Downsizing Prisons

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

Get Book

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

American Prisons and Jails [2 volumes]

American Prisons and Jails [2 volumes] PDF Author: Vidisha Barua Worley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1610695011
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 815

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Book Description
This two-volume encyclopedia provides a comprehensive and authoritative examination of the history and current character of American prisons and jails and their place in the U.S. corrections system. This encyclopedia provides a rigorous and comprehensive summary of correctional systems and practices and their evolution throughout US history. Topics include sentencing norms and contemporary developments; differences between local jails and prisons and regional, state, and federal systems; violent and nonviolent inmate populations; operations of state and federal prisons, including well-known prisons such as ADX-Florence, Alcatrez, Attica, Leavenworth, and San Quentin; privately run, for-profit prisons as well as the companies that run them; inmate culture, including prisoner-generated social hierarchies, prisoner slang, gangs, drug use, and violence; prison trends and statistics, including racial, ethnic, age, gender, and educational breakdowns; the death penalty; and post-incarceration outcomes, including recidivism. The set showcases contributions from some of the leading scholars in the fields of correctional systems and practices and will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning more about American prisons, jails, and community corrections.

The Toughest Beat

The Toughest Beat PDF Author: Joshua Page
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199985073
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In America today, one in every hundred adults is behind bars. As our prison population has exploded, 'law and order' interest groups have also grown -- in numbers and political clout. In The Toughest Beat, Joshua Page argues in crisp, vivid prose that the Golden State's prison boom fueled the rise of one of the most politically potent and feared interest groups in the nation: the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA). As it made great strides for its members, the prison officers' union also fundamentally altered the composition and orientation of the penal field. The Toughest Beat is essential reading for anyone concerned with contemporary crime and punishment, interest group politics, and public sector labor unions.

The Oxford Handbook of Prisons and Imprisonment

The Oxford Handbook of Prisons and Imprisonment PDF Author: John D. Wooldredge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190888318
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 732

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Book Description
Research on prisons prior to the prison boom of the 1980s and 1990s focused mainly on inmate subcultures, inmate rights, and sociological interpretations of inmate and guard adaptations to their environment, with qualitative studies and ethnographic methods the norm. In recent years, research has expanded considerably to issues related to inmates' mental health, suicide, managing special types of offenders, risk assessment, and evidence-based treatment programs. The Oxford Handbook of Prisons and Imprisonment provides the only single source that bridges social scientific and behavioral perspectives, providing graduate students with a more comprehensive understanding of the topic, academics with a body of knowledge that will more effectively inform their own research, and practitioners with an overview of evidence-based best practices. Across thirty chapters, leading contributors offer new ideas, critical treatments of substantive topics with theoretical and policy implications, and comprehensive literature reviews that reflect cumulative knowledge on what works and what doesn't. The Handbook covers critical topics in the field, some of which include recent trends in imprisonment, prison gangs, inmate victimization, the use and impact of restrictive housing, unique problems faced by women in prison, special offender populations, risk assessment and treatment effectiveness, prisoner re-entry, and privatization. The Oxford Handbook of Prisons and Imprisonment offers a rich source of information on the current state of institutional corrections around the world, on issues facing both inmates and prison staff, and on how those issues may impede or facilitate the various goals of incarceration.

Healing Corrections

Healing Corrections PDF Author: Chris Innes
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
ISBN: 1555538487
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Unlike critics who see the organizational cultures of prisons, jails, and community correction agencies as a problem that needs to be fixed with simple-sounding reforms, Chris Innes argues instead that these types of organizational cultures are adaptive and a source of strength that can be used to genuinely transform them. He shows how operational priorities, including safety and security, become much more difficult to sustain when organizational cultures become fragmented into disconnected subcultures. To transform an organizational culture, he argues, this fragmentation must be "healed" by changing the patterns of communication that make up the day-to-day reality of an organization's culture. Innes advocates an innovative approach based on the skills and practices of dialogue. He describes in detail how Dialogic Practice can be used to transform organizational cultures through an implementation process that begins with the leadership and cascades through the organization as an expanding circle, as staff are trained and become engaged in the process. Innes draws upon the research and policy literature in several fields, the contemporary national debate on the role of the justice system in American society, and his own experience during the last forty years in correctional research and policy, and in working directly with correctional agencies. This innovative approach to transforming organizational cultures will interest correctional decision makers; administrators, researchers, and graduate students in criminal justice; advocates; and others who manage mission-driven human services organizations.

Smart Decarceration

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

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Book Description
Smart Decarceration is a forward-thinking, practical volume that provides innovative concepts and concrete strategies for ushering in an era of decarceration-a proactive and effective undoing of the era of mass incarceration. The text grapples with tough questions and takes up the challenge of transforming America's approach to criminal justice in the 21st century. The primary purpose of this book is to inform both academic and public understanding-to place the challenge of smart decarceration at the center of the current national discourse, taking into account the realities of the current sociopolitical context-and to propose beginning action steps. This is achieved by first outlining and addressing questions such as: What if incarceration were not an option for most?; Whose voices are essential in this era of decarceration?; What is the state of evidence for solutions?; How do we generate and adopt empirically driven reforms?; How do we redifine and rethink justice in the United States? Smart Decarceration offers a way forward in building a field of decarceration through provocative but reasoned challenges to existing approaches to criminal justice reforms, lively focus on potential solutions, and action steps for meaningful change. Book jacket.

Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners

Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners PDF Author: James Braxton Peterson
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 1939994322
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of what scholars, activists, and artists have identified as the Mass Incarceration movement in the United States. Since the early 1990s, activist critics of the US prison system have marked its emergence as a “complex” in a manner comparable to how President Eisenhower described the Military Industrial Complex. Like its institutional “cousin,” the Prison Industrial Complex features a critical combination of political ideology, far-reaching federal policy, and the neo-liberal directive to privatize institutions traditionally within the purview of the government. The result is that corporations have capital incentives to capture and contain human bodies. The Prison Industrial Complex relies on the “law and order” ideology fomented by President Nixon and developed at least partially in response to the unrest generated through the Civil Rights Movement. It is (and has been) enhanced and emboldened via the US “war on drugs,” a slate of policies that by any account have failed to do anything except normalize the warehousing of nonviolent substance abusers in jails and prisons that serve more as criminal training centers then as redemptive spaces for citizens who might re-enter society successfully. Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a primer for how these issues emerged and how our awareness of the systems at work in mass incarceration might be the very first step in reforming an institution responsible for some of our most egregious contemporary civil rights violations.

The Punishment Imperative

The Punishment Imperative PDF Author: Todd R. Clear
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479861189
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Clear and Frost chart the rise of penal severity in the U.S. and the forces necessary to end it Over the last 40 years, the US penal system has grown at an unprecedented rate—five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. In The Punishment Imperative, eminent criminologists Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost argue that America’s move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the early 2000s was more than just a response to crime or a collection of policies adopted in isolation; it was a grand social experiment. Tracing a wide array of trends related to the criminal justice system, this book charts the rise of penal severity in America and speculates that a variety of forces—fiscal, political, and evidentiary—have finally come together to bring this great social experiment to an end. The authors stress that while the doubling of the crime rate in the late 1960s represented one of the most pressing social problems at the time, it was instead the way crime posed a political problem—and thereby offered a political opportunity—that became the basis for the great rise in punishment. Clear and Frost contend that the public’s growing realization that the severe policies themselves, not growing crime rates, were the main cause of increased incarceration eventually led to a surge of interest in taking a more rehabilitative, pragmatic, and cooperative approach to dealing with criminal offenders that still continues to this day. Part historical study, part forward-looking policy analysis, The Punishment Imperative is a compelling study of a generation of crime and punishment in America.

The Modern Prison Paradox

The Modern Prison Paradox PDF Author: Amy E. Lerman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107041457
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Amy E. Lerman examines the shift from rehabilitation to punitivism that has taken place in the politics and practice of American corrections.

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.