The Growth of Incarceration in the United States

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States PDF Author: Committee on Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 9780309298018
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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Book Description
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.

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States PDF Author: Committee on Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 9780309298018
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 800

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Book Description
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.

The Prisoner Society

The Prisoner Society PDF Author: Ben Crewe
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019162974X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 533

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Book Description
While the use of imprisonment continues to rise in developed nations, we have little sociological knowledge of the prison's inner world. Based on extensive fieldwork in a medium-security prison, The Prisoner Society: Power, Adaptation and Social Life in an English Prison provides an in-depth analysis of the prison's social anatomy. It explains how power is exercised by the institution, individualizing the prisoner community and demanding particular forms of compliance and engagement. Drawing on prisoners' life stories, it supplies a detailed typology of adaptive styles, showing how different prisoners experience and respond to the new range of penal practices and frustrations. It then explains how the prisoner society - its norms, hierarchy and social relationships - is shaped both by these conditions of confinement and by the different backgrounds, values and identities that prisoners bring into the prison environment. Through this analysis, this meticulously researched book aims to revive and update the dormant tradition of prison ethnography. It provides an empirical snapshot of a modern prison, documenting the aims and techniques of contemporary imprisonment and illuminating the social structures and behaviours that they generate. Through a penetrating account of power relations throughout the institution, the author documents the pains of modern imprisonment, the new techniques of survival, and the prison's distinctive forms of trade, friendship and everyday culture.

Health and Incarceration

Health and Incarceration PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309287715
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 67

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Book Description
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.

Prison and Social Death

Prison and Social Death PDF Author: Joshua M. Price
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813565596
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson’s term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer “social death.” In Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families. Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and children. Moreover, this isolation of people in prison renders them highly vulnerable to other forms of violence, including sexual violence. Price stresses that the violence they face goes beyond physical abuse by prison guards and it involves institutionalized forms of mistreatment, ranging from abysmally poor health care to routine practices that are arguably abusive, such as pat-downs, cavity searches, and the shackling of pregnant women. And social death does not end with prison. The condition is permanent, following people after they are released from prison. Finding housing, employment, receiving social welfare benefits, and regaining voting rights are all hindered by various legal and other hurdles. The mechanisms of social death, Price shows, are also informal and cultural. Ex-prisoners face numerous forms of distrust and are permanently stigmatized by other citizens around them. A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.

Prisoners in Prison Societies

Prisoners in Prison Societies PDF Author: Ulla Bondeson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351308114
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Prisoners in Prison Societies is a study of criminal career patterns over time, demonstrating specifically how and in what ways imprisonment has a positive correlation with later recidivism. The book combines original research and a ten-year follow-up study of Swedish inmates, surveying their attitudes on everything from political ideology to prison reform. The work is much more than a survey of prisoner attitudes, however; it also includes official statements and administrative staff assessments at the institutions examined. As a result, the text avoids the usual special pleading of criminological writings.Prisoners in Prison Societies analyzes thirteen correctional institutions, ranging from training schools to youth and adult prisons as well as a preventive detention facility. These four types cover representative samples of male and female, young and old offenders. In individual and group interviews, conducted with a time interval, the author finds that the form of incarceration is less significant in determining prisoner behavior than the fact of incarceration as such. Whether one looks at the data across variables or in longitudinal terms, the fact of criminalization rather than the goal of rehabilitation creates conditions of permanent incarceration.A leitmotif of the book is comparison of penal institutions and policies in the U.S. and Sweden, with an encyclopedic presentation of the sociological and criminological literature. From the American tradition, Bondeson distinguishes between program research and sanction research. Her notion of prisonization, as a special form of socialization, derives from the work of scholars from Clemmer to Goffman. Her work utilizes notions of informal social systems within formal systems, especially how the former preempt the latter. The interplay of original research at the prison level, coupled with a sweeping command of the basic literature, makes this book unique.

Beyond Bars

Beyond Bars PDF Author: Jeffrey Ian Ross Ph.D.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101108525
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
An essential resource for former convicts and their families post-incarceration. The United States has the largest criminal justice system in the world, with currently over 7 million adults and juveniles in jail, prison, or community custody. Because they spend enough time in prison to disrupt their connections to their families and their communities, they are not prepared for the difficult and often life-threatening process of reentry. As a result, the percentage of these people who return to a life of crime and additional prison time escalates each year. Beyond Bars is the most current, practical, and comprehensive guide for ex-convicts and their families about managing a successful reentry into the community and includes: • Tips on how to prepare for release while still in prison • Ways to deal with family members, especially spouses and children • Finding a job • Money issues such as budgets, bank accounts, taxes, and debt • Avoiding drugs and other illicit activities • Free resources to rely on for support

Annual Report of the Inspectors of the Eastern State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania

Annual Report of the Inspectors of the Eastern State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania PDF Author: State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Criminal statistics
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description


Prisoners Once Removed

Prisoners Once Removed PDF Author: Jeremy Travis
Publisher: The Urban Insitute
ISBN: 9780877667155
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Addresses the issues of parenting behind bars and fostering successful family relationships after release.

The Society of Prisoners

The Society of Prisoners PDF Author: Renaud Morieux
Publisher:
ISBN: 019872358X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Very little has been written of the history of prisoners of war before the twentieth century, and Renaud Morieux seeks to correct this in this new history of war captivity in the eighteenth century, mining archives in Britain and France to take a fresh look at international relations through the histories of prisoners and host communities.

Liberating Minds

Liberating Minds PDF Author: Ellen Condliffe Lagemann
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1620971232
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
An authoritative and thought-provoking argument for offering free college in prisons—from the former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Anthony Cardenales was a stickup artist in the Bronx before spending seventeen years in prison. Today he is a senior manager at a recycling plant in Westchester, New York. He attributes his ability to turn his life around to the college degree he earned in prison. Many college-in-prison graduates achieve similar success and the positive ripple effects for their families and communities, and for the country as a whole, are dramatic. College-in-prison programs have been shown to greatly reduce recidivism. They increase post-prison employment, allowing the formerly incarcerated to better support their families and to reintegrate successfully into their communities. College programs also decrease violence within prisons, improving conditions for both correction officers and the incarcerated. Liberating Minds eloquently makes the case for these benefits and also illustrates them through the stories of formerly incarcerated college students. As the country confronts its legacy of over-incarceration, college-in-prison provides a corrective on the path back to a more democratic and humane society. “Lagemann includes intensive research, but her most powerful supporting evidence comes from the anecdotes of former prisoners who have become published poets, social workers, and nonprofit leaders.”—Publishers Weekly