Download or read book Sentenced to Debt written by Louise Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Robert Forrester moved to London in the early 1780s, he was a 'nobody' in terms of documented history. A judgment at the Old Bailey in 1783 turned him into a 'somebody'.Along with hundreds of other men and women whose homeland did not want them and forcibly expelled them, in 1787 he was loaded aboard one of the First Fleet ships bound for the far side of the world. They anchored in Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788. An astonishing new chapter opened in the long story of an ancient continent.In 1791 a small group of selected convicts allowed to become the first 'new Australians' included Robert Forrester. He'd escaped his death sentence but his land grant in the Hawkesbury's 'valley of floods' quickly sentenced him to debt. Interactions with the 'First Australians', the custodians of his land for 60,000 years, earned him and his partner Isabella Ramsay a permanent place in Australian history. Be transported, not like Robert on a convict ship, but by this engrossing true story of a resilient if inadvertent founder of modern Australia.
Download or read book A Pound of Flesh written by Alexes Harris and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2016-06-08 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over seven million Americans are either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, with their criminal records often following them for life and affecting access to higher education, jobs, and housing. Court-ordered monetary sanctions that compel criminal defendants to pay fines, fees, surcharges, and restitution further inhibit their ability to reenter society. In A Pound of Flesh, sociologist Alexes Harris analyzes the rise of monetary sanctions in the criminal justice system and shows how they permanently penalize and marginalize the poor. She exposes the damaging effects of a little-understood component of criminal sentencing and shows how it further perpetuates racial and economic inequality. Harris draws from extensive sentencing data, legal documents, observations of court hearings, and interviews with defendants, judges, prosecutors, and other court officials. She documents how low-income defendants are affected by monetary sanctions, which include fees for public defenders and a variety of processing charges. Until these debts are paid in full, individuals remain under judicial supervision, subject to court summons, warrants, and jail stays. As a result of interest and surcharges that accumulate on unpaid financial penalties, these monetary sanctions often become insurmountable legal debts which many offenders carry for the remainder of their lives. Harris finds that such fiscal sentences, which are imposed disproportionately on low-income minorities, help create a permanent economic underclass and deepen social stratification. A Pound of Flesh delves into the court practices of five counties in Washington State to illustrate the ways in which subjective sentencing shapes the practice of monetary sanctions. Judges and court clerks hold a considerable degree of discretion in the sentencing and monitoring of monetary sanctions and rely on individual values—such as personal responsibility, meritocracy, and paternalism—to determine how much and when offenders should pay. Harris shows that monetary sanctions are imposed at different rates across jurisdictions, with little or no state government oversight. Local officials’ reliance on their own values and beliefs can also push offenders further into debt—for example, when judges charge defendants who lack the means to pay their fines with contempt of court and penalize them with additional fines or jail time. A Pound of Flesh provides a timely examination of how monetary sanctions permanently bind poor offenders to the judicial system. Harris concludes that in letting monetary sanctions go unchecked, we have created a two-tiered legal system that imposes additional burdens on already-marginalized groups.
Download or read book Prisons of Debt written by Lynne Haney and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction : From deadbeat to deadbroke -- Making men pay -- The debt of imprisonment -- Punishing parents, creating criminals -- The imprisonment of debt -- The good, the bad, and the dead broke -- Cyclical parenting -- Conclusion : Reforming debt, reimagining fatherhood -- Appendix : about the research.
Download or read book The New Debtors Prison written by Christopher B. Maselli and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debtors’ prisons might sound like something out of a Dickens novel, but what most Americans do not realize is that they are alive and well in a new and startling form. Today more than 20 percent of the prison population is incarcerated for financial reasons such as failing to pay a fine. This alarming trend not only affects the poor, who are hit particularly hard, but also ensnares the millions of self-identified middle-class people who are struggling to make ends meet. All across the country people are being fined and even imprisoned for offenses as small as delinquency on student debt or an unpaid parking ticket. However, there is an insidious undercurrent to these practices that the average person might not realize. Many counties depend on a steady supply of citizens to pay fines and court costs in order to make their budgets. Minor vehicle infractions, by design, can rack up hundreds of dollars in charges that go straight to the city’s coffers. Combine this with the fact that many middle-class people cannot handle an unexpected $400 expense and the general lack of awareness about the risk for being repeatedly jailed for failure to pay court costs, probation, and even per day charges for being in jail and you get an endless cycle of men and women either in debt or in prison for debt. While shocking to some, this system makes up today’s debtors’ prisons. In The New Debtors’ Prison, Christopher Maselli draws from his personal knowledge of the criminal justice system based on his experience on both sides of the prison walls as an attorney as well as a former inmate, to take a hard look at our modern prison system that systematically targets the poor and vulnerable of our society in order to fund the prison-industrial complex.
Download or read book Robert Forrester First Fleeter written by Louise Wilson and published by L. Wilson. This book was released on 2009-01 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sydney's early history abounds with tales of men and women behaving badly. Robert Forrester, who arrived in Sydney Harbour aboard the First Fleet vessel 'Scarborough' on 26 January 1788, at first glance was just another ne'er-do-well. He was caught up in a 'scam' in London. He was charged with drunkenness and insolence in Sydney. He was the first man in Australia who appeared before a court enquiry into the murder of an Aborigine. His legal wife, and then his second 'common law' wife, disappeared from the records. Yet determined detective work, recreating his adult life, has revealed that Robert Forrester might even have been 'a decent bloke'.
Download or read book Oppressed by Debt written by Saul Schwartz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection brings together essays that explore personal debts to government. Intensive collection efforts by governments in need of revenue often cause hardship, whether it is the poor in the United States going to jail because of unpaid fines, low-income English people being evicted because they paid their council taxes but could then not pay their rent, or poor former students having tax refunds or social benefits taken by the government when they have defaulted on their student loans. Student loans, fines and fees arising from the justice system, benefit overpayments and unpaid taxes have all ballooned in the past decade, but no other volume comprehensively addresses the various ways in which governments have become privileged creditors, using their power to collect debts owed to them by their citizens. With each essay emphasizing a particular kind of debt to government, the book focuses on what happens when citizens cannot pay the debts they owe to their governments. Contributors offer pragmatic options to facilitate a movement to soften the stance of governments toward those who owe them money. The insights in this collection will be of relevance to students and academics in criminology, sociology, public policy, and economics, as well as policymakers and government officials interested in effecting change in this area.
Download or read book Sentenced to debt written by Bjørn Brede Hansen and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Guidelines Manual written by United States Sentencing Commission and published by . This book was released on 1988-10 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Golden Gulag written by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-01-08 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.
Download or read book Sentenced to Debt written by Judit Kiss and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Punishment Without Crime written by Alexandra Natapoff and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018
Download or read book Sentence written by Daniel Genis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of a decade in prison by a well-educated young addict known as the "Apologetic Bandit" In 2003 Daniel Genis, the son of a famous Soviet émigré writer, broadcaster, and culture critic, was fresh out of NYU when he faced a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and ultimately crime. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint, he was nicknamed the “Apologetic Bandit” in the press, given his habit of expressing regret to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to twelve years—ten with good behavior, a decade he survived by reading 1,046 books, taking up weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with his fellow inmates, working at a series of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him. Genis describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system. In his journey from Rikers Island and through a series of upstate institutions, he encounters violence on an almost daily basis, while learning about the social strata of gangs, the “court” system that sets geographic boundaries in prison yards, how sex was obtained, the workings of the black market in drugs and more practical goods, the inventiveness required for everyday tasks such as cooking, and how debilitating solitary confinement actually is—all while trying to preserve his relationship with his wife, whom he recently married. Written with empathy and wit, Sentence is a strikingly powerful memoir of the brutalities of prison and how one man survived them, leaving its walls with this book inside him, “one made of pain and fear and laughter and lots of other books.”
Download or read book Slavery by Another Name written by Douglas A. Blackmon and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
Download or read book Sentenced to Debt African Debt Crisis Facts Causes and Remedies written by and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Doing Time written by Bell Gale Chevigny and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Doing time.” For prison writers, it means more than serving a sentence; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one’s humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers’ organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. Bell Chevigny, a former prison teacher, has selected the best of these submissions from over the last 25 years to create Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing—a vital work, demonstrating that prison writing is a vibrant part of American literature. This new edition will contain updated biographies of all contributors. The 51 original prisoners contributing to this volume deliver surprising tales, lyrics, and dispatches from an alien world covering the life span of imprisonment, from terrifying initiations to poignant friendships, from confrontations with family to death row, and sometimes share extraordinary breakthroughs. With 1.8 million men and women—roughly the population of Houston—In American jails and prisons, we must listen to “this small country of throwaway people,” in Prejean’s words. Doing Time frees them from their sentence of silence. We owe it to ourselves to listen to their voices.
Download or read book Mr Smith Goes to Prison written by Jeff Smith and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A politician's humorous memoir of his year in federal prison, with a viable prescription for a more productive, cost-effective corrections system.
Download or read book Good Cop Bad Criminal written by Gary Sahlin and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-20 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gary Sahlin was a good cop, but a bad criminal. His childhood dream was to become a police officer. He accomplished this dream after serving honorably in the United States Navy. Then, after a series of unfortunate events, and some very poor decisions, he ended up in the federal prison system serving a twenty-year sentence for a bank robbery. Instead of wallowing in depression with the way his life turned out he decided to turn a negative situation into a positive one. Navigating through the justice system as an ex-cop wasn't always easy, but he made it and he came out a much better person. He is now sharing his story about living on both sides of the law in an entertaining, informative and compelling new book titled: Good Cop, Bad Criminal: Becoming a Cop, a Criminal and Life on Both Sides of the Law.
