Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration PDF Author: Chris Surprenant
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351692410
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This book offers a philosophical examination of incarceration as a form of punishment. A diverse group of contributors engages with research in criminology, economics, law, and sociology to help contextualize the philosophical issues.

Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration PDF Author: Chris Surprenant
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351692410
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This book offers a philosophical examination of incarceration as a form of punishment. A diverse group of contributors engages with research in criminology, economics, law, and sociology to help contextualize the philosophical issues.

Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration PDF Author: Chris W. Surprenant
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351692402
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
One of the most important problems faced by the United States is addressing its broken criminal justice system. This collection of essays offers a thorough examination of incarceration as a form of punishment. In addition to focusing on the philosophical aspects related to punishment, the volume’s diverse group of contributors provides additional background in criminology, economics, law, and sociology to help contextualize the philosophical issues. The first group of essays addresses whether or not our current institutions connected with punishment and incarceration are justified in a liberal society. The next set of chapters explores the negative effects of incarceration as a form of punishment, including its impact on children and families. The volume then describes how we arrived at our current situation in the United States, focusing on questions related to how we view prisons and prisoners, policing for profit, and the motivations of prosecutors in trying to secure convictions. Finally, Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration examines specific policy alternatives that might offer solutions to our current approach to punishment and incarceration.

Rethinking Punishment

Rethinking Punishment PDF Author: Leo Zaibert
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110867660X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
The age-old debate about what constitutes just punishment has become deadlocked. Retributivists continue to privilege desert over all else, and consequentialists continue to privilege punishment's expected positive consequences, such as deterrence or rehabilitation, over all else. In this important intervention into the debate, Leo Zaibert argues that despite some obvious differences, these traditional positions are structurally very similar, and that the deadlock between them stems from the fact they both oversimplify the problem of punishment. Proponents of these positions pay insufficient attention to the conflicts of values that punishment, even when justified, generates. Mobilizing recent developments in moral philosophy, Zaibert offers a properly pluralistic justification of punishment that is necessarily more complex than its traditional counterparts. An understanding of this complexity should promote a more cautious approach to inflicting punishment on individual wrongdoers and to developing punitive policies and institutions.

Rethinking the American Prison Movement

Rethinking the American Prison Movement PDF Author: Dan Berger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317662229
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
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.

Rethinking Incarceration

Rethinking Incarceration PDF Author: Dominique DuBois Gilliard
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830887733
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
The United States has more people locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers than any other country in the history of the world. Exploring the history and foundations of mass incarceration, Dominique Gilliard examines Christianity’s role in its evolution and expansion, assessing justice in light of Scripture, and showing how Christians can pursue justice that restores and reconciles.

Homeward

Homeward PDF Author: Bruce Western
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610448715
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments rife with violence. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over one hundred individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability despite their efforts to rejoin society. Western and his research team conducted comprehensive interviews with men and women released from the Massachusetts state prison system who returned to neighborhoods around Boston. Western finds that for most, leaving prison is associated with acute material hardship. In the first year after prison, most respondents could not afford their own housing and relied on family support and government programs, with half living in deep poverty. Many struggled with chronic pain, mental illnesses, or addiction—the most important predictor of recidivism. Most respondents were also unemployed. Some older white men found union jobs in the construction industry through their social networks, but many others, particularly those who were black or Latino, were unable to obtain full-time work due to few social connections to good jobs, discrimination, and lack of credentials. Violence was common in their lives, and often preceded their incarceration. In contrast to the stereotype of tough criminals preying upon helpless citizens, Western shows that many former prisoners were themselves subject to lifetimes of violence and abuse and encountered more violence after leaving prison, blurring the line between victims and perpetrators. Western concludes that boosting the social integration of former prisoners is key to both ameliorating deep disadvantage and strengthening public safety. He advocates policies that increase assistance to those in their first year after prison, including guaranteed housing and health care, drug treatment, and transitional employment. By foregrounding the stories of people struggling against the odds to exit the criminal justice system, Homeward shows how overhauling the process of prisoner reentry and rethinking the foundations of justice policy could address the harms of mass incarceration.

The First Civil Right

The First Civil Right PDF Author: Naomi Murakawa
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199892806
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In The First Civil Right is a groundbreaking analysis of root of the conflicts that lie at the intersection of race and the legal system in America. Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state-a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos-was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after.

Captive Nation

Captive Nation PDF Author: Dan Berger
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469618249
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

The Punisher's Brain

The Punisher's Brain PDF Author: Morris B. Hoffman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107038065
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Using evidence and arguments from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, Morris B. Hoffman describes how the judge and jury system evolved.

Death and Other Penalties

Death and Other Penalties PDF Author: Lisa Guenther
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823265315
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Mass incarceration is one of the most pressing ethical and political issues of our time. In this volume, philosophers join activists and those incarcerated on death row to grapple with contemporary U.S. punishment practices and draw out critiques around questions of power, identity, justice, and ethical responsibility. This work takes shape against a backdrop of disturbing trends: The United States incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country in the world. A disproportionate number of these prisoners are people of color, and, today, a black man has a greater chance of going to prison than to college. The United States is the only Western democracy to retain the death penalty, even after decades of scholarship, statistics, and even legal decisions have depicted a deeply flawed system structured by racism and class oppression. Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the contributors to this volume come together from a diverse range of backgrounds to analyze, critique, and envision alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with the hyper-incarceration of people of color, the incomplete abolition of slavery, the exploitation of prisoners as workers and as “raw material” for the prison industrial complex, the intensive confinement of prisoners in supermax units, and the complexities of capital punishment in an age of abolition. The resulting collection contributes to a growing intellectual and political resistance to the apparent inevitability of incarceration and state execution as responses to crime and to social inequalities. It addresses both philosophers and activists who seek intellectual resources to contest the injustices of punishment in the United States.