Rethinking Corrections

Rethinking Corrections
Author: Lior Gideon
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 897
Release: 2011
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1412970180

Explores the challenges faced by convicted offenders over the course of rehabilitation and reintegration. Each chapter focuses on a specific phase of the process.

Rethinking Incarceration

Rethinking Incarceration
Author: Dominique DuBois Gilliard
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2018-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0830887733

The United States has more people locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers than any other country in the history of the world. Exploring the history and foundations of mass incarceration, Dominique Gilliard examines Christianity’s role in its evolution and expansion, assessing justice in light of Scripture, and showing how Christians can pursue justice that restores and reconciles.

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States
Author: Committee on Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 800
Release: 2014-12-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780309298018

After decades of stability from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the rate of imprisonment in the United States has increased fivefold during the last four decades. The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons. The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is 5 to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies. The U.S. prison population is largely drawn from the most disadvantaged part of the nation's population: mostly men under age 40, disproportionately minority, and poorly educated. Prisoners often carry additional deficits of drug and alcohol addictions, mental and physical illnesses, and lack of work preparation or experience. The growth of incarceration in the United States during four decades has prompted numerous critiques and a growing body of scientific knowledge about what prompted the rise and what its consequences have been for the people imprisoned, their families and communities, and for U.S. society. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines research and analysis of the dramatic rise of incarceration rates and its affects. This study makes the case that the United States has gone far past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits and has reached a level where these high rates of incarceration themselves constitute a source of injustice and social harm. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines policy changes that created an increasingly punitive political climate and offers specific policy advice in sentencing policy, prison policy, and social policy. The report also identifies important research questions that must be answered to provide a firmer basis for policy. This report is a call for change in the way society views criminals, punishment, and prison. This landmark study assesses the evidence and its implications for public policy to inform an extensive and thoughtful public debate about and reconsideration of policies.

Getting Tough

Getting Tough
Author: Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2017-05-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400885183

The politics and policies that led to America's expansion of the penal system and reduction of welfare programs In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. Kohler-Hausmann rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the "underclass" could be managed only through coercion and force. Getting Tough illuminates this narrative through three legislative cases: New York's adoption of the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, Illinois's and California's attempts to reform welfare through criminalization and work mandates, and California's passing of a 1976 sentencing law that abandoned rehabilitation as an aim of incarceration. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, Getting Tough offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state.

Big House on the Prairie

Big House on the Prairie
Author: John M. Eason
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2017-03-06
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022641034X

Now more than ever, we need to understand the social, political, and economic shifts that have driven the United States to triple its prison construction in just over three decades. John Eason goes a very considerable distance here in fulfilling this need, not by detailing the aftereffects of building huge numbers of prisons, but by vividly showing the process by which a community seeks to get a prison built in their area. What prompted him to embark on this inquiry was the insistent question of why the rapid expansion of prisons in America, why now, and why so many. He quickly learned that the prison boom is best understood from the perspective of the rural, southern towns where they tend to be placed (North Carolina has twice as many prisons as New Jersey, though both states have the same number of prisoners). And so he sets up shop, as it were, in Forrest City, Arkansas, where he moved with his family to begin the splendid fieldwork that led to this book. A major part of his story deals with the emergence of the rural ghetto, abetted by white flight, de-industrialization, the emergence of public housing, and higher proportions of blacks and Latinos. How did Forrest City become a site for its prison? Eason takes us behind the decision-making scenes, tracking the impact of stigma (a prison in my backyard-not a likely desideratum), economic development, poverty, and race, while showing power-sharing among opposed groups of elite whites vs. black race leaders. Eason situates the prison within the dynamic shifts rural economies are undergoing, and shows how racially diverse communities can achieve the siting and building of prisons in their rural ghetto. The result is a full understanding of the ways in which a prison economy takes shape and operates."

Prisons

Prisons
Author: Ashley G. Blackburn
Publisher: Jones & Bartlett Publishers
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2014
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1449615961

Prisons: Today and Tomorrow, Third Edition uses current case studies and research to present balanced and comprehensive coverage of prisons and prisoners. Featuring chapters contributed by leading authorities on the modern prison system, this text examines the many purposes of prisons-punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation-and examines controversial issues such as whether imprisonment actually deters crime or merely serves as punishment.