Prison

About: Prison is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25120 publications have been published within this topic receiving 470474 citations. The topic is also known as: jail & gaol.

Between Prison and Probation: Intermediate Punishments in a Rational Sentencing System

Abstract: Across the country prisons are jammed to capacity, and in extreme cases, barges and mobile homes are used to stem the overflow. Probation officers in some cities have caseloads of 200 and more--hardly a manageable number of offenders to track and supervise. And with about one million people in prison and jail, and two and a half million on probation, it is clear we are experiencing a crisis in our penal system. In Between Prison and Probation, Norval Morris and Michael Tonry, two of the nation's leading criminologists, offer an important and timely strategy for alleviating these problems. They argue that our overwhelmed corrections system cannot cope with the flow of convicted offenders because the two extremes of punishment--imprisonment and probation--are both used excessively, with a near-vacuum of useful punishments in between. Morris and Tonry propose instead a comprehensive program that relies on a range of punishment including fines and other financial sanctions, community service, house arrest, intensive probation, closely supervised treatment programs for drugs, alcohol and mental illness, and electronic monitoring of movement. Used in rational combinations, these "intermediate" punishments would better serve the community than our present polarised choice. Serious consideration of these punishments has been hindered by the widespread perception that they are therapeutic rather than punitive. The reality, however, Morris and Tonry argue, "is that the American criminal justice system is both too severe and too lenient--almost randomly." Systematically implemented and rigorously enforced, intermediate punishments can "better and more economically serve the community, the victim, and the criminal than the prison terms and probation orders they supplant." Between Prison and Probation goes beyond mere advocacy of an increasing use of interdediate punishments; the book also addresses the difficult task of fitting these punishments into a comprehensive, fair and community-protective sentencing system.

Penal Systems: A Comparative Approach

Abstract: Foreword - David Downes PART ONE: ABOUT COMPARATIVE PENOLOGY Introducing Comparative Penology PENAL SYSTEMS IN CRISIS? Globalized Penal Crisis? The United States of America Law and Order Ideology, Hyperincarceration and Looming Crisis England and Wales Stop-Go and the Upwards Zig-Zag Australia and New Zealand Neo-Liberal Punitiveness Down Under South Africa The Transition From Apartheid Germany Archetypal Corporatism The Netherlands A Beacon of Tolerance Dimmed France and Italy Corporatism and Catholicism Sweden and Finland Nordic Social Democracy Japan Iron Fist in a Velvet Penal Glove PART TWO: PATTERNS OF PENALITY Comparative Youth Justice Neo-Liberal Youth Justice Systems Youth Justice Systems: Corporatist Variants General Patterns in Youth Justice? Prison Privatization PART THREE: IN CONCLUSION 'A Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever?'

Improving pregnancy outcome during imprisonment: a model residential care program.

Abstract: The female prison population has increased dramatically in recent years. Most women prisoners are involved with drugs, and as many as 25 percent are pregnant or have delivered within the past year. Reproductive health and drug treatment services for women in prison are inadequate, if they are available at all, and although illicit drugs are readily available in prison, drug-involved pregnant women often are incarcerated to protect fetal health. Studies of pregnancy outcome among women prisoners have demonstrated high rates of perinatal mortality and morbidity. This article examines issues related to pregnancy among women prisoners and describes an innovative residential program designed for pregnant, drug-dependent women in a state adult corrections system. Social workers can play an important role in promoting policy reform and improved services for this underserved population.

Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide Between America and Europe

Abstract: Why is American punishment so cruel? While in continental Europe great efforts are made to guarantee that prisoners are treated humanely, in America sentences have gotten longer and rehabilitation programs have fallen by the wayside. Western Europe attempts to prepare its criminals for life after prison, whereas many American prisons today leave their inhabitants reduced and debased. In the last quarter of a century, Europe has worked to ensure that the baser human inclination toward vengeance is not reflected by state policy, yet America has shown a systemic drive toward ever increasing levels of harshness in its criminal policies. Why is America so short on mercy? In this deeply researched, comparative work, James Q. Whitman reaches back to the 17th and 18th centuries to trace how and why American and European practices came to diverge. Eschewing the usual historical imprisonment narratives, Whitman focuses instead on intriguing differences in the development of punishment in the age of Western democracy. European traditions of social hierarchy and state power, so consciously rejected by the American colonies, nevertheless supported a more merciful and dignified treatment of offenders. The hierarchical class system on the continent kept alive a tradition of less-degrading "high-status" punishments that eventually became applied across the board in Europe. The distinctly American, draconian regime, on the other hand, grows, Whitman argues, out of America's longstanding distrust of state power and its peculiar, broad-brush sense of egalitarianism. Low-status punishments were evenly meted out to all offenders, regardless of class or standing. America's unrelentingly harsh treatment of trangressors-this "equal opportunity degradation"- is, in a very real sense, the dark side of the nation's much vaunted individualism. A sobering look at the growing rift between the United States and Europe, Harsh Justice exposes the deep cultural roots of America's degrading punishment practices.

The New `Peculiar Institution':: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto

Abstract: Not one but several `peculiar institutions' have operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States: chattel slavery from the colonial era to the Civil W...