Women Behind Bars PDF Download

Author: Silja Talvi
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1580051952
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
An award-winning investigative journalist examines increasing rates of women imprisonment in today's America, in a report that draws on interviews with inmates, correctional officers, and administrators to offer insight into the societal impact of female incarceration. Original.

Author: Elihu Rosenblatt
Publisher: South End Press
ISBN: 9780896085398
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
'At a time when activists, elected officials, and concerned individuals should be countering these trends with demands for jobs, education and serious alternatives to imprisonment, there is relative silence. Criminal Injustice, which explores the connections between imprisonment, racism, class domination, misogyny, and homophobia, offers us invaluable information and compelling arguments for placing prison issues on the agenda of every progressive organization.' Angela Y. DavisThis remarkable anthology exposes and uncovers the economic and political realities behind the imprisonment of astounding numbers of the working class, working poor, and people of color.

Author: William L. Selke
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253351494
Category : Corrections
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Prison officials are in the midst of the biggest prison crisis. This book looks at prison life and conditions. It reviews ideas and policies, both at home and from abroad, that can be used to alleviate the crisis if we are able to muster the political courage and public support to put them into effect.

Author: Terry Kupers
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
A Disturbing and Shocking Expose-A Passionate Cry for Reform Prison Madness exposes the brutality and failure of today's correctional system-for all prisoners-but especially the incredible conditions Andured by those suffering from serious mental disorders. "A passionately argued and brilliantly written wake-up call to America about the myriad ways our penal systems brutalize our entire culture. Dr. Kupers not only diagnoses the problem, he also offers a set of solutions. I hope this book will be read by all concerned citizens and voters, for it conveys truths that are vitally important to all of us." —James Gilligan, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic

Author: Judah Schept
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479888923
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
How prisons became economic development strategies for rural Appalachian communities As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region; there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis, Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America’s hinterlands. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research, Schept traces recent prison growth in the region to the rapid decline of its coal industry. He takes us inside this startling transformation occurring in the coalfields, where prisons are often built on top of old coalmines, including mountaintop removal sites, and built into community planning approaches to crises of unemployment, population loss, and declining revenues. By linking prison growth to other sites in this landscape—coal mines, coal waste, landfills, and incinerators—Schept shows that the prison boom has less to do with crime and punishment and much more with the overall extraction, depletion, and waste disposal processes that characterize dominant development strategies for the region. Schept argues that the future of this area now hangs in the balance, detailing recent efforts to oppose its carceral growth. Coal, Cages, Crisis offers invaluable insight into the complex dynamics of mass incarceration that continue to shape Appalachia and the broader United States.

Author: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520938038
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.

Author: Jeff Smith
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250058406
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
A politician's humorous memoir of his year in federal prison, with a viable prescription for a more productive, cost-effective corrections system.

Author: Christian Parenti
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859843031
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Lockdown America documents the horrors and absurdities of militarized policing, prisons, a fortified border, and the war on drugs. Its accessible and vivid prose makes clear the links between crime and politics in a period of gathering economic crisis.

Author: Rebecca M. McLennan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521830966
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
In the Age of Jackson, private enterprise set up shop in the American penal system. Working hand in glove with state government, contractors in both the North and the South would go on to put more than half a million imprisoned men, women, and youth to hard, sweated toil for private gain by 1900. Held captive, stripped of their rights, and subject to lash and paddle, convict laborers churned out vast quantities of goods and revenue, in some years generating the equivalent of more than $30 billion worth of work. By the 1880s, however, a growing mass of Americans came to regard the prison labor system as immoral and unbefitting of a free republic: it fostered torture and other abuses, degraded free citizen-workers, corrupted government and the legal system, and stifled the supposedly ethical purposes of punishment. The Crisis of Imprisonment tells the remarkable story of this controversial system of penal servitude:-how it came into being, how it worked, how the popular campaigns for its abolition were ultimately victorious, and how it shaped and continues to haunt the American penal system. The author takes the reader into the morally vital world of nineteenth-century artisans, industrial workers, farmers, clergy, convicts, machine politicians, and labor leaders and shows how prisons became a lightning rod in a determined defense of republican and Christian values against the encroachments of an unbridled market capitalism. She explores the vexing ethical questions that prisons posed then and remain exigent today: What are the limits of state power over the minds, bodies, and souls of citizens and others-is torture permissible under certain circumstances? What, if anything, makes the state morally fit to deprive a person of life or liberty? Are prisoners slaves and, if so, by what right? Should prisoners work? Is the prison a morally defensible institution? The eventual abolition of prison labor contracting plunged the prisons into deep fiscal and ideological crisis. The second half of the book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Progressive Era prison reform as, above all, a response to this crisis. It concludes with an exploration of the long-range impact of both penal servitude and the anti-prison labor movement on the modern American penal system.

Author: Hans Toch
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 0202309320
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This book is about human breakdown under stress. It is the first attempt comprehensively to map the variety of forms that despair can take, to reconstruct the ineffable shapes of human extremity as fully and faithfully as possible. Presenting the results of one of the largest studies ever undertaken, the book is based on well over 600 interviews (and related background material) dealing with the self-destructive acts of men and women in prison. It is thus also a portrait of the impact of incarceration, bringing to life the prison world as seen through the eyes of those who suffer in confinement. Hundreds of inmates, speaking in their own words, here present a firsthand view of their experience with all its nuances and pathos. Following an introductory chapter on the scope and methods of the research, the first part of the book presents the major themes of coping that emerged from the study--the fundamental concerns of people under stress (potency, fear, need for support) as they are manifested in difficulties with the environment, with perception of the self and others, and with impulse management. Part Two takes up the questions of how typical are inmates who injure themselves and in what ways they differ from their peers--and major differences in risk and in themes of coping are shown to be related to age, sex, ethnic background, previous experiences with drugs and with personal violence, and incarceration in jails before sentence and in prisons. Part Three presents detailed psychological autopsies of men who ended their lives in prison cells, providing a convincing (and heart-rending) view of the process of human breakdown as it unfolds over time. The book will be important not only to criminologists and penologists but also--and because of its profound general implications--to all those sociologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and administrators of institutions who wish to understand and effectively to deal with the tragic problems of human breakdown. Hans Toch is professor of psychology in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Albany. He is an elected fellow of the American Psychological Association as well as the American Society of Criminology. He has been president of the American Association of Forensic Psychology. He was also the Project Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Crime and Delinquency at Sacramento, California.