The Penal Landscape

The Penal Landscape
Author: Anita Dockley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135919852

The Howard League for Penal Reform is committed to developing an effective penal system which ensures there are fewer victims of crime, has a diminished role for prison and creates a safer community for all. In this collection of ten papers, the charity has brought together some of the most prominent academic experts in the field to map out what is happening in a specific area of criminal justice policy, ranging from prison privatisation to policing and the role of community sentences. The Howard League guide has two main aims: first it seeks to paint a picture of the current state of the penal system, using its structures, processes and the specific groups affected by the system as the lens for analysis. However, each author also seeks to identify the challenges and gaps in understanding that should be considered to predicate a move towards a reduced role for the penal system, and prison in particular, while maintaining public confidence and safer communities. In doing so, we hope to inspire researchers and students alike to develop new research proposals that challenge the status quo and seek to create the Howard League’s vision for the criminal justice system with less crime, safer communities, fewer people in prison.

Public Criminology?

Public Criminology?
Author: Ian Loader
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113693152X

What is the role and value of criminology in a democratic society? How do, and how should, its practitioners engage with politics and public policy? How can criminology find a voice in an agitated, insecure and intensely mediated world in which crime and punishment loom large in government agendas and public discourse? What collective good do we want criminological enquiry to promote? In addressing these questions, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks offer a sociological account of how criminologists understand their craft and position themselves in relation to social and political controversies about crime, whether as scientific experts, policy advisors, governmental players, social movement theorists, or lonely prophets. They examine the conditions under which these diverse commitments and affiliations arose, and gained or lost credibility and influence. This forms the basis for a timely articulation of the idea that criminology’s overarching public purpose is to contribute to a better politics of crime and its regulation. Public Criminology? offers an original and provocative account of the condition of, and prospects for, criminology which will be of interest not only to those who work in the fields of crime, security and punishment, but to anyone interested in the vexed relationship between social science, public policy and politics.

Privatising Justice

Privatising Justice
Author: Wendy Fitzgibbon
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780745399256

A powerful petition against the privatisation of the criminal justice system.

Social Media

Social Media
Author: Kehbuma Langmia
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2016-12-28
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 149854858X

Social Media: Culture and Identity examines the global impact of social media in the formation of various identities and cultures. New media scholars— both national and international— have posited thought-provoking analyses of sociocultural issues about human communication that are impacted by the omnipresence of social media. This collection examines issues of gender, class, and race inequities along with social media’s connections to women’s health, cyberbullying, sexting, and transgender issues both in the United States and in some developing countries.

State Food Crimes

State Food Crimes
Author: Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2016-09-08
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1107133521

Discusses government policies that cause malnutrition or starvation in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and the West Bank and Gaza.

Separated

Separated
Author: William D. Lopez
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-09-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 142143332X

William D. Lopez details the incredible strain that immigration raids place on Latino communities—and the families and friends who must recover from their aftermath. 2020 International Latino Book Awards Winner First Place, Mariposa Award for Best First Book - Nonfiction Honorable Mention, Best Political / Current Affairs Book On a Thursday in November 2013, Guadalupe Morales waited anxiously with her sister-in-law and their four small children. Every Latino man who drove away from their shared apartment above a small auto repair shop that day had failed to return—arrested, one by one, by ICE agents and local police. As the two women discussed what to do next, a SWAT team clad in body armor and carrying assault rifles stormed the room. As Guadalupe remembers it, "The soldiers came in the house. They knocked down doors. They threw gas. They had guns. We were two women with small children . . . The kids terrified, the kids screaming." In Separated, William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Exploring the chaos of enforcement through the lens of community health, Lopez discusses deportation's rippling negative effects on families, communities, and individuals. Focusing on those left behind, Lopez reveals their efforts to cope with trauma, avoid homelessness, handle worsening health, and keep their families together as they attempt to deal with a deportation machine that is militarized, traumatic, implicitly racist, and profoundly violent. Lopez uses this single home raid to show what immigration law enforcement looks like from the perspective of the people who actually experience it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-four individuals whose lives were changed that day in 2013, as well as field notes, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and his own experience as an activist, Lopez combines rigorous research with moving storytelling. Putting faces and names to the numbers behind deportation statistics, Separated urges readers to move beyond sound bites and consider the human experience of mixed-status communities in the small towns that dot the interior of the United States.

Against Prediction

Against Prediction
Author: Bernard E. Harcourt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0226315991

From random security checks at airports to the use of risk assessment in sentencing, actuarial methods are being used more than ever to determine whom law enforcement officials target and punish. And with the exception of racial profiling on our highways and streets, most people favor these methods because they believe they’re a more cost-effective way to fight crime. In Against Prediction, Bernard E. Harcourt challenges this growing reliance on actuarial methods. These prediction tools, he demonstrates, may in fact increase the overall amount of crime in society, depending on the relative responsiveness of the profiled populations to heightened security. They may also aggravate the difficulties that minorities already have obtaining work, education, and a better quality of life—thus perpetuating the pattern of criminal behavior. Ultimately, Harcourt shows how the perceived success of actuarial methods has begun to distort our very conception of just punishment and to obscure alternate visions of social order. In place of the actuarial, he proposes instead a turn to randomization in punishment and policing. The presumption, Harcourt concludes, should be against prediction.

Evidence Based Policing

Evidence Based Policing
Author: Renée J. Mitchell
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2018-12-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1447339789

Over the past ten years, the field of evidence-based policing (EBP) has grown substantially, evolving from a novel idea at the fringes of policing to an increasingly core component of contemporary policing research and practice. Examining what makes something evidence-based and not merely evidence-informed, this book unifies the voices of police practitioners, academics, and pracademics. It provides real world examples of evidence-based police practices and how police research can be created and applied in the field. Includes contributions from leading international EBP researchers and practitioners such as Larry Sherman, University of Cambridge, Lorraine Mazerrolle, University of Queensland, Anthony Braga, Northeastern and Craig Bennell, Carelton University.

Sensory Penalities

Sensory Penalities
Author: Kate Herrity
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2021-02-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1839097280

Sensory Penalties aims to reinvigorate a conversation about the role of sensory experience in empirical investigation. It explores the visceral, personal reflections buried within forgotten criminological field notes, to ask what privileging these sensorial experiences does for how we understand and research spaces of punishment and social control.