anti-psychotic medications on criminal justice outcomes; Embedding Community Mental Health Service System Interventions in the Criminal Justice Process: From Arrest to Release; Jail diversion for people with mental illness: what do we really know); The nature of the alliance: an anthropological look at the practice of forensic psychiatry; Courting the court: courts as agents for treatment and justice; Prison, hospital or community: community re-entry and mentally ill offenders.

The Baby Peter and Dano Sonnex incidents were high profile cases in which two key public services, namely child protection and probation, both failed in their tasks of protection of the victims and the public. In this book the author graphically describes media and political reactions and then proceeds to analyze the common problems both social work and probation practice face under conditions of economic recession and drastic reductions in funding. This new paperback version comes with a foreword from Shadd Maruna, Professor of Justice and Human Development and Director of the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Queen's University, Belfast, UK.

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."

Offender rehabilitation has become increasingly and almost exclusively associated with structured cognitive-behavioural programmes. For fifty years, however, a small number of English prisons have promoted an alternative method of rehabilitation: the democratic therapeutic community (TC). These prisons offer long-term prisoners convicted of serious offences the opportunity to undertake group psychotherapy within an overtly supportive and esteem-enhancing living environment.

Drawing upon original research conducted with residents (prisoners) and staff at three TC prisons, "Offender Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Communities" provides a uniquely evocative and engaging portrayal of the TC regime. Individual chapters focus on residents adaptation to the TC way of rehabilitation and imprisonment; the development of caring relationships between community members; residents contributions towards the safe and efficient running of their community; and the greater assimilation of sexual offenders within TCs for men, made possible in part by a lessening in hypermasculinity .

By analyzing residents own accounts of desistance in process in the TC, this book argues that TCs help offenders to change by enabling positive developments to their personal identity and self-narratives: to the ways in which they see themselves and their life. The radically different penal environment allows its residents to become someone different .

The United States of America is in possession of the largest prison population in the world, with 2.3 million people currently behind bars. This number is predominantly and disproportionately made up of communities of colour and poverty. Between 1987 and 2007, the U.S. prison population tripled; the direct result of various 'tough on crime' public policies. Organizers and scholars use the term prison industrial complex (PIC) to name the structure that encompasses the expanding economic and political contexts of the detention and corrections industry in the USA. The PIC is a network that sutures capital, communities and the State to a permanent punishment economy. The term 'the PIC' aims to capture the range of material and ideological forces that shape the growth of detention: the political and lobbying power of the corrections officers unions, the framing of prisons and jails as a growth industry in the context of deindustrialization, the production and sales of technology and security required to maintain and expand the state of incarceration, and the naturalization of isolation as a logical response to harm. Education and Incarceration highlights the significance of centering agency and autonomy, and documents scholars who work to be accountable to justice movements and communities, not simply to academic disciplines or to research. Additionally, as emerging scholars committed to challenging the PIC, these authors struggle to build multi-layered analytic and material tools for resistance within and beyond the walls of schools, jails and prisons. This book provides snapshots of practices in motion: activist scholars working to engage, to be accountable to families, communities and larger justice movements, and to build abolition democracies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Race Ethnicity and Education.

Can offenders be rehabilitated? Can this be done in ways that benefit the community as a whole, as well as offenders? This book is about the history, theory, practice and effectiveness of rehabilitation. It shows how different beliefs about the value of rehabilitation and about 'what works' have influenced criminal justice policy and practice at different times, and it identifies a number of promising approaches for the future. Everyone interested in the rehabilitation of offenders should read this book.

This book recounts a successful effort to resocialize criminal offenders placed in Kibbutzim. Social scientist Michael Fischer and educational philosopher Brenda Geiger describe the events and experiences that unfolded when a Kibbutz adopted an Israeli ex-convict as a temporary member of its collective. They conclude that resocialization is achievable: that a world of hard work, interdependence, and self-denial can successfully compete against the temptations for adventure and diversion in an offender's past and present. Fischer and Geiger reconstruct the subjective experiences of the Israeli ex-convicts who were invited to live and work as members on separate Kibbutzim. They detail how a protective environment, daily routines, egalitarianism, peer group support, acceptance, and trust yielded involvement, commitment, and higher self-esteem on the part of the offenders. Relating the kibbutz experience to theories of social psychology and criminology, Fischer and Geiger offer a model for resocialization combining group dynamics with social learning in a context of meaningful work and acceptance. This study is valuable to students and scholars of social psychology, criminology, and Judaic Studies.