Download or read book Tackling Prison Overcrowding written by Hough, Mike and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2008-10-22 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tackling Prison Overcrowding is a response to controversial proposals and sentencing set out in by Lord Patrick Carter's review of prisons, published in 2007." "This book comprises nine chapters by leading academic experts, who expose the proposals of the Carter Review to critical scrutiny. They take the Carter Report to task for construing the problems too narrowly, in terms of efficiency and economy, and for failing to understand the wider issues of justice that need addressing. They argue that the crisis of prison overcrowding is first and foremost a political problem - arising from penal populism - for which political solutions need to be found."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Prisoners of Politics written by Rachel Elise Barkow and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A CounterPunch Best Book of the Year A Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book “If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.” —James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The social consequences of this fact—recycling people who commit crimes through an overwhelmed system and creating a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are devastating. A leading criminal justice reformer who has successfully rewritten sentencing guidelines, Rachel Barkow argues that we would be safer, and have fewer people in prison, if we relied more on expertise and evidence and worried less about being “tough on crime.” A groundbreaking work that is transforming our national conversation on crime and punishment, Prisoners of Politics shows how problematic it is to base criminal justice policy on the whims of the electorate and argues for an overdue shift that could upend our prison problem and make America a more equitable society. “A critically important exploration of the political dynamics that have made us one of the most punitive societies in human history. A must-read by one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy “Barkow’s analysis suggests that it is not enough to slash police budgets if we want to ensure lasting reform. We also need to find ways to insulate the process from political winds.” —David Cole, New York Review of Books “A cogent and provocative argument about how to achieve true institutional reform and fix our broken system.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Charged
Download or read book Health and Incarceration written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2013-08-08 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration in the United States has skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, both historically and in comparison to that of other developed nations. At far higher rates than the general population, those in or entering U.S. jails and prisons are prone to many health problems. This is a problem not just for them, but also for the communities from which they come and to which, in nearly all cases, they will return. Health and Incarceration is the summary of a workshop jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences(NAS) Committee on Law and Justice and the Institute of Medicine(IOM) Board on Health and Select Populations in December 2012. Academics, practitioners, state officials, and nongovernmental organization representatives from the fields of healthcare, prisoner advocacy, and corrections reviewed what is known about these health issues and what appear to be the best opportunities to improve healthcare for those who are now or will be incarcerated. The workshop was designed as a roundtable with brief presentations from 16 experts and time for group discussion. Health and Incarceration reviews what is known about the health of incarcerated individuals, the healthcare they receive, and effects of incarceration on public health. This report identifies opportunities to improve healthcare for these populations and provides a platform for visions of how the world of incarceration health can be a better place.
Download or read book The Politics of Prison Crowding written by Simone Santorso and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Prison Crowding investigates recent transformations in Italy’s penal system to make the key analytical observation that conditions of overcrowding have become the ‘new normal’ under which the modern prison system continues to operate and deliver punishment. Engaging with the politics of crowding thus entails a direct and pertinent engagement with the modern state’s politics of criminal justice and social control. Worldwide, over the last decades, a growing number of jurisdictions have prison systems operating above or to the limit of their capacity, yet little attention has been paid to these elements in the analysis of prison politics and day-to-day functions. By exploring the crowding issue, this book offers an original and interesting insight into the politics and dynamics characterising contemporary prison systems. The hypothesis of this book is that the politics of prison crowding have become the template for the daily administration of the prison system, which incorporates not just policy and rules but day-to-day functions and practices regulating life behind bars. Through interviews in modern Italian prisons, the book brings to light a radical redefinition of a carceral system that harshens the delivery of punishment while justifying this exacerbation of pain by adding new bureaucratic logic to the administration of the penal system within a narrative of compliance to human rights standards. By shedding new light on prison politics to open new critical perspectives and research paths, The Politics of Prison Crowding offers a fundamental tool to scholars, students, and all professional policymakers and practitioners dealing with prison policies and the politics of justice.
Download or read book The Growth of Incarceration in the United States written by Committee on Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2014-12-31 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of stability from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the rate of imprisonment in the United States has increased fivefold during the last four decades. The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons. The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is 5 to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies. The U.S. prison population is largely drawn from the most disadvantaged part of the nation's population: mostly men under age 40, disproportionately minority, and poorly educated. Prisoners often carry additional deficits of drug and alcohol addictions, mental and physical illnesses, and lack of work preparation or experience. The growth of incarceration in the United States during four decades has prompted numerous critiques and a growing body of scientific knowledge about what prompted the rise and what its consequences have been for the people imprisoned, their families and communities, and for U.S. society. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines research and analysis of the dramatic rise of incarceration rates and its affects. This study makes the case that the United States has gone far past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits and has reached a level where these high rates of incarceration themselves constitute a source of injustice and social harm. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines policy changes that created an increasingly punitive political climate and offers specific policy advice in sentencing policy, prison policy, and social policy. The report also identifies important research questions that must be answered to provide a firmer basis for policy. This report is a call for change in the way society views criminals, punishment, and prison. This landmark study assesses the evidence and its implications for public policy to inform an extensive and thoughtful public debate about and reconsideration of policies.
Download or read book Prisons Crowding A Psychological Perspective written by Paul Paulus and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-05-30 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a summary of a 1S-year effort to determine the effects of prison crowding and their relationship to the broader realm of crowding phenomena and theories. Although the writing of this volume was for the most part a solitary effort, the data and ideas it is based on were mostly the result of a collaborative effort with Verne Cox and Garvin McCain. Their schedules limited their ability to contribute to this volume, but they provided much constructive feedback and assistance. Cox also wrote a preliminary draft of Chapter 3, and both McCain and Cox made major contributions to Chapter S and assisted with several other chapters. I am greatly indebted to these two fine scholars for their efforts and support over the course of our joint research endeavors. In recognition of this fact, the pronoun "we" is used throughout this volume. This research would not have been possible without the cooperation and support of thousands of inmates and hundreds of prison officials. The un conditional support throughout the project from Director Norman Carlson and former regional research director Jerome Mabli, both of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is also greatly appreciated. Thanks are due to the National Institute of Justice for financial support during various phases of this project. The support of John Spevacek of the Institute was indispens able. Funds were also provided by the Hogg Foundation, U. S. Department of Justice-Civil Rights Division, and the University of Texas at Arlington.
Download or read book Building the Prison State written by Heather Schoenfeld and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world—about 1 in 100 adults, or more than 2 million people—while national spending on prisons has catapulted 400 percent. Given the vast racial disparities in incarceration, the prison system also reinforces race and class divisions. How and why did we become the world’s leading jailer? And what can we, as a society, do about it? Reframing the story of mass incarceration, Heather Schoenfeld illustrates how the unfinished task of full equality for African Americans led to a series of policy choices that expanded the government’s power to punish, even as they were designed to protect individuals from arbitrary state violence. Examining civil rights protests, prison condition lawsuits, sentencing reforms, the War on Drugs, and the rise of conservative Tea Party politics, Schoenfeld explains why politicians veered from skepticism of prisons to an embrace of incarceration as the appropriate response to crime. To reduce the number of people behind bars, Schoenfeld argues that we must transform the political incentives for imprisonment and develop a new ideological basis for punishment.
Download or read book A Country Called Prison written by Mary D. Looman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weaving together sociological and psychological principles, theories of political reform, and real-life stories from experiences working in prison and with at-risk families, Looman and Carl form a foundation of understanding to demonstrate that prison is a culture, not purely an institution made up of fences, building, and policies.
Download or read book A Second Look at Alleviating Jail Crowding written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Politics of Imprisonment written by Vanessa Barker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-26 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The attention devoted to the unprecedented levels of imprisonment in the United States obscure an obvious but understudied aspect of criminal justice: there is no consistent punishment policy across the U.S. It is up to individual states to administer their criminal justice systems, and the differences among them are vast. For example, while some states enforce mandatory minimum sentencing, some even implementing harsh and degrading practices, others rely on community sanctions. What accounts for these differences? The Politics of Imprisonment seeks to document and explain variation in American penal sanctioning, drawing out the larger lessons for America's overreliance on imprisonment. Grounding her study in a comparison of how California, Washington, and New York each developed distinctive penal regimes in the late 1960s and early 1970s--a critical period in the history of crime control policy and a time of unsettling social change--Vanessa Barker concretely demonstrates that subtle but crucial differences in political institutions, democratic traditions, and social trust shape the way American states punish offenders. Barker argues that the apparent link between public participation, punitiveness, and harsh justice is not universal but dependent upon the varying institutional contexts and patterns of civic engagement within the U.S. and across liberal democracies. A bracing examination of the relationship between punishment and democracy, The Politics of Imprisonment not only suggests that increased public participation in the political process can support and sustain less coercive penal regimes, but also warns that it is precisely a lack of civic engagement that may underpin mass incarceration in the United States.
Download or read book Prison Policy in Ireland written by Mary Rogan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2011-04 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how Irish prison policy has come to take on its particular character, with comparatively low prison numbers, significant reliance on short sentences and a policy-making climate in which long periods of neglect are interspersed with bursts of political activity all prominent features. Drawing on the emerging scholarship of policy analysis, the book argues that it is only through close attention to the way in which policy is formed that we will fully understand the nature of prison policy.
Download or read book The New Jim Crow written by Michelle Alexander and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
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 Rethinking the American Prison Movement written by Dan Berger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking the American Prison Movement provides a short, accessible overview of the transformational and ongoing struggles against America’s prison system. Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier show that prisoners have used strikes, lawsuits, uprisings, writings, and diverse coalitions with free-world allies to challenge prison conditions and other kinds of inequality. From the forced labor camps of the nineteenth century to the rebellious protests of the 1960s and 1970s to the rise of mass incarceration and its discontents, Rethinking the American Prison Movement is invaluable to anyone interested in the history of American prisons and the struggles for justice still echoing in the present day.
Download or read book The Scale of Imprisonment written by Franklin E. Zimring and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1993-09 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two of the nation's foremost criminal justice scholars present a comprehensive assessment of the factors behind the growth and subsequent overcrowding of American prisons. By critiquing the existing scholarship on prison scale from sociology and history to correctional forecasting and economics, they both reveal that explicit policy changes have had little influence on the increases in imprisonment in recent years and analyze whether it is possible to place limits effectively on prison population. "The Scale of Imprisonment has an exceptionally well designed literature review of interest to public policy, criminal justice, and public law scholars. Its careful review, analysis, and critique of research is stimulating and inventive."—American Political Science Review "The authors fram our thoughts about the soaring use of imprisonment and stimulate our thinking about the best way we as criminologists can conduct rational analysis and provide meaningful advice."—Susan Guarino-Ghezzi, Journal of Quantitative Criminology "Zimring and Hawkins bring a long tradition of excellent criminological scholarship to the seemingly intractable problems of prisons, prison overcrowding, and the need for alternative forms of punishment."—J. C. Watkins, Jr., Choice
Download or read book The Prison and the Gallows written by Marie Gottschalk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-19 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. Nearly one in 50 people, excluding children and the elderly, is incarcerated today, a rate unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. What are some of the main political forces that explain this unprecedented reliance on mass imprisonment? Throughout American history, crime and punishment have been central features of American political development. This 2006 book examines the development of four key movements that mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: the victims' movement, the women's movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and opponents of the death penalty. This book argues that punitive penal policies were forged by particular social movements and interest groups within the constraints of larger institutional structures and historical developments that distinguish the United States from other Western countries.
Download or read book The Impact of Covid 19 on Prison Conditions and Penal Policy written by Frieder Dünkel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Impact of COVID-19 on Prison Conditions and Penal Policy presents the results of a worldwide exchange of information on the impact of COVID-19 in prisons. It also focuses on the human rights questions that have been raised during the pandemic, relating to the treatment of prisoners in institutions for both juveniles and adults worldwide. The first part brings together the findings and conclusions of leading prison academics and practitioners, presenting national reports with information on the prison system, prison population rates, how COVID-19 was and is managed in prisons, and its impact on living conditions inside prisons and on reintegration programmes. Forty-four countries are covered – many in Europe, but also Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Perú, Costa Rica, Canada, the USA, Kenya, South Africa, China, India, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. In the second part, thematic chapters concentrate explicitly on the impact of the pandemic on the application of international human rights standards in prisons and on worldwide prison population rates. The book concludes by drawing out the commonalities and diverging practices between jurisdictions, discussing the impact of measures introduced and reflecting on what could be learnt from policies that emerged during the pandemic. Particular attention is paid to whether "reductionist" strategies that emerged during the pandemic can be used to counteract mass incarceration and prison overcrowding in the future. Although the book reflects the situation until mid 2021, after the second and during the third wave of the pandemic, it is highly relevant to the current situation, as the living conditions in prisons did not change significantly during the following waves, which showed high infection rates (in particular in the general population), but increased vaccination rates, too. In prisons, problems the pandemic raises have an even greater impact than for the general society. Revealing many notable and interesting changes in prison life and in release programmes, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of penology, criminology, law, sociology and public health. It will also appeal to criminal justice practitioners and policy makers.
