Showing papers on "Prison published in 2008"

Preparing for prison?: The criminalization of school discipline in the USA

Abstract: American schools increasingly define and manage the problem of student discipline through a prism of crime control. Most theoretical explanations fail to situate school criminalization in a broader...

Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison

Abstract: By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nation's two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? "Doing Time Together" vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiances, and boyfriends on the inside. Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison's intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into quasi-inmates, eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives. An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America's massive prison system, Comfort's book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.

The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World

Abstract: In recent years, numerous individuals who confessed to and were convicted of serious felony crimes have been released from prison - some after many years of incarceration - and declared factually innocent. Often, these individuals are freed as a result of DNA tests that were not possible at the time of arrest, prosecution, and conviction. DNA testing has also exonerated numerous individuals who confessed to serious crimes before their cases went to trial. In this article, we analyze 125 recent cases of proven interrogation-induced false confessions (i.e., cases in which indisputably innocent individuals confessed to crimes they did not commit) and how these cases were treated by officials in the criminal justice system. This article has three goals. First, we provide and analyze basic demographic, legal, and case-specific descriptive data from these 125 cases. This is significant because this is the largest cohort of interrogation-induced false confession cases ever identified and studied in the research literature. Second, we analyze the role that (false) confession evidence played in these cases and how the defendants in these cases were treated by the criminal justice system. In particular, this article focuses on how criminal justice officials and triers-of-fact respond to confession evidence, whether it biases their evaluations and overwhelms other evidence (particularly evidence of innocence), and how likely false confessions are to lead to the wrongful arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of the innocent. Analysis of the aforementioned questions leads to the conclusion that the problem of interrogation-induced false confession in the American criminal justice system is far more significant than previously supposed. Furthermore, the problem of interrogation-induced false confessions has profound implications for the study of miscarriages of justice as well as the proper administration of justice. Third, and finally, this article suggests that several promising policy reforms, particularly mandatory electronic recording of police interrogations, will minimize the number of false confessions and thereby inject a much needed dose of justice into the American criminal justice system.

Pathways to Prison Impact of Victimization in the Lives of Incarcerated Women

Abstract: This study examines ways in which victimization may contribute to criminal involvement among incarcerated women. The authors conduct interviews with 60 women in a maximum-security prison to gather each woman's perspective on psychological, physical, and sexual victimization in her life. Qualitative analyses indicate ways that victimization relates directly to women's crimes as well as influences health, psychosocial functioning, or systemic involvement to create difficult situations with which the women struggle. Case histories are used to illustrate pervasive impacts of victimization, and the roles of multiple traumas and cumulative impact are discussed.

Places of Pain and Shame : Dealing with 'Difficult Heritage'

Abstract: 1. Remembering Places of Pain and Shame 2. Let the Dead be Remembered: Interpretation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial 3. The Hiroshima "Peace Memorial": Transforming Legacy, Memories and Landscapes 4. Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Challenges of Heritage Management Following the Cold War 5. "Dig a Hole and Bury the Past in It": Reconciliation and the Heritage of Genocide in Cambodia 6. The Myall Creek Memorial: History, Identity and Reconciliation 7. Cowra Japanese War Cemetry 8. A Cave in Taiwan: Comfort Women's Memories and the Local Identity 9. Postcolonial Shame: Heritage and the Forgotten Pain of Civilian Women Internees in Java 10. Difficult Memories: The Independence Struggle as Cultural Heritage in East Timor 11. Port Arthur, Norfolk Island, New Caledonia: Convict Prison Islands in the Antipodes 12. Hoa Lo Museum, Hanoi: Changing Attitudes to a Vietnamese Place of Pain and Shame 13. Places of Pain as Tools for Social Justice in the "New" South Africa: Black Heritage Preservation in the "Rainbow" Nation's Townships 14. Negotiating Places of Pain in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland: Debating the Future of the Maze/Prison/Long Kesh 15. Beauty Springing from the Breast of Pain . "No Less than a Palace: Kew Asylum, its Planned Surrounds, and its Present-Day Residents 17. Between the Hostel and the Detention Centre: Possible Trajectories of Migrant Pain and Shame in Australia

Deterrence and Crime Prevention: Reconsidering the Prospect of Sanction

Abstract: Deterrence is at the heart of the preventive aspiration of criminal justice. Deterrence, whether through preventive patrol by police officers or stiff prison sentences for violent offenders, is the principal mechanism through which the central feature of criminal justice, the exercise of state authority, works – it is hoped -- to diminish offending and enhance public safety. And however well we think deterrence works, it clearly often does not work nearly as well as we would like – and often at very great cost. Drawing on a wide range of scholarly literatures and real-world experience, Kennedy argues that we should reframe the ways in which we think about and produce deterrence. He argues that many of the ways in which we seek to deter crime in fact facilitate offending; that simple steps such as providing clear information to offenders could transform deterrence; that communities may be far more effective than legal authorities in deterring crime; that apparently minor sanctions can deter more effectively than draconian ones; that groups, rather than individual offenders, should often be the focus of deterrence; that existing legal tools can be used in unusual but greatly more effective ways; that even serious offenders can be reached through deliberate moral engagement; and that authorities, communities, and offenders – no matter how divided – share and can occupy hidden common ground. The result is a sophisticated but ultimately common-sense and profoundly hopeful case that we can and should use new deterrence strategies to address some of our most important crime problems. Drawing on and expanding on the lessons of groundbreaking real-world work like Boston’s Operation Ceasefire – credited with the "Boston Miracle" of the 1990s – "Deterrence and Crime Prevention" is required reading for scholars, law enforcement practitioners, and all with an interest in public safety and the health of communities.

Inmate-On-Inmate Assault: A Multilevel Examination of Prison Violence

Abstract: Most literature on inmate assaultive behavior considers only one level of analysis, thereby ignoring the importance of prison context on inmate behavior. This study improved on past research by combining inmate and prison-level data into a multilevel model explaining inmate-on-inmate, nondeadly assaults. Data from 1,054 male inmates in 30 prisons revealed that age and aggression were the most robust predictors of inmate-on-inmate assaults. In terms of multilevel effects, aggressive inmates were found to commit more assaults in prisons that were more crowded and had a greater percentage of younger inmates (e.g., younger than age 25). Policy implications and suggestions for a multilevel theory of prison violence are discussed.

Language and Power: An Introduction to Institutional Discourse

Abstract: 1. Introduction 2. Institutional Discourse / Approaches to the analysis of institutional discourse 3. University Discourse 4. Prison Discourse 5. News as Institutional Discourse: Commercialization in the Press 6. Multiculturalism in the Regional Press through the Language of Capitalism 7. War memorials 8. Defense Speeches 9. How to Analyse Institutional Discourse.

Who’s Using and Who’s Doing Time: Incarceration, the War on Drugs, and Public Health

Abstract: WITHOUT A PERSONAL connection, scientists, researchers, and those who set public policy rarely know the stories of those who are convicted of felony crimes and sentenced to prison: how they came to be convicted, whom they left behind, and what they went home to once released. But the consequences of their imprisonment—social, economic, political, and personal—are evidenced daily in every major city, suburban town, and rural hamlet. We aim to reframe the growth of the prison industrial complex and the war on drugs from the perspective of those incarcerated for nonviolent, drug-related crimes. By framing the issue this way, we . . .

Rape: A History From 1860 To The Present

Abstract: Joanna Bourke, author of the critically-acclaimed Fear, unflinchingly and controversially moves away from looking at victims to look at the rapists. She examines the nature of rape, drawing together the work of criminologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to analyse what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence. Rape - A History looks at the perception of rape, both in the mass media and the wider public, and considers the crucial questions of treatment and punishment. Should sexual offenders be castrated? Will Freud's couch or the behaviourists' laboratory work most effectively? Particular groups of offenders such as female abusers, psychopaths and exhibitionists are given special attention here, as are potentially dangerous environments, including the home, prison, and the military. By demystifying the category of the rapist and revealing the specificities of the past, Joanna Bourke dares to consider a future in which sexual violence has been placed outside the human experience.

The Malign Effects of Drug and Crime Control Policies on Black Americans

Abstract: The disproportionate presence of blacks in American prisons, jails, and Death Rows, and the principal reasons for it—higher rates of commission of violent crimes and racially disparate effects of drug policies and sentencing laws governing violent and drug crimes—are well known. Since the late 1980s, black involvement in violent crime has declined substantially, but racial disproportions have not. Blacks are six to seven times more likely than whites to be in prison. Nearly a third of young black men are under criminal justice system control. A third of black boys born in 2001 are predicted to spend some time in prison. The simplest explanation for these patterns is that drug and sentencing policies that contribute to disparities have not been significantly changed in decades. The question then is, why not? The answer is that the white majority does not empathize with poor black people who wind up in prison. That in turn is because recent punishment policies have replaced the urban ghetto, Jim Cr...

Punishment and Culture

Abstract: From the chain gang to the electric chair, the problem of how to deal with criminals has long been debated. What explains this concern with getting punishment right? And why do attitudes toward particular punishments change radically over time? In addressing these questions, Philip Smith attacks the comfortable myth that punishment is about justice, reason, and law. Instead he argues that punishment is an essentially irrational act founded in ritual as a means to control evil without creating more of it in the process."Punishment and Culture" traces three centuries of the history of punishment, looking in detail at issues ranging from public executions and the development of the prison to Jeremy Bentham's notorious panopticon and the invention of the guillotine. Smith contends that each of these attempts to achieve sterile bureaucratic control was thwarted as uncontrollable cultural forces generated alternative visions of heroic villains, darkly gothic technologies, and sacred awe. Moving from Andy Warhol to eighteenth-century highwaymen to Orwell's 1984, Smith puts forward a dazzling account of the cultural landscape of punishment. His findings will fascinate students of sociology, history, criminology, law, and cultural studies.

The effect of criminal background checks on hiring ex‐offenders*

Abstract: Research Summary The rapid increase in the nation's incarceration rate over the past decade has raised questions about how to reintegrate a growing number of ex-offenders successfully. Employment has been shown to be an important factor in reintegration, especially for men over the age of 27 years who characterize most individuals released from prison. This article explores this question using unique establishment-level data collected in Los Angeles in 2001. On average, we replicate the now-common finding that employer-initiated criminal background checks are negatively related to the hiring of ex-offenders. However, this negative effect is less than complete. The effect is strongly negative for those employers that are legally required to perform background checks, which is not surprising because these legal requirements to perform checks are paired with legal prohibitions against hiring ex-offenders. However, some employers seem to perform checks to gain additional information about ex-offenders (and thus hire more ex-offenders than other employers), and checking seems to have no effect on hiring ex-offenders for those employers not legally required to perform checks. Policy Implications One public policy initiative that has received considerable attention is to deny employers access to criminal history record information, which includes movements to “ban the box” that inquires about criminal history information on job applications. The assumption underlying this movement is that knowledge of ex-offender status leads directly to a refusal to hire. The results of this analysis show that policy initiatives aimed at restricting background checks, particularly for those firms not legally required to perform checks, may not have the desired consequences of increasing ex-offender employment. This result is consistent with an alternative view that some employers care about the characteristics of the criminal history record and use information about criminal history in a more nuanced, nondiscrete way.

The Effects of High Imprisonment Rates on Communities

Abstract: When large numbers of parent‐aged adults, especially men, cycle through stays in prison and jail at very high rates, communities are negatively affected in myriad ways, including damage to social networks, social relationships, and long‐term life chances. These effects impair children, family functioning, mental and physical health, labor markets, and economic and political infrastructures. There are considerable methodological challenges in trying to link the consequences of concentrated incarceration to reduced public safety. Findings from studies are mixed. Yet, as empirical evidence grows of the negative collateral consequences of concentrated incarceration, the likelihood that concentrated incarceration is criminogenic in its effects on those communities becomes stronger. No well‐established or proven strategy exists for combating the effects of concentrated incarceration on communities. Most current debates about penal policy are essentially oblivious to the problem. Solutions must flow fro...

Managing mentally ill inmates in prisons

Abstract: Mentally ill inmates now comprise a substantial portion of the prison population and pose administrative and therapeutic challenges to prison administrators and mental health professionals. Some ev...

Prison: Cultural Memory and Dark Tourism

Abstract: Prison: Cultural Memory and Dark Tourism discusses decommissioned Australian prisons currently or potentially functioning as tourist attractions. In particular, it addresses a fundamental question: Do the interpretations and presentations of the sites include and fairly represent the personal stories and experiences associated with those prisons? The author argues that the conventional understanding of most of Australia's historical prisons fosters a radical «othering of inmates, and with it the exclusion, distortion and historical neglect of their narratives. This book examines avenues via which neglected narratives may be glimpsed or inferred, presenting a number of examples. This remedies the imbalance in some degree - and tests such avenues' potential as resources for inclusive interpretations by public historians and curators. The book also focuses on the influence of «celebrity prisoners, whose links to the penal system are exploited as promotional features by the sites and in some cases by the individuals themselves. Their narratives provide broad, if unwitting, support for the system and for the othering of the more general inmate population. The ramifications of the above with regard to aspects of Australian identity mean that certain facets of the «Australian character traditionally held to be emblematic are affected. These effects have subtle but tangible consequences for modern Australians' collective memory and deleterious consequences for current popular attitudes to penal practice.

Re-membering exclusions: participatory action research in public institutions

Abstract: At a political moment when democracy, dissent and participation are under siege, especially in low-income communities of color, we write this article to reveal how participatory action research (PAR) can be joined with a larger democratic project to re-member institutions and communities exiled today in neoliberal society. This article draws on two large-scale PAR studies conducted in a women's maximum security prison and in a series of racially desegregated public high schools to explore the power, strategic moves and difficulties of PAR within public institutions. Arguing that PAR offers a theory of method for democratic research, we enter two participatory research collaboratives: a four year, qualitative and quantitative study of the impact of college in prison on the women students, the prison environment, prisoners' postrelease outcomes and civil society, and an ongoing qualitative and quantitative study of how race, ethnicity, class, and academic opportunities and outcomes are (inequitably) distrib...

Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality

Abstract: In "Criminal Intimacy", Regina Kunzel explores the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries - along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners' rights activism; and, the HIV epidemic - ultimately discovering a world whose surprising plurality reveals the fissures beneath modern sexuality itself. Drawing on a wide range of sources - as well as depictions of prison life in popular culture - Kunzel argues for the importance of the prison to the history of sexuality and for the centrality of ideas about sex and sexuality to the modern prison.

Forensic mental health services: facts and figures on current provision

Abstract: Forensic mental health services play an important role in providing treatment and accommodation for people diverted from prison or the courts who require secure and specialist mental health treatment. There are more than 3,500 people in medium and high‐secure hospitals who have been directed there by the courts or prison system, and nearly 1,000 new admissions are received each year. Yet, the facts and figures relating to these services are patchy and not widely published. This paper builds on an earlier statistical briefing produced by the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health in 2007, and seeks to provide an up‐to‐date and improved understanding of this area of service provision by presenting the most recent data and figures.

“It's Just Black, White, or Hispanic”: An Observational Study of Racializing Moves in California's Segregated Prison Reception Centers

Abstract: This article takes as its launching point a 2005 U. S. Supreme Court case, Johnson v. California (543 U.S. 499), which ruled that the California Department of Corrections' unwritten practice of racially segregating inmates in prison reception centers is to be reviewed under the highest level of constitutional review, strict scrutiny. Relying on observational data from two California prison reception centers, this research is grounded in an interactionist perspective and influenced by Smith's work on “institutional ethnography.” I examine how racialization occurs in carceral settings, arguing that officers and inmates collaborate to arrive at a “negotiated settlement” regarding housing decisions. They do so working together (but not always in agreement) to shape how an inmate is categorized in terms of ‘race’/ethnicity and gang/group affiliation, within a framework established by official Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation paperwork and related institutional understandings of housing needs. The findings demonstrate that administrators, officers, and inmates alike have influence over the process by which people are categorized and ‘race’ is produced, even as they derive their power from different sources and are both enabled and constrained by the relationship between them. I conclude that California prisons are, as Wacquant has put it, “the main machine for ‘race making’” (2005:128), and that the fuel for that machine—a series of patterned, negotiated settlements—happens in real time, “on the ground,” and with important consequences for inmates, officers, and administrators.

Gender Differences in Factors Contributing to Institutional Misconduct

Abstract: Importation and deprivation theories are typically offered to explain the process by which inmates adjust to prison environments. Nearly all prior empirical tests of these theories have exclusively...

Making Sense out of Nonsense: The Deconstruction of State-Level Sex Offender Residence Restrictions

Abstract: Releasing a sex offender from prison or placing the offender on community-based sanctions, only to have the offender commit a new sex crime, is a policy-maker’s worst nightmare. Fueled by misperceptions and public fear, sex offender laws have developed piecemeal and without rigorous empirical insight and testing. While policies and practices are well-intended, they are unlikely to resolve the very real social problem of sexual violence and may inadvertently increase victimization. Such is the possibility with residence restrictions. This type of law is among the newest in an ever-growing barrage of legislation designed specifically for sexual criminals yet what little research that exists suggests there is no correlation between residence and sexual recidivism. This article identifies 30 states with state-level residence restrictions and conducts a content analysis of each state’s legislation. Geographical and other assessments are also conducted.

Employment after Prison: A Longitudinal Study of Releasees in Three States

Abstract: In this brief, we explore the reality of finding employment after prison from the perspective of 740 former male prisoners in Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. Interviews were conducted as part of a comprehensive, longitudinal study entitled Returning Home: Understanding the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry. Eight months after prison, 65 percent of respondents had been employed at some point, but only 45 percent were currently employed. Those who held a job while in prison or participated in job-training programs had better employment outcomes after release. Respondents who were employed and earning higher wages after release were less likely to return to prison the first year out.

The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941

Abstract: America's prison-based system of punishment has not always enjoyed the widespread political and moral legitimacy it has today. In this groundbreaking reinterpretation of penal history, Rebecca McLennan covers the periods of deep instability, popular protest, and political crisis that characterized early American prisons. She details the debates surrounding prison reform, including the limits of state power, the influence of market forces, the role of unfree labor, and the 'just deserts' of wrongdoers. McLennan also explores the system that existed between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, where private companies relied on prisoners for labor. Finally, she discusses the rehabilitation model that has primarily characterized the penal system in the twentieth century. Unearthing fresh evidence from prison and state archives, McLennan shows how, in each of three distinct periods of crisis, widespread dissent culminated in the dismantling of old systems of imprisonment.

Views From the Inside: Young Offenders' Subjective Experiences of Incarceration

Abstract: This study examined the incarceration experiences of 16 adolescent males in a maximum-security detention facility. A semistructured interview was conducted with each detainee and recorded on audiocassette. Data were analysed using phenomenological descriptive methodology. Detainees' experiences were characterised by a prison culture of bullying, substance use, and antagonism with youth workers; inadequate service provision and a lack of rehabilitative programming; and a sense of loss through reduced autonomy and dislocation from important others. These experiences gave rise to a range of negative feelings and emotions and promoted thinking about past and future behaviours. The incarceration experience placed detainees into a state of readiness for positive change but failed to provide them with the necessary skills to effect and sustain this change. Promotion of antisocial behaviour, lack of deterrence, and insufficient rehabilitative programming were identified as factors of the incarceration setting likely to contribute to the high rates of recidivism.

A Prison within a Prison? The Masculinity Narratives of Male Prisoners

Abstract: This study uses a narrative analysis to explore the masculinity narratives of male prisoners. Individual interviews were conducted with nine men aged twenty-two to forty-seven. Using a method descr...