Death and redemption Barnes, Steven A
2011., 20110404, 2011, c2011., 2011-04-04, 20110101
eBook
Death and Redemption offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag--the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons--in Soviet society. Soviet ...authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. In this provocative book, Steven Barnes argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily as a penal institution where prisoners were given one final chance to reintegrate into Soviet society. Millions whom authorities deemed "reeducated" through brutal forced labor were allowed to leave. Millions more who "failed" never got out alive.
Throughout WWII, thousands of Allied prisoners dreamed of outwitting their captors and returning to war against the Axis. Their ingenuity knew no bounds: they went over the barbed wire surrounding ...them and under it as well; they built tunnels of enormous length and complexity, often working with only their bare hands. They concealed themselves in their captors' vehicles and hitched rides to freedom. They became world-class forgers and tailors; they stole anything that might be useful to their escapes that wasn't actually red-hot or nailed down. The stories in The Greatest Escapes of WWII highlight the courage, endurance, and ingenuity of Allied prisoners, chronicling their ceaseless efforts and the alarm that spread far and wide when one or more escaped.
Lt. Benjamin Loring (1824-1902) lived the life of an everyman Civil War sailor. He commanded no armies and devised no grand strategies. Loring was a sailor who just wanted to return home, where the ...biggest story of his life awaited him.Covering almost a year of Loring's service,I Held Lincolndescribes the lieutenant's command of the gunboat USSWave, the Battle of Calcasieu Pass, the surrender of his ship, and his capture by the Confederates. He was incarcerated in Camp Groce, a deadly Confederate prison where he endured horrific conditions and abuse. Loring attempted to escape, evading capture for ten days behind enemy lines, only to be recaptured just a few miles from freedom. After an arduous second escape, he finally reached the safety of Union lines and gained his freedom.On the night of April 14, 1865, Loring attended Ford's Theater and witnessed one of the single most tragic events in American history: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. After the shot rang out, Loring climbed into the presidential box and assisted the dying president, helping to carry him across the street to the Peterson House. Using Loring's recently discovered private journal, Richard E. Quest tells this astonishing now-recovered story, giving insight into a little-known Confederate prison camp during the last days of the Civil War and providing much-deserved recognition to a man whose journey was nearly lost to American history.
The Torture Papers Greenberg, Karen J; Dratel, Joshua L; Lewis, Anthony
01/2005
eBook
The Torture Papers document the so-called 'torture memos' and reports which US government officials wrote to prepare the way for, and to document, coercive interrogation and torture in Afghanistan, ...Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib. These documents present for the first time a compilation of materials that prior to publication have existed only piecemeal in the public domain. The Bush Administration, concerned about the legality of harsh interrogation techniques, understood the need to establish a legally viable argument to justify such procedures. The memos and reports document the systematic attempt of the US Government to prepare the way for torture techniques and coercive interrogation practices, forbidden under international law, with the express intent of evading legal punishment in the aftermath of any discovery of these practices and policies.
The global prison population exceeds 10 million and continues to grow; more than 30 million people are released from custody annually. These individuals are disproportionately poor, disenfranchised, ...and chronically ill. There are compelling, evidence-based arguments for improving health outcomes for ex-prisoners on human rights, public health, criminal justice, and economic grounds. These arguments stand in stark contrast to current policy and practice in most settings. There is also a dearth of evidence to guide clinicians and policymakers on how best to care for this large and growing population during and after their transition from custody to community. Well-designed longitudinal studies, clinical trials, and burden of disease studies are pivotal to closing this evidence gap.
The first time Wahhab visited HMP Wormwood Scrubs, just over a decade ago, he was shown around the kitchens, where he met a prisoner who had worked his way up the line over two years. Starting with ...pot washing, he had progressed to what they would call head chef, responsible for hundreds of meals a day. He asked him what he planned to do on release and, when he said he had no idea, his heart sank. The prospect of prisoners being taught culinary and service skills to offer them a career in hospitality rather than a return to crime is thankfully more sophisticated now, most notably with the great success of the Clink Charity's Clink restaurants, which started in HMP High Down and this year announced the roll-out of Clink Kitchens to 70 prisons in England and Wales over the next three years. Yet what they have historically failed to act on is the neglect that we continue to show for the food that prisoners can access.
There is plentiful evidence that imprisonment is painful, harmful and criminogenic. However, alongside accounts that emphasize such consequences are alternative narratives, in which some prisoners ...claim that carceral confinement has been a positive intervention in their life. Drawing on Scott’s idea of the reinventive institution, this article explores these narratives, which—contra Goffman—involve a voluntaristic commitment to the prison, active engagement in the process of identity reconstruction, normative alignment with institutional values and the role of lateral regulation in shaping the prisoner’s new self. Our analysis emphasizes the impact of the prison as an institutional form, and the ways that, in interaction with particular biographical experiences, it produces narratives of reinvention which imply an inversion of its normal destructive processes. Our argument is not a defence of imprisonment, but an attempt to theorize a narrative claim that, although expressed by a minority of prisoners, merits proper analysis.
•We tested whether group membership influenced children’s behavior in a social dilemma.•We found that children cooperated more with in-group than out-group members.•Girls were more likely to ...cooperate than boys, regardless of group membership.•However, girls’ and boys’ sensitivity to group membership differed based on age.•Group membership affects risky, strategic cooperation in childhood.
Adults are more likely to cooperate with in-group members than with out-group members in the context of social dilemmas, situations in which self-interest is in conflict with collective interest. This bias has the potential to profoundly shape human cooperation, and therefore it is important to understand when it emerges in development. Here we asked whether 6- to 9-year-old children (N = 146) preferentially cooperate with in-group members in the context of a well-studied social dilemma, the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. We assigned children to minimal groups and paired them with unfamiliar same-age and same-gender peers. Consistent with our predictions, children were more likely to cooperate with in-group members than with out-group members in this minimal group context. This finding adds to the current literature on group bias in children’s prosocial behavior by showing that it affects decision making in a context that calls on strategic cooperation. In addition, our analyses revealed an effect of gender, with girls more likely to cooperate than boys regardless of the group membership of their partner. Exploring this gender effect further, we found an interaction between gender and age across condition, with older girls showing less sensitivity to the group membership of their partner than younger girls and with older boys showing more sensitivity to the group membership of the partner than younger boys. Our findings suggest that risky cooperation in the face of social dilemmas is shaped by group bias during childhood, highlighting the potentially deeply rooted ties between cooperation and parochialism in humans.
In Australian prisons approximately 20% of inmates are chronically infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV), providing an important population for targeted treatment and prevention. A dynamic ...mathematical model of HCV transmission was used to assess the impact of increasing direct-acting antiviral (DAA) treatment uptake on HCV incidence and prevalence in the prisons in New South Wales, Australia, and to assess the cost-effectiveness of alternate treatment strategies. We developed four separate models reflecting different average prison lengths of stay (LOS) of 2, 6, 24, and 36 months. Each model considered four DAA treatment coverage scenarios of 10% (status-quo), 25%, 50%, and 90% over 2016-2045. For each model and scenario, we estimated the lifetime burden of disease, costs and changes in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) in prison and in the community during 2016-2075. Costs and QALYs were discounted 3.5% annually and adjusted to 2015 Australian dollars. Compared to treating 10% of infected prisoners, increasing DAA coverage to 25%, 50%, and 90% reduced HCV incidence in prisons by 9-33% (2-months LOS), 26-65% (6-months LOS), 37-70% (24-months LOS), and 35-65% (36-months LOS). DAA treatment was highly cost-effective among all LOS models at conservative willingness-to-pay thresholds. DAA therapy became increasingly cost-effective with increasing coverage. Compared to 10% treatment coverage, the incremental cost per QALY ranged from $497-$569 (2-months LOS), -$280-$323 (6-months LOS), -$432-$426 (24-months LOS), and -$245-$477 (36-months LOS). Treating more than 25% of HCV-infected prisoners with DAA therapy is highly cost-effective. This study shows that treating HCV-infected prisoners is highly cost-effective and should be a government priority for the global HCV elimination effort.
PDF
