Winner of the 2014 Outstanding Book Award presented by the Academy of Criminal Justice SciencesOver 2% of U.S.children under the age of 18more than 1,700,000 childrenhave a parent in prison. These ...children experience very real disadvantages when compared to their peers: they tend to experience lower levels of educational success, social exclusion, and even a higher likelihood of their own future incarceration. Meanwhile, their new caregivers have to adjust to their new responsibilities as their lives change overnight, and the incarcerated parents are cut off from their childrens development.Parental Incarceration and the Familybrings a family perspective to our understanding of what it means to have so many of our nations parents in prison. Drawing from the fields most recent research and the authors own fieldwork, Joyce Ardittioffers an in-depth look at how incarceration affects entire families: offender parents, children, and care-givers. Through the use of exemplars, anecdotes, and reflections, Joyce Arditti puts a human face on the mass of humanity behind bars, as well as those family members who are affected by a parents imprisonment. In focusing on offenders as parents, a radically different social policy agenda emergesone that calls for real reform and that responds to the collective vulnerabilities of the incarcerated and their kin.
Deportations by train were critical in the Nazis' genocidal vision of the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. Historians have estimated that between 1941 and 1944 up to three million Jews were ...transported to their deaths in concentration and extermination camps. In his writings on the "Final Solution" Raul Hilberg pondered the role of trains: “How can railways be regarded as anything more than physical equipment that was used, when the time came, to transport the Jews from various cities to shooting grounds and gas chambers in Eastern Europe. This book explores the question by analyzing victims' experiences at each stage of forced relocation: the round-ups and departures from the ghettos, the captivity in trains, and finally, the arrival at the camps. Utilizing a variety of published memoirs and unpublished testimonies, the book argues that victims experienced train journeys as mobile chambers, comparable in importance to fixed locations of persecution such as ghettos and camps.
La realidad de los paÃses latinoamericanos es cada vez más violenta y represiva, de barbarie e impunidad, de opulencia extrema y pobreza crÃtica, cuando en nombre de la "democracia" el poder del ...mercado neoliberal capitalista reproduce un sistema de clases y exclusión social, al parecer, ad infinitum. El autor nos hace el retrato escrito del futuro (sic) inmediato de frustración y miseria que produce el "nuevo orden social" que ha globalizado la explotación y deshumanización del Tercer Mundo.
In this timely book, renowned criminologist and activist Renny Golden sheds light on the women behind bars and the 350,000 children they leave behind. In exposing the fastest growing prison ...population-a direct result of Reagan's War on Drugs-Golden sets up new framework for thinking about how to address the situation of mothers in prison, the risks and needs of their children and the implications of current judicial policies.
"In her book War on the Family Mothers in Prison and the Families They Leave Behind , Renny Golden brings to life the pains of imprisonment that incarcerated mothers and their children experience...By sharing the stories of incarcerated mothers and their children in two geographical regions, Golden offers an insightful picture of this typically forgotten group...the author examines the long-term impact of incarceration on the children of incarcerated parents, which few studies have done." -- Jennifer Cobbina, Criminal Justice Review, March 2008
Renny Golden is Professor of Criminal Justice, Sociology, and Social Work at Northeastern Illinois University. She is a criminologist, published poet, and well-known activist for social rights in El Salvador and Guatamala. Her previous publications include, Disposable Children: America's Child Welfare System and Oscar Romero: Reflections on His Life and Writings .
Liberty's Prisonersexamines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States. The first penitentiary was founded in ...Philadelphia in 1790, a period of great optimism and turmoil in the Revolution's wake. Those who were previously dependents with no legal standing-women, enslaved people, and indentured servants-increasingly claimed their own right to life, liberty, and happiness. A diverse cast of women and men, including immigrants, African Americans, and the Irish and Anglo-American poor, struggled to make a living. Vagrancy laws were used to crack down on those who visibly challenged longstanding social hierarchies while criminal convictions carried severe sentences for even the most trivial property crimes.
The penitentiary was designed to reestablish order, both behind its walls and in society at large, but the promise of reformative incarceration failed from its earliest years. Within this system, women served a vital function, and Liberty's Prisoners is the first book to bring to life the experience of African American, immigrant, and poor white women imprisoned in early America. Always a minority of prisoners, women provided domestic labor within the institution and served as model inmates, more likely to submit to the authority of guards, inspectors, and reformers. White men, the primary targets of reformative incarceration, challenged authorities at every turn while African American men were increasingly segregated and denied access to reform.
Liberty's Prisonerschronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a repository for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.
When a woman leaves prison, she enters a world of competing messages and conflicting advice. Staff from prison, friends, family members, workers at halfway houses and treatment programs all have ...something to say about who she is, who she should be, and what she should do.The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemmaoffers an in-depth, firsthand look at how the former prisoner manages messages about returning to the community.Over the course of a year, Andrea Leverentz conducted repeated interviews with forty-nine women as they adjusted to life outside of prison and worked to construct new ideas of themselves as former prisoners and as mothers, daughters, sisters, romantic partners, friends, students, and workers. Listening to these women, along with their family members, friends, and co-workers, Leverentz pieces together the narratives they have created to explain their past records and guide their future behavior. She traces where these narratives came from and how they were shaped by factors such as gender, race, maternal status, age, and experiences in prison, halfway houses, and twelve-step programs-factors that in turn shaped the women's expectations for themselves, and others' expectations of them. The women's stories form a powerful picture of the complex, complicated human experience behind dry statistics and policy statements regarding prisoner reentry into society for women, how the experience is different for men and the influence society plays.With its unique view of how society's mixed messages play out in ex-prisoners' lived realities,The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemmashows the complexity of these women's experiences within the broad context of the war on drugs and mass incarceration in America. It offers invaluable lessons for helping such women successfully rejoin society.
Vital Enemies Santos-Granero, Fernando
2009, 20090101
eBook
Analyzing slavery and other forms of servitude in six non-state indigenous societies of tropical America at the time of European contact, Vital Enemies offers a fascinating new approach to the study ...of slavery based on the notion of “political economy of life.” Fernando Santos-Granero draws on the earliest available historical sources to provide novel information on Amerindian regimes of servitude, sociologies of submission, and ideologies of capture. Estimating that captive slaves represented up to 20 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent when combined with other forms of servitude, Santos-Granero argues that native forms of servitude fulfill the modern understandings of slavery, though Amerindian contexts provide crucial distinctions with slavery as it developed in the American South. The Amerindian understanding of life forces as being finite, scarce, unequally distributed, and in constant circulation yields a concept of all living beings as competing for vital energy. The capture of human beings is an extreme manifestation of this understanding, but it marks an important element in the ways Amerindian “captive slavery” was misconstrued by European conquistadors. Illuminating a cultural facet that has been widely overlooked or miscast for centuries, Vital Enemies makes possible new dialogues regarding hierarchies in the field of native studies, as well as a provocative re-framing of pre- and post-contact America.
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