Beyond the Prison Gates

Beyond the Prison Gates PDF

Author: Warren Rosenblum

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1469606763

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Germany today has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the industrialized world, and social welfare principles play an essential role at all levels of the German criminal justice system. Warren Rosenblum examines the roots of this social approach to criminal policy in the reform movements of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, when reformers strove to replace state institutions of control and incarceration with private institutions of protective supervision. Reformers believed that private charities and volunteers could diagnose and treat social pathologies in a way that coercive state institutions could not. The expansion of welfare for criminals set the stage for a more economical system of punishment, Rosenblum argues, but it also opened the door to new, more expansive controls over individuals marked as "asocial." With the reformers' success, the issue of who had power over welfare became increasingly controversial and dangerous. Other historians have suggested that the triumph of eugenics in the 1890s was predicated upon the abandonment of liberal and Christian assumptions about human malleability. Rosenblum demonstrates, however, that the turn to "criminal biology" was not a reaction against social reform, but rather an effort to rescue its legitimacy.

My Fellow Prisoners

My Fellow Prisoners PDF

Author: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Publisher: ABRAMS

Published: 2015-02-24

Total Pages: 60

ISBN-13: 1468311611

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Russian oil mogul and activist offers reflections on his decades-long incarceration under Putin in this “illuminating and brave” prison memoir (The Washington Post). Mikhail Khodorkovsky was Russia’s most successful businessman—and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin. As his oil company Yukos revived the Russian oil industry, Khodorkovsky began sponsoring programs to encourage civil society and fight corruption. Then he was arrested at gunpoint. Sentenced to ten years in a Siberian penal colony on fraud and tax evasion charges in 2003, Khodorkovsky was put on trial again in 2010 and sentenced to fourteen years on new charges that contradicted the previous ones. While imprisoned, Khodorkovsky fought for the rights of his fellow prisoners, going on hunger strike four times. After he was pardoned in 2013, he vowed to continue fighting for prisoners’ rights, and this book is dedicated to that work. A moving portrait of the prisoners Khodorkovsky met, My Fellow Prisoners is an eye-opening account of Russia’s brutal prison system. “Vivid, humane and poignant” —Financial Times

On the Outside

On the Outside PDF

Author: David J. Harding

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 022660764X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

One of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Best Criminal Justice Books of 2019 America’s high incarceration rates are a well-known facet of contemporary political conversations. Mentioned far less often is what happens to the nearly 700,000 former prisoners who rejoin society each year. On the Outside examines the lives of twenty-two people—varied in race and gender but united by their time in the criminal justice system—as they pass out of the prison gates and back into the world. The book takes a clear-eyed look at the challenges faced by formerly incarcerated citizens as they try to find work, housing, and stable communities. Standing alongside these individual portraits is a quantitative study conducted by the authors that followed every state prisoner in Michigan who was released on parole in 2003 (roughly 11,000 individuals) for the next seven years, providing a comprehensive view of their postprison neighborhoods, families, employment, and contact with the parole system. On the Outside delivers a powerful combination of hard data and personal narrative that shows why our country continues to struggle with the social and economic reintegration of the formerly incarcerated. For further information, including an instructor guide and slide deck, please visit: http://ontheoutsidebook.us/home/instructors

Barred

Barred PDF

Author: Daniel S. Medwed

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1541675908

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A groundbreaking exposé of how our legal system makes it nearly impossible to overturn wrongful convictions Thousands of innocent people are behind bars in the United States. But proving their innocence and winning their release is nearly impossible. In Barred, legal scholar Daniel S. Medwed argues that our justice system’s stringent procedural rules are largely to blame for the ongoing punishment of the innocent. Those rules guarantee criminal defendants just one opportunity to appeal their convictions directly to a higher court. Afterward, the wrongfully convicted can pursue only a few narrow remedies. Even when there is strong evidence of a miscarriage of justice, rigid guidelines, bias, and deference toward lower courts all too often prevent exoneration. Offering clear explanations of legal procedures alongside heart-wrenching stories of their devastating impact, Barred exposes how the system is stacked against the innocent and makes a powerful call for change.

But They All Come Back

But They All Come Back PDF

Author: Jeremy Travis

Publisher: The Urban Insitute

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9780877667506

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The iron law of imprisonment is that “they all come back”. In 2002, more than 630,000 individuals left U.S. federal and state prisons. Thirty years ago, only 150,000 did. In this study, Travis decribes the new realities of imprisonment, and explores the impact of returning prisoners on seven policy domains: public safety, families and children, work, housing, public health, civic identity, and community capacity. Travis proposes a new architecture for the criminal justice system, organized around five principles of reentry, to encourage change and spur innovation.

Beyond the Spiral Gates

Beyond the Spiral Gates PDF

Author: Mutch Katsonga

Publisher: Austin Macauley

Published: 2017-09

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9781787104464

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Wickfields was the name of an institution that housed children deemed too dangerous to live in regular society. Beyond the Spiral Gates is a raw coming-of-age odyssey, a first-hand account of one boy's experiences at the archaic Wickfields School for Criminal Children. From the idyllic sun-drenched fields of Hayvern to the shadowy hallways of Wickfields, the story delves deep into the epicentre of the human psyche. Starting in the present day with the protagonist as an elderly man and chronic insomniac who struggles to come to terms with his own mortality as he confronts the demons of his youth spent at Wickfields, the story spins us back through the years to where it all began. It's a tale of self-exploration, a redemptive narrative as well as a harrowing love story that does not spare raw emotion as the protagonist grapples with the trauma of the events that shaped that period of his adolescent life. Beyond The Spiral Gates is a gut-wrenching account of one boy's journey of self-discovery, told in an unflinching and engaging voice.

The Culture of Punishment

The Culture of Punishment PDF

Author: Michelle Brown

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2009-10-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 081479145X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

America is the most punitive nation in the world, incarcerating more than 2.3 million people—or one in 136 of its residents. Against the backdrop of this unprecedented mass imprisonment, punishment permeates everyday life, carrying with it complex cultural meanings. In The Culture of Punishment, Michelle Brown goes beyond prison gates and into the routine and popular engagements of everyday life, showing that those of us most distanced from the practice of punishment tend to be particularly harsh in our judgments. The Culture of Punishment takes readers on a tour of the sites where culture and punishment meet—television shows, movies, prison tourism, and post 9/11 new war prisons—demonstrating that because incarceration affects people along distinct race and class lines, it is only a privileged group of citizens who are removed from the experience of incarceration. These penal spectators, who often sanction the infliction of pain from a distance, risk overlooking the reasons for democratic oversight of the project of punishment and, more broadly, justifications for the prohibition of pain.

Decades Behind Bars

Decades Behind Bars PDF

Author: Gaye D. Holman

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1476628483

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

More than two million people are incarcerated in America's prisons--one in nine is serving a life sentence. Mass long-term imprisonment devours state budgets, adversely affects community well-being and skews our collective moral compass. This study examines the human costs of keeping the convicted out of sight, out of mind. Beginning in 1994, the author began recording the personal stories of 50 incarcerated felons--17 of them were still in prison 20 years later. The men candidly discuss what it means to commit a serious crime and to be confined for perhaps the remainder of their lives. Their stories are balanced by conversations with correctional officers, prison administrators, chaplains and parole board members. The author identifies circumstances that ruin some prisoners and save others and presents insights for possible improvements in the criminal justice system.