Over the last two decades, and in the wake of increases in recorded crime and other social changes, British criminal justice policy has become increasingly politicised as an index of governments' ...competence. New and worrying developments, such as the inexorable rise of the US prison population and the rising force of penal severity, seem unstoppable in the face of popular anxiety about crime. But is this inevitable? Nicola Lacey argues that harsh 'penal populism' is not the inevitable fate of all contemporary democracies. Notwithstanding a degree of convergence, globalisation has left many of the key institutional differences between national systems intact, and these help to explain the striking differences in the capacity for penal tolerance in otherwise relatively similar societies. Only by understanding the institutional preconditions for a tolerant criminal justice system can we think clearly about the possible options for reform within particular systems.
Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation ...in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism.Exhaustively researched, Felber illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is a halting reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black Muslim communities.
Through the centuries, prisons were closed institutions, full of secrets and shrouded in mystery. But modern media culture has opened the gates. Dawn Cecil explores decades of popular culture-from ...Golden Age Hollywood films to YouTube videos, from newspapers to beer labels, hip-hop music, and children's books-to reveal how prison imagery shapes our understanding of who commits crimes, why, and how the criminal justice system should respond.
Backed up by the best science, Todd Clear and Natasha Frost make a compelling case for why the nation's forty-year embrace of the punitive spirit has been morally bankrupt and endangered public ...safety. But this is far more than an expose of correctional failure. Recognizing that a policy turning point is at hand, Clear and Frost provide a practical blueprint for choosing a different correctional future - counsel that is wise and should be widely followed. - Francis T. Cullen, Distinguished Research Professor of Criminal Justice, University of CincinnatiOver the last 35 years, the US penal system has grown at a rate unprecedented in US history - five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. This growth was part of a sustained and intentional effort to get tough on crime, and characterizes a time when no policy options were acceptable save for those that increased penalties. InThe Punishment Imperative, eminent criminologists Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost argue that America's move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the early 2000s was more than just a response to crime or a collection of policies adopted in isolation; it was a grand social experiment. Tracing a wide array of trends related to the criminal justice system,The Punishment Imperativecharts the rise of penal severity in America and speculates that a variety of forces - fiscal, political, and evidentiary - have finally come together to bring this great social experiment to an end.Clear and Frost stress that while the doubling of the crime rate in the late 1960s represented one of the most pressing social problems at the time, this is not what served as a foundation for the great punishment experiment. Rather, it was the way crime posed a political problem - and thereby offered a political opportunity - that became the basis for the great rise in punishment. The authors claim that the punishment imperativeis a particularly insidious social experiment because the actual goal was never articulated, the full array of consequences was never considered, and the momentum built even as the forces driving the policy shifts diminished. Clear and Frost argue that the public's growing realization that the severe policies themselves, not growing crime rates, were the main cause of increased incarceration eventually led to a surge of interest in taking a more rehabilitative, pragmatic, and cooperative approach to dealing with criminal offenders.The Punishment Imperativecautions that the legacy of the grand experiment of the past forty years will be difficult to escape. However, the authors suggest that the United States now stands at the threshold of a new era in penal policy, and they offer several practical and pragmatic policy solutions to changing the criminal justice system's approach to punishment. Part historical study, part forward-looking policy analysis,The Punishment Imperativeis a compelling study of a generation of crime and punishment in America.Todd R. Clear is Dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He is the author of Imprisoning Communities and What Is Community Justice? and the founding editor of the journal Criminology and Public Policy.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Seeking to shed light on how ...we might end mass incarceration, The Price of Freedom compares the histories and goals of the American and German justice systems. Drawing on repeated in-depth interviews with incarcerated young men in the United States and Germany, Michaela Soyer argues that the apparent relative lenience of the German criminal justice system is actually founded on the violent enforcement of cultural homogeneity at the hands of the German welfare state. Demonstrating how both societies have constructed a racialized underclass of outsiders over time, this book emphasizes that criminal justice reformers in the United States need to move beyond European models in order to build a truly just, diverse society.
Drug courts--a rare success story in the criminal justice system--are generally credited with reducing recidivism and providing a lower-cost alternative to incarceration. They have also spawned the ...development of other specialty courts. The authors of Drug Courts and the Criminal Justice System provide a comprehensive analysis of just how drug courts work, systematically examining the model and exploring its broader significance.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict ...laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women's brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners' acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life.A landmark history of black women's imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.
Gendering Criminology provides a contemporary guide for
understanding the role of gender in criminal engagement and
experiences as well as reactions to these offenses among laypersons
and agents of ...social control. The textbook provides evidence for
the argument that gender socially situates people in their risks
for criminal engagement, victimization, and what occurs in the
aftermath of crime: arrest, the judicial process, and sentencing.
Aside from investigating the role of men and women, the authors
also explore the experiences of LGBTQIA+ communities involved in or
working within the criminal-legal system. The volume provides a
comprehensive account of various offenses-violent and
nonviolent-and individual motivations, drives, and methods, to help
students develop the skills they need to work as professionals in
and around the criminal-legal system. Key features:
Applies theoretical concepts to real-life applications, media
bytes, and case studies
Includes new and timely information regarding gender and online
victimization
Provides an overview of each topic within eleven chapters,
delving into the literature in each area
Promotes active learning activities in each chapter to fully
immerse and engage students in the material
In Justice in the Risk Society Barbara Hudson outlines traditional liberal perspectives on justice, risk and security, as well as addressing some key concerns. The book provides theoretical analysis ...with a discussion of policies, and arguments are illustrated by cases and examples.
For African American men without a high school diploma, being in prison or jail is more common than being employed—a sobering reality that calls into question post–Civil Rights era social gains. ...Nearly 70 percent of young black men will be imprisoned at some point in their lives, and poor black men with low levels of education make up a disproportionate share of incarcerated Americans. In Invisible Men, sociologist Becky Pettit demonstrates another vexing fact of mass incarceration: most national surveys do not account for prison inmates, a fact that results in a misrepresentation of U.S. political, economic, and social conditions in general and black progress in particular. Invisible Men provides an eye-opening examination of how mass incarceration has concealed decades of racial inequality. Pettit marshals a wealth of evidence correlating the explosion in prison growth with the disappearance of millions of black men into the American penal system. She shows that, because prison inmates are not included in most survey data, statistics that seemed to indicate a narrowing black-white racial gap—on educational attainment, work force participation, and earnings—instead fail to capture persistent racial, economic, and social disadvantage among African Americans. Federal statistical agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau, collect surprisingly little information about the incarcerated, and inmates are not included in household samples in national surveys. As a result, these men are invisible to most mainstream social institutions, lawmakers, and nearly all social science research that isn’t directly related to crime or criminal justice. Since merely being counted poses such a challenge, inmates’ lives—including their family background, the communities they come from, or what happens to them after incarceration—are even more rarely examined. And since correctional budgets provide primarily for housing and monitoring inmates, with little left over for job training or rehabilitation, a large population of young men are not only invisible to society while in prison but also ill-equipped to participate upon release. Invisible Men provides a vital reality check for social researchers, lawmakers, and anyone who cares about racial equality. The book shows that more than a half century after the first civil rights legislation, the dismal fact of mass incarceration inflicts widespread and enduring damage by undermining the fair allocation of public resources and political representation, by depriving the children of inmates of their parents’ economic and emotional participation, and, ultimately, by concealing African American disadvantage from public view.
