Author: Lauren-Brooke Eisen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542313
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 476
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Book Description
When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration—to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen’s work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America. From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America’s largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.
Author: Jane Garner
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1800438621
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
Exploring the Roles and Practices of Libraries in Prisons aims to strengthen and expand the small body of knowledge currently published regarding libraries in prisons, with each chapter addressing different aspects of the roles and practices of library services to prisons and prisoners.
Author: Andrew Coyle
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447362470
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
This book discusses the failings of the prison system in many countries and offers positive pointers for the future. It shows the way forward will be through initiatives such as Justice Reinvestment and in the Human Development model.
Author: Charles W. Colson
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
ISBN: 9780842352451
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
Something clearly is wrong with the current justice system in which repeat incarceration is high, injustice is rampant, and 25 percent of African-American males can expect to spend time behind bars. Colson's biblical ideas for reform have the potential to turn the system around, keep innocent people out of prison, and give victims some relief.
Author: Peter Laufer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Community where money could buy just about anything. Prisoners included middle-class vacationers, international businessmen, and young Americans touring the world. Laufer explores the cultural misunderstandings that land Americans in jail. A woman accepts a curio in Turkey to get rid of a street seller and is arrested for smuggling antiquities. A businesswoman in Nigeria finds her dealings have been made illegal retroactively, and she faces a death sentence. Two young.
Author: Coyle, Andrew
Publisher: Policy Press
ISBN: 1447331753
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
How many people are imprisoned across the globe? What factors can help explain variations in the use of imprisonment in different countries? What ethical considerations should apply to the way imprisonment is used? Providing a comprehensive account of prison populations worldwide, this new work links prison statistics from the last 15 years with considerations of how prisons and prison populations are managed. With commentary from its well-known, respected authors on what is meant by an ethical approach to the use of imprisonment, and how this can be sustained in ever more challenging social, economic and political environments, this book is a major contribution to the knowledge of those currently debating prisons and the use of imprisonment, whether from academic, policy, practitioner, activist or lay perspectives. Its accessible, informative infographics also make it an engaging read and a valuable teaching resource for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in criminology, law, political science and public policy.
Author: Mechthild Nagel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781592214815
Category : Prisons
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Prisons & Punishment focuses on cross-national perspectives about penal theories and empirical studies. It brings together African, European and North American social philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, legal practitioners, prisoners and abolitionist activists. The contributors reflect on carceral society, most notably in the United States, and on the re-conceptualisation of punishment.
Author: Great Britain: H.M. Inspectorate of Prisons for England and Wales
Publisher: The Stationery Office
ISBN: 9780102951905
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 76
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Book Description
This annual report from Her Majesty's Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, covers the 2006-07 period. During this time the prison population increased to 81,500 prisoners, with over 1,000 a week being held in police cells, awaiting a prison place. The report also charts the effects on prisons and prisoners of an increasingly pressurised system. There were 40% more self-inflicted deaths in custody last year, particularly during a prisoners early days within the prison system, and particularly amongst groups of vulnerable prisoners, such as foreign nationals, indeterminate-sentenced and unsentenced prisoners and women. The effects of prison overcrowding place great strain on training prisons and local prisons, with more suicides, poorer resettlement outcomes and insufficient exercise activity. Further, the greater use of indeterminate sentences stranded many prisoners within inappropriate prisons further driving up the prison population. The Chief Inspector does commend the prison system stating they are better places than 10 to 15 years ago, with some prisons showing improvements. There are improvements in healthcare, though there are concerns expressed about such provision in private sector prisons. There is also more support during the vulnerable early days of custody, though too many prisoners spend their first night in a police cell. The Inspector believes the prison system is at a crossroads and praises recent signs of a more effective and measured approach to policy and strategy, with new initiatives and good operational practice to build on. But, there is also a real risk that the prison system will move towards large-scale penal containment so losing the progress gained in improving the prison system.
Author: Shane Bauer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735223580
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.
Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501721267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.
