Downsizing Prisons

Downsizing Prisons PDF Author: Michael Jacobson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814742912
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"There is a better path, and this book shows us how to find that new direction." --Los Angeles Times"Downsizing Prisons offers an innovative approach to reducing the strain on America's overcrowded prisons: namely, by fixing the dysfunctional parole systems in states around the country. . . . Jacobson's book comes at exactly the right time." --Mother Jones"Policy wonks, journalists, elected officials and students of criminal justice will find the arguments and data in this book worth grappling with." --New York Newsday"Should be read by the public and used by policy makers. Essential." --Choice"Downsizing Prisons explains not only why current incarceration policy is not working, but what we can do about it. Michael Jacobson's blueprint provides an overview of a pragmatic strategy that can reduce the size of our bloated prison system while improving prospects for public safety." -- Marc Mauer, author of Race to Incarcerate"A very timely book, offering a unique and important perspective on a topic of widespread concern." --David Garland, author of The Culture of Control"In this excellent book, Michael Jacobson addresses one of the most important problems facing our society today, our bloated prisons. He traces their growth, the unintended consequences of this excessive punitive development and examines 'the new reality' of managing the hundreds of new, overcrowded prisons. He also demonstrates that this expansion has done nothing to reduce crime." --John Irwin, author of The Felon"Michael Jacobson's excellent book combines the hands-on experience of a seasoned policy practitioner with a researcher's keen sense of the political and economic climate in which criminal justice policy isformed." --Bruce Western, co-editor of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass IncarcerationOver

Downsizing Prisons

Downsizing Prisons PDF Author: Michael Jacobson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814742912
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"There is a better path, and this book shows us how to find that new direction." --Los Angeles Times"Downsizing Prisons offers an innovative approach to reducing the strain on America's overcrowded prisons: namely, by fixing the dysfunctional parole systems in states around the country. . . . Jacobson's book comes at exactly the right time." --Mother Jones"Policy wonks, journalists, elected officials and students of criminal justice will find the arguments and data in this book worth grappling with." --New York Newsday"Should be read by the public and used by policy makers. Essential." --Choice"Downsizing Prisons explains not only why current incarceration policy is not working, but what we can do about it. Michael Jacobson's blueprint provides an overview of a pragmatic strategy that can reduce the size of our bloated prison system while improving prospects for public safety." -- Marc Mauer, author of Race to Incarcerate"A very timely book, offering a unique and important perspective on a topic of widespread concern." --David Garland, author of The Culture of Control"In this excellent book, Michael Jacobson addresses one of the most important problems facing our society today, our bloated prisons. He traces their growth, the unintended consequences of this excessive punitive development and examines 'the new reality' of managing the hundreds of new, overcrowded prisons. He also demonstrates that this expansion has done nothing to reduce crime." --John Irwin, author of The Felon"Michael Jacobson's excellent book combines the hands-on experience of a seasoned policy practitioner with a researcher's keen sense of the political and economic climate in which criminal justice policy isformed." --Bruce Western, co-editor of Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass IncarcerationOver

The Unmet Promise of Alternatives to Incarceration

The Unmet Promise of Alternatives to Incarceration PDF Author: James Austin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Community-based corrections
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description


The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow PDF Author: Michelle Alexander
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620971941
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
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.

Death by Prison

Death by Prison PDF Author: Christopher Seeds
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520379977
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
"In recent decades, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) has developed into a distinctive penal form in the United States, one firmly entrenched in US policy-making, judicial and prosecutorial decision-making, correctional practice, and public discourse. LWOP is now a routine part of contemporary US criminal justice, even engrained in the nation's cultural imaginary, but how it came to be so remains in question. Fifty years ago, imprisoning a person until death was an extraordinary sentence; today, it accounts for an increasing percentage of all US prisoners. What explains the shifts in penal practice and the social imagination by which we have become accustomed to imprisoning individuals until death without any reevaluation or reasonable expectation of release? Combining a wide historical lens with detailed state- and institutional-level research, Death by Prison offers a provocative new foundation for questioning this deeply problematic practice that has escaped close scrutiny for too long. The rise of life without parole, this book demonstrates, is not simply a matter of growth: it is a phenomenon of change, inclusive of changes in definitions, practices, and meanings. Death by Prison shows that the complex processes by which life without parole became imprisonment until death and perpetual confinement became a routine part of American punishment must be understood not only in terms of punitive attitudes and political efforts but as a matter of background conditions and transformations in penal institutions. The book also reveals how the social and sociological relevance of life without parole extends beyond its punitive element: imbued in the history of life without parole are a variety of forms of disregard--for human dignity, for social consequences, and for the myriad responsibilities that go along with state punishment"--

Enforcing Freedom

Enforcing Freedom PDF Author: Kerwin Kaye
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547099
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
In 1989, the first drug-treatment court was established in Florida, inaugurating an era of state-supervised rehabilitation. Such courts have frequently been seen as a humane alternative to incarceration and the war on drugs. Enforcing Freedom offers an ethnographic account of drug courts and mandatory treatment centers as a system of coercion, demonstrating how the state uses notions of rehabilitation as a means of social regulation. Situating drug courts in a long line of state projects of race and class control, Kerwin Kaye details the ways in which the violence of the state is framed as beneficial for those subjected to it. He explores how courts decide whether to release or incarcerate participants using nominally colorblind criteria that draw on racialized imagery. Rehabilitation is defined as preparation for low-wage labor and the destruction of community ties with “bad influences,” a process that turns participants against one another. At the same time, Kaye points toward the complex ways in which participants negotiate state control in relation to other forms of constraint in their lives, sometimes embracing the state’s salutary violence as a means of countering their impoverishment. Simultaneously sensitive to ethnographic detail and theoretical implications, Enforcing Freedom offers a critical perspective on the punitive side of criminal-justice reform and points toward alternative paths forward.

The Prison and the Gallows

The Prison and the Gallows PDF Author: Marie Gottschalk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139455214
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
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.

Smart Decarceration

Smart Decarceration PDF Author: Matthew Epperson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190653094
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Smart Decarceration is a forward-thinking, practical volume that provides concrete strategies for an era of decarceration. This timely work consists of chapters written from multiple perspectives and disciplines including scholars, practitioners, and persons with incarceration histories. The text grapples with tough questions and builds a foundation for the decarceration field.

Prison Land

Prison Land PDF Author: Brett Story
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781517906887
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America offers a geographic excavation of the prison as a set of social relations-including property, work, gender and race-enacted across various spatial forms and landscapes within American life"--

Do Prisons Make Us Safer?

Do Prisons Make Us Safer? PDF Author: Steven Raphael
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610444655
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
The number of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails more than quadrupled between 1975 and 2005, reaching the unprecedented level of over two million inmates today. Annual corrections spending now exceeds 64 billion dollars, and many of the social and economic burdens resulting from mass incarceration fall disproportionately on minority communities. Yet crime rates across the country have also dropped considerably during this time period. In Do Prisons Make Us Safer? leading experts systematically examine the complex repercussions of the massive surge in our nation's prison system. Do Prisons Make Us Safer? asks whether it makes sense to maintain such a large and costly prison system. The contributors expand the scope of previous analyses to include a number of underexplored dimensions, such as the fiscal impact on states, effects on children, and employment prospects for former inmates. Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll assess the reasons behind the explosion in incarceration rates and find that criminal behavior itself accounts for only a small fraction of the prison boom. Eighty-five percent of the trend can be attributed to "get tough on crime" policies that have increased both the likelihood of a prison sentence and the length of time served. Shawn Bushway shows that while prison time effectively deters and incapacitates criminals in the short term, long-term benefits such as overall crime reduction or individual rehabilitation are less clear cut. Amy Lerman conducts a novel investigation into the effects of imprisonment on criminal psychology and uncovers striking evidence that placement in a high security penitentiary leads to increased rates of violence and anger—particularly in the case of first time or minor offenders. Rucker Johnson documents the spill-over effects of parental incarceration—children who have had a parent serve prison time exhibit more behavioral problems than their peers. Policies to enhance the well-being of these children are essential to breaking a devastating cycle of poverty, unemployment, and crime. John Donohue's economic calculations suggest that alternative social welfare policies such as education and employment programs for at-risk youth may lower crime just as effectively as prisons, but at a much lower human cost. The cost of hiring a new teacher is roughly equal to the cost of incarcerating an additional inmate. The United States currently imprisons a greater proportion of its citizens than any other nation in the world. Until now, however, we've lacked systematic and comprehensive data on how this prison boom has affected families, communities, and our nation as a whole. Do Prisons Make Us Safer? provides a highly nuanced and deeply engaging account of one of the most dramatic policy developments in recent U.S. history.

Downsizing the Federal Government

Downsizing the Federal Government PDF Author: Chris Edwards
Publisher: Cato Institute
ISBN: 1933995513
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
The federal government is running huge budget deficits, spending too much, and heading toward a financial crisis. Federal spending soared under President George W. Bush, and the costs of programs for the elderly are set to balloon in coming years. Hurricane Katrina has made the federal budget situation even more desperate. In Downsizing the Federal Government Cato Institute budget expert Chris Edwards provides policymakers with solutions to the growing federal budget mess. Edwards identifies more than 100 federal programs that should be terminated, transferred to the states, or privatized in order to balance the budget and save hundreds of billions of dollars. Edwards proposes a balanced reform package of cuts to entitlements, domestic programs, and excess defense spending. He argues that these cuts would not only eliminate the deficit, but also strengthen the economy, enlarge personal freedom, and leave a positive fiscal legacy for the next generation. Downsizing the Federal Government discusses the systematic causes of wasteful spending, and it overflows with examples of federal programs that are obsolete and mismanaged. The book examines the budget process and shows how policymakers act contrary to the interests of average Americans by favoring special interests.