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.

Health and Incarceration

Health and Incarceration
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 67
Release: 2013-08-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0309287715

Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration in the United States has skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, both historically and in comparison to that of other developed nations. At far higher rates than the general population, those in or entering U.S. jails and prisons are prone to many health problems. This is a problem not just for them, but also for the communities from which they come and to which, in nearly all cases, they will return. Health and Incarceration is the summary of a workshop jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences(NAS) Committee on Law and Justice and the Institute of Medicine(IOM) Board on Health and Select Populations in December 2012. Academics, practitioners, state officials, and nongovernmental organization representatives from the fields of healthcare, prisoner advocacy, and corrections reviewed what is known about these health issues and what appear to be the best opportunities to improve healthcare for those who are now or will be incarcerated. The workshop was designed as a roundtable with brief presentations from 16 experts and time for group discussion. Health and Incarceration reviews what is known about the health of incarcerated individuals, the healthcare they receive, and effects of incarceration on public health. This report identifies opportunities to improve healthcare for these populations and provides a platform for visions of how the world of incarceration health can be a better place.

Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners

Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners
Author: Committee on Ethical Considerations for Revisions to DHHS Regulations for Protection of Prisoners Involved in Research
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2007-01-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0309164605

In the past 30 years, the population of prisoners in the United States has expanded almost 5-fold, correctional facilities are increasingly overcrowded, and more of the country's disadvantaged populations—racial minorities, women, people with mental illness, and people with communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and tuberculosis—are under correctional supervision. Because prisoners face restrictions on liberty and autonomy, have limited privacy, and often receive inadequate health care, they require specific protections when involved in research, particularly in today's correctional settings. Given these issues, the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Human Research Protections commissioned the Institute of Medicine to review the ethical considerations regarding research involving prisoners. The resulting analysis contained in this book, Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners, emphasizes five broad actions to provide prisoners involved in research with critically important protections: • expand the definition of "prisoner"; • ensure universally and consistently applied standards of protection; • shift from a category-based to a risk-benefit approach to research review; • update the ethical framework to include collaborative responsibility; and • enhance systematic oversight of research involving prisoners.

Being Imprisoned

Being Imprisoned
Author: M. Schinkel
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113744083X

Exploring the way in which criminal punishment is interpreted and narrated by offenders, this book examines the meaning offenders ascribe to their sentence and the consequences of this for future desistance.

When Prisoners Come Home

When Prisoners Come Home
Author: Joan Petersilia
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2003-03-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199727414

Every year, hundreds of thousands of jailed Americans leave prison and return to society. Largely uneducated, unskilled, often without family support, and with the stigma of a prison record hanging over them, many if not most will experience serious social and psychological problems after release. Fewer than one in three prisoners receive substance abuse or mental health treatment while incarcerated, and each year fewer and fewer participate in the dwindling number of vocational or educational pre-release programs, leaving many all but unemployable. Not surprisingly, the great majority is rearrested, most within six months of their release. What happens when all those sent down the river come back up--and out? As long as there have been prisons, society has struggled with how best to help prisoners reintegrate once released. But the current situation is unprecedented. As a result of the quadrupling of the American prison population in the last quarter century, the number of returning offenders dwarfs anything in America's history. What happens when a large percentage of inner-city men, mostly Black and Hispanic, are regularly extracted, imprisoned, and then returned a few years later in worse shape and with dimmer prospects than when they committed the crime resulting in their imprisonment? What toll does this constant "churning" exact on a community? And what do these trends portend for public safety? A crisis looms, and the criminal justice and social welfare system is wholly unprepared to confront it. Drawing on dozens of interviews with inmates, former prisoners, and prison officials, Joan Petersilia convincingly shows us how the current system is failing, and failing badly. Unwilling merely to sound the alarm, Petersilia explores the harsh realities of prisoner reentry and offers specific solutions to prepare inmates for release, reduce recidivism, and restore them to full citizenship, while never losing sight of the demands of public safety. As the number of ex-convicts in America continues to grow, their systemic marginalization threatens the very society their imprisonment was meant to protect. America spent the last decade debating who should go to prison and for how long. Now it's time to decide what to do when prisoners come home.

Contagion of Violence

Contagion of Violence
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2013-03-06
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309263646

The past 25 years have seen a major paradigm shift in the field of violence prevention, from the assumption that violence is inevitable to the recognition that violence is preventable. Part of this shift has occurred in thinking about why violence occurs, and where intervention points might lie. In exploring the occurrence of violence, researchers have recognized the tendency for violent acts to cluster, to spread from place to place, and to mutate from one type to another. Furthermore, violent acts are often preceded or followed by other violent acts. In the field of public health, such a process has also been seen in the infectious disease model, in which an agent or vector initiates a specific biological pathway leading to symptoms of disease and infectivity. The agent transmits from individual to individual, and levels of the disease in the population above the baseline constitute an epidemic. Although violence does not have a readily observable biological agent as an initiator, it can follow similar epidemiological pathways. On April 30-May 1, 2012, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Forum on Global Violence Prevention convened a workshop to explore the contagious nature of violence. Part of the Forum's mandate is to engage in multisectoral, multidirectional dialogue that explores crosscutting, evidence-based approaches to violence prevention, and the Forum has convened four workshops to this point exploring various elements of violence prevention. The workshops are designed to examine such approaches from multiple perspectives and at multiple levels of society. In particular, the workshop on the contagion of violence focused on exploring the epidemiology of the contagion, describing possible processes and mechanisms by which violence is transmitted, examining how contextual factors mitigate or exacerbate the issue. Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary covers the major topics that arose during the 2-day workshop. It is organized by important elements of the infectious disease model so as to present the contagion of violence in a larger context and in a more compelling and comprehensive way.

Long-Term Imprisonment

Long-Term Imprisonment
Author: Timothy J. Flanagan
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 279
Release: 1995-04-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452246947

With recent sentencing law changes at the state and national level, the United States will continue to use long-term confinement more than any other nation in the world. In this authoritative yet accessible volume, scholars, correctional authorities, researchers, and prisoners examine the use of long- term incarceration as a response to crime, the effects of long- term incarceration, and the strategies used by long-term inmates to adjust to confinement. Long-Term Imprisonment explores the prison experience of both male and female inmates and discusses the correctional management challenges posed by long-term incarceration. The core of this collection, edited by Timothy Flanagan, is a set of articles first published in The Prison Journal, the official journal of the Pennsylvania Prison Society and the oldest journal in the field of corrections. These articles are complemented with research reports on the effects of long-term confinement, a comprehensive analysis of long-term inmates currently confined in American and Canadian prisons, and essays written by long-term prisoners. If you are interested in the use and operation of prisons, and in the impact of these institutions on the people confined within them, this book is for you. In addition to students studying imprisonment, the book informs correctional administrators and policymakers about the nature of long-term inmate population and the impact of long-term imprisonment. "Timothy Flanagan began studying the effects of long-term incarceration over two decades ago when he conducted one of the first major studies of prisoners serving long sentences. Since then, many changes have occurred in corrections and sentences practices that have greatly increased sentence lengths and the number of prisoners serving long sentences. The collection of the essays contained in Long-Term Imprisonment represents the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and definitive review of literature regarding the effects of long-term incarceration on prisoners. Flanagan provides readers with a variety of perspectives of long- term imprisonment by including articles written by prison researchers, corrections officials, and long-term prisoners. This book is must reading for anyone interested in life in prisons and the unique world of the long-term prisoner." --Kevin N. Wright, Binghamton University

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Correctional Education
Author: Lois M. Davis
Publisher: Rand Corporation
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2013-08-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0833081322

After conducting a comprehensive literature search, the authors undertook a meta-analysis to examine the association between correctional education and reductions in recidivism, improvements in employment after release from prison, and other outcomes. The study finds that receiving correctional education while incarcerated reduces inmates' risk of recidivating and may improve their odds of obtaining employment after release from prison.

Coercive Confinement in Post-Independence Ireland

Coercive Confinement in Post-Independence Ireland
Author: Eoin O'Sullivan
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780719095450

This book provides an overview of the incarceration of tens of thousands of men, women and children during the first fifty years of Irish independence. Psychiatric hospitals, mother and baby homes, Magdalen homes, reformatory and industrial schools, prisons and borstal formed a network of institutions of coercive confinement that was integral to the emerging state. The book, now available in paperback after performing superbly in hardback, provides a wealth of contemporaneous accounts of what life was like within these austere and forbidding places as well as offering a compelling explanation for the longevity of the system and the reasons for its ultimate decline. While many accounts exist of individual institutions and the factors associated with their operation, this is the first attempt to provide a holistic account of the interlocking range of institutions that dominated the physical landscape and, in many ways, underpinned the rural economy. Highlighting the overlapping roles of church, state and family in the maintenance of these forms of social control, this book will appeal to those interested in understanding twentieth-century Ireland: in particular, historians, legal scholars, criminologists, sociologists and other social scientists. These arguments take on special importance as Irish society continues to grapple with the legacy of its extensive use of institutionalisation.

Imprisonment Worldwide

Imprisonment Worldwide
Author: Coyle, Andrew
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2016-06-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1447331753

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.